Literature / Panguan

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Panguan (Chinese: 判官) is a fantasy, supernatural, and danmei novel by Mu Su Li. Originally written in 2020 as a webnovel on the JJWXC site, it's the second entry of a thematic trilogy that's set in the same universe as Mu Su Li's other works Copper Coins: Tong Qian Kan Shi and Three Hundred Years of Longing: Bu Jian Shang Xian San Bai Nian but is otherwise its own story.

In a world similar to ours, there exists a Magical Society of people who have trained to become panguan, psychopomps who use their puppetry, spellcasting, array-making, and divination skills to free ghosts trapped in cages created by their unresolved regrets and attachments from their lives so that these ghosts can successfully pass on and reincarnate. The first panguan from over a thousand years ago was Chen Budao, an extraordinarily powerful and half-immortal master who passed down his teachings and knowledge to his disciples and future generations of panguan but had to be tragically sealed away when he accumulated a gigantic amount of malevolent qi within his body that he couldn't cleanse.

A millennium later in 2020, Wen Shi, one of Chen Budao's direct disciples and a nigh-unparalleled master of puppetry, has been reborn for the twelfth time with a mysterious lack of his soul and most of his memories. Wen Shi sets out to find his lost soul and unlock the many ghost cages he encounters along the way with the sometimes-dubious help of Xia Qiao, the cowardly grandson of one of Wen Shi's deceased friends, Zhou Xu, a bratty teenage boy who's always getting in trouble, Xie Wen, the sickly and misfortune-plagued Black Sheep of the Zhang panguan family, and several other side characters depending on the story arc.

However, the seemingly weak and unremarkable Xie Wen is secretly Chen Budao, Wen Shi's former shifu, who has no plans to tell Wen Shi about his identity and is concealing many other deep secrets of his own.

The novel is 117 chapters long and has an in-progress English fan translation that currently covers the first 110 chapters. It has also received an Audio Drama adaptation.

Tropes in the novel:

• Arc Number: Twelve. Wen Shi is reborn from the Gate of Oblivion twelve times, his soul's cage is guarded by twelve puppets, his birthday and soul-severing both took place in the twelfth month of the year, and it takes twelve days for Xie Wen and Wen Shi to fully revive in the ending.
• Arc Words: "Don't look back."
• Audience Surrogate: Xia Qiao serves as this in the first few story arcs as a character who doesn't have the extensive knowledge of panguan skills or cage-unlocking steps that the main characters do and has to have them explained to him.
• Barred from the Afterlife: Chen Budao, according to rumors, was condemned to a miserable fate of being forever unable to reincarnate.
• Birth-Death Juxtaposition: Whenever Wen Shi helps a dead soul move on, he creates a living memento of that person from a fragment of their worldly bonds, usually in the form of a blooming tree, as a way to help soothe their loved ones' grief a little bit or give that soul a way to leave their own small imprint on the mortal world even after their death. Xie Wen also does this, but with birds instead of trees.
• Black Sheep:
  • Xie Wen is treated as a pariah to the Zhang family because of how his massive amount of karmic debts rendered him incapable of unlocking cages and resulted in his name being struck from the panguan name mural.
  • Xie Wen's mother Zhang Wan also became a pariah to the Zhang family when she had a bitter falling-out with her father and left home to never return.
• Body Surf: Zhang Daiyue has been possessing the bodies of his "heirs" for a thousand years to extend his life.
• Brought Down to Badass: Wen Shi starts the novel a fair amount weaker than he was in his disciple days due to the loss of his soul and memories, but he quickly proves that he can still surpass most other people with his feats of puppetry and cage-unlocking.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe:
  • The story makes several references to a Buddhist belief that if you get eighteen monks to chant a special rebirth mantra for a person twenty-one times and there's enough sincerity behind the words, that person will be blessed with good fortune. The reverse also works with believed-in words about a lack of rebirth, which resulted in the words about Chen Budao being doomed to never reincarnate that people passed down and repeated for over a thousand years cursing Xie Wen with even more bad karma on top of the sheer amount he was already plagued with.
  • In the ending, it's revealed that Wen Shi was able to avoid truly dying and gain an alternative way to reincarnate without having to take on a new body and identity because the belief Chen Budao had imprinted in his Memento MacGuffin that Wen Shi would be blessed with great fortune was strong enough to cancel out the worst of Wen Shi's misfortunes.
• Connected All Along: Several characters turn out to have unexpected connections to each other: Shen Qiao is the reincarnation of Shen Mansheng, the sole survivor of the Shen family massacre, who adopted Xia Qiao who happened to be the puppet of Wen Shi, the man Shen Qiao befriended in the past. In addition, Zhang Wan and Zhang Biling are both reincarnations of people who were killed in Liu Village by Zhang Daiyue, their current family head.
• Cooldown Hug: Xie Wen embraces Wen Shi to calm the latter down before his Unstoppable Rage against Zhang Daiyue causes him to do something deeply unwise to punish him.
• Creepy Good: Many of the ghosts the main characters encounter appear to be frightening or malicious at first, but turn out to be benign souls who don't mean any harm and are just having a difficult time accepting their own deaths or dealing with being unwillingly dragged into a cage by someone else.
  • In the Wooden Boy arc, the faceless old man and his Perverse Puppet companion initially come across as highly sinister and murderous but the old man turns out to be Shen Qiao, who was just having trouble letting go of his attachments to his adopted puppet son who is in fact Xia Qiao.
  • In the Wanquan Road arc's cage, there's a woman with only a crude drawing for a face who keeps silently coming back to inspect the mall's shops and the shopkeepers are all so terrified of her that they quickly close down their shops and hide whenever they sense her coming, but she's really just searching for her still-living husband who keeps hiding from her because he doesn't want to accept that his wife is dead and will never see her again if she succeeds in fulfilling her Unfinished Business of having one last meal with him.
  • In the Shop Sanmi arc, the ghost girl Shen Manyi has a creepily distorted appearance and impersonates people to force them to play games with her, but she turns out to be a tragic, pitiful soul who was unjustly murdered and just wants to be able to play with someone who doesn't treat her as a hideous monster. All the other ghosts in this arc also turn out to be tragic victims of a mass murder who don't try to harm the human characters at all, with the one exception of the ghost of the person who was responsible for killing them all.
  • In the Grave of the Common Folk arc, Lu Wenjuan is described as being unsettlingly friendly with a smile that stays exactly the same even as she unsubtly threatens the characters with TV shows of people being beheaded for refusing to eat her soup, but it turns out that she genuinely just wants to help the humans who accidentally stumble into the cage by giving them soup that will make them sleep deeply enough to not be attacked by heart demons during the night.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Ghosts' lingering resentments and karmic burdens can manifest as a black mist that many people regard as malevolent qi, but Xie Wen prefers to refer to it "worldly bonds" instead to emphasize that this sinister-looking mist shouldn't be viewed as a harmful entity but rather as something that all humans naturally form throughout their lives that shouldn't be stigmatized.
• Don't Fear the Reaper: The panguan are benevolent people (with only a few exceptions) whose job it is to help ghosts move on to the afterlife and next reincarnation by gently easing them into the truth of their deaths and how leaving their past lives behind isn't an inherently awful thing to do.
• Do with Him as You Will: The Big Bad receives his karmic comeuppance in this manner: Xie Wen declares that Zhang Daiyue has an obligation to repay his karmic debts to Liu Village and Zhang Biling, the reincarnation of one of the people who unjustly died because of his actions, steps forward to declare that Zhang Daiyue will have all his karmic sins turned back onto himself and be unable to reincarnate until he fully repays every single one of the three hundred souls he killed. This causes Zhang Daiyue's soul to be shredded into pieces with him suffering unimaginable agony the entire time.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: And how! Wen Shi and Xie Wen, after a thousand years of separation and suffering, finally get to not only be happily together but reunite with all of Xie Wen's other direct disciples by building vessels for their souls to inhabit.
• Epiphanic Prison: The "cages" people form when they die or experience the death of someone they can't bear to let go function like this: they trap that person's soul inside a prison formed from their deepest regrets or longings that prevents them from escaping until they're able to accept their own death or loss of their loved ones and resolve or let go of the Unfinished Business that's keeping them caged.
• Erotic Dream: Wen Shi had one of Xie Wen caressing and licking his puppet strings when he was nineteen years old, which caused him to realize his feelings for his shifu.
• Eternal Love: Wen Shi and Xie Wen are half-immortal cultivators who have been in love with each other for at least a thousand years, a love that has not diminished at all even after a lengthy, painful separation and their repeated futile attempts to let go of their attachments to each other.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Zhang Daiyue assumed that the secret array he saw Chen Budao forming was created to make him even more powerful and copied it from him to prolong his own life, but Chen Budao had actually formed the array to help other panguan by giving them a place they could safely keep excess worldly bonds contained until they could fully cleanse it.
• Fate Drives Us Together: Shen Qiao believes that him meeting Xia Qiao was fate because of their shared first name, but Wen Shi thinks that was just his old age's senility speaking. It's heavily implied in a later chapter that fate really did drive them together to make sure that Xia Qiao would be protected by someone trustworthy.
• Fate Worse than Death:
  • Chen Budao's "miserable fate" was to be sealed away in an array that prevented him from entering the cycle of reincarnation, meaning that he would never get a chance to repay his enormous karmic debts.
  • The Soul Slaughter is a Dangerous Forbidden Technique that rips a person's soul into shreds and forces them to watch the rest of the world continue its cycle of life and death with them being unable to ever truly die or reincarnate. Wen Shi almost performs this technique on Zhang Daiyue, but is stopped from doing so by Xie Wen because inflicting such an inhumane fate on another person, even someone as monstrous as Zhang Daiyue, would've caused the heavens to punish his own soul with an equally terrible fate. This does not prevent Zhang Daiyue from suffering a slightly different fate worse than death when his Karma Houdini Warranty finally expires, however.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: Wen Shi has been gone from the mortal world for twenty-five years and isn't familiar with smartphones or other new technology as a result. Downplayed in that he hasn't been gone for that long to not know some of the things that the teenage characters assume weren't around in 1995, like Coca-Cola or 3D movies.
• Geometric Magic: One panguan art is arrays created by precise arrangements of stones and other objects that can do things like shield people or trap others within a barrier or maze.
• Ghost Amnesia: Most of the ghosts the main characters meet are unaware they're dead because they subconsciously don't want to know the painful truth. If a ghost is a cage master, they'll even violently reject or try to drive out anything in their cage that might remind them about being dead.
• A Glitch in the Matrix: One of the major things that makes Wen Shi sorrowfully realize that he's become trapped in his own cage's illusion of him being happily back in the past with Chen Budao and his disciple friends is that the moon in the night sky never changes from its crescent shape no matter how many days or seasons seem to pass by.
• Gossip Evolution: After a thousand years of rumors and heresay, plenty of the 'truths' circulating about Chen Budao and his disciples have diverged quite far from the facts, mostly in ways that paint Chen Budao as much more fearsome and ill-fated than he actually was. A good portion of this was intentionally caused by Zhang Daiyue to get people to believe in and spread enough bad rumors about Chen Budao and his "miserable end" so that their belief would curse Chen Budao to truly suffer his reputed "miserable end".
• Hand Signals: When Wen Shi has jumped out of a window in a cage and the other people in the cage are unsure of whether to follow him or not, he forms his puppet string into a beckoning hand as a signal that they should follow him. Xie Wen recognizes what he's doing because he was the one who caused Wen Shi to develop a habit of using his puppet string in this manner to alert others, but the other people he's with are more reluctant to believe that the outwardly cold and humorless Wen Shi would really do a playful thing like this, which causes Wen Shi to lose his patience and send his gigantic snake puppet back through the window as a much more obvious signal for them to hurry the hell up.
• Heir Club for Men: The Zhang family, unlike all the other panguan families, has only had male family heads which is chalked up to them being old-fashioned. In reality, it's because their first family head has been possessing the bodies of all his handpicked successors to extend his life and he naturally prefers all his bodies to be of the same gender as him. The one time he did briefly consider making a woman his next heir/meatsuit was almost certainly because his original planned heir died unexpectedly and she was his next most powerful descendant, and her leaving the family put a stop to any plans he might've had to appoint her as heir anyway.
• Heroic BSoD: Wen Shi has a major Despair Event Horizon-induced one when the Xie Wen he's been interacting with for the entire novel up to that point finally loses the last wisp of spiritual consciousness that was keeping his puppet body alive and becomes just a dead tree branch.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Chen Budao aka Xie Wen was the founder of the entire profession of panguan and all the arts and methods they still practice a thousand years after his time, but he's so dreaded by the modern generation of panguan that they don't dare worship or even speak his name out loud and they mainly regard him as someone who died a miserable Fallen Hero. Furthermore, his modern day identity of Xie Wen, in spite of clearly not being a bad guy, is shunned by nearly all other panguan because of his massive amount of karmic debts causing his name to be struck off the panguan name mural.
• Horror Hunger: When Wen Shi comes out of the Gate of Oblivion, his spiritual energy is completely depletes and he feels an intense hunger for more of it, especially when he catches sight of the huge amount of malevolent qi surrounding Xie Wen.
• I Work Alone: Wen Shi prefers to unlock cages on his own, partly because he doesn't want to be slowed down by other people less competent than him and partly because he doesn't want to put others in danger.
• Immortal Apathy: Subverted with Xie Wen. His perpetual calmness and lack of overtly strong emotional reactions causes some other characters to believe that his half-immortality has made him apathetic about the mortal world, but he genuinely cherishes human life and enjoys watching living beings thrive and dead trees sprout new buds.
• Intimate Healing: Xie Wen kisses Wen Shi on the lips to transfer the final fragment of his soul to him. He admits afterwards that he could've accomplished this through other methods that didn't require kissing Wen Shi, but had no inclination to consider the other methods.
• Jack of All Trades: While the majority of panguan specialize in only one of the arts of puppetry, spellcasting, arrays, or divination, there are some panguan who choose to practice all of them as "mixed arts". This was the path that Zhuang Ye, one of Chen Budao's direct disciples, chose to take.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: The Big Bad Zhang Daiyue has gotten away with living for a thousand years as a Villain with Good Publicity without having to suffer any of the karmic debts he should have shouldered due to Xie Wen receiving most of them instead, but his warranty finally runs out when Wen Shi and Xie Wen expose him for the villain he really is in front of all the panguan families and Zhang Biling condemns him to experience the full extent of his karmic sins for every single one of the hundreds of souls he killed.
  Xie Wen: No matter how many times you reincarnate, no matter how much the world changes around you, the people you're indebted to will always be close by. Unavoidable and inescapable, until all is settled between you and them.
• Karmic Misfire: Zhang Daiyue was supposed to suffer Heavens' Wrath for him causing the deaths of an entire village to save another, but he instead expelled most of it inside Chen Budao's secret array which forced Chen Budao to take it on instead for the next thousand years.
• Karmic Shunning: In the Shop Sanmi arc, when Ah Jun shouts that he wishs he'd never become a part of the Shen family, it causes the Shen family members who were all murdered by him to stop attacking him and instead quietly turn their backs on him without paying him any further notice or giving him the kind of cathartic closure or punishment he'd hoped for, including even his own mother.
• Kneel Before Zod: Chen Budao is said to have had his disciples kowtow to him regularly. This is actually a lie spread by Zhang Daiyue, who enjoys invoking this rumor to get others to follow the "tradition" of kneeling before him.
• Laser-Guided Karma: If a person has committed foul deeds in their life, it will negatively affect their next reincarnation. Misfires of this are possible, however.
• Liminal Being: Wen Shi is stuck in a strange state of being where he's neither alive enough to register as so on the panguan name mural nor dead enough to be a ghost or corpse.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: Some of the cages formed by ghosts and longing souls, in addition to being Epiphanic Prisons, also function as this. They trap their creator inside an illusionary world where they don't have to face the fact that they're dead or can have the things they longed for the most during their lives, but it's all fake and they can't move on until their cage is unlocked.
• Marionette Master: One of the possible fields of study for panguan is puppetry, which involves using string to control puppets created from the panguan's spiritual energy. Wen Shi is known as the ancestor of puppetry and Zhang Yalin and Da Dong are two of the other characters who are shown to practice puppetry too.
• Meaningful Rename:
  • Xie Wen changed his name to Chen Budao when he became the half-immortal panguan founder, but he goes by Xie Wen again in the present day.
  • Zhang Wan's first name used to be Wanling but she dropped the -ling from her name after her falling-out with Zhang Zhengchu, the Zhang family head, caused her to be blacklisted from the panguan name mural. Zhang Lan and Zhang Yalin don't have as estranged relationships with Zhang Zhengchu, but them also choosing to drop the -ling from their names is an indicator that they still don't feel particularly close to him.
• Memento MacGuffin: Xie Wen's string of beads with a green-blue feather that was formed from a fragment of Wen Shi's own worldly bonds.
• Mortality Phobia: It's shown that many humans are so unwilling to accept death that they'd rather subconsciously form cages imprisoning their souls than admit that they or their loved ones are no longer alive. The Big Bad tops them all, however; he's so terrified of dying and actually having to repay his karmic debts that he used appallingly evil methods to prolong his life for a thousand years.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: During the early arcs, Wen Shi and Xie Wen act (or at least try to act) like they're not experienced with several panguan concepts they know inside out to avoid the younger panguan from getting suspicious about an unknown disciple and a sickly weakling being more powerful than they should be.
• Ominous Fog: Many descriptions of the cages' environments or other spooky sights include mentions of fog obscuring the characters' vision.
• Parental Abandonment:
  • Wen Shi's entire family tragically died when he was very young and Chen Budao was the only parental figure he had while growing up.
  • Xie Wen also turns out to have lost his entire family when he was a young man.
• Past-Life Memories: Reincarnated people normally can't remember what their past lives were like, but Zhang Wan and Zhang Biling were able to regain some memories of their past lives.
• People Puppets: Sufficiently powerful puppet masters can use their strings to control other people. This can be done in helpful or harmless ways, like Wen Shi briefly taking control of Da Dong's fingers to help him open a door he was too emotionally shaken to do himself, or in much more sinister ways like Zhang Daiyue planting a Trigger Phrase into his grandchildren's minds that he could use to turn them into involuntary puppets for him.
• Perverse Puppet: The first cage the characters encounter in the novel has a creepy puppet boy who viciously attacks and relentlessly hunts down the characters whenever they draw too much attention to themselves. Subverted in that this puppet isn't actually evil and it's attacking the characters only because it's an extension of the cage master's subconsciousness that will automatically try to drive out any intruders that might disrupt its cage.
• Razor Floss: Another ability powerful puppet masters have is to make their strings sharp enough to cut through even steel.
• Reincarnation-Identifying Trait: When a person commits a grave enough violation of the heavenly laws, they receive a mark on their body that appears on their reincarnations' bodies until they've reincarnated enough times for the mark to completely fade away. Zhang Wan had one such faded mark from her past incarnation's unwitting role in the destruction of Liu Village and she was able to tell that her father Zhang Zhengchu must be the reincarnation of the man who manipulated her into destroying her village due to him having a similar mark on his body, although it turns out that Zhang Zhengchu isn't just his reincarnation but the exact same man who's been prolonging his life for centuries via body theft.
• Right in Front of Me:
  • Many characters talk about how Chen Budao is so terrifying and ill-omened a figure that they don't even dare speak his name aloud or worship him, while Xie Wen is within earshot. When they eventually learn, one by one, that Xie Wen is Chen Budao, they're filled with mortified horror at remembering all the times they talked unflatteringly about Chen Budao right in front of him, although Xie Wen is good-natured enough to not mind it too much.
  • Wen Shi also experiences this when Zhang Yalin speaks about how he worships his great and mighty puppet master idol so fervently that he even wears one of Wen Shi's finger bones around his neck.
  • Da Dong brags about how much his puppet resembles Chen Budao's legendary Golden-Winged Dapeng to Wen Shi and Xie Wen's group, unaware that Lao Mao, Xie Wen's seemingly ordinary assistant, is that very Golden-Winged Dapeng who's chagrined that Da Dong thinks his puppet is as impressive as the real thing.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: While Chen Budao himself wasn't evil, him being sealed away is viewed by later generations of panguan as this because of how the humongous amount of worldly bonds within him was killing and corroding everything around him and the only way to prevent them from doing further damage was to seal him away.
• Secretly Dying: When Xie Wen's puppet body begins to run out of spiritual consciousness, he shows Wen Shi an illusion of his body still being only half-petrified to prevent him from figuring out just how close he truly is to completely withering away until the last possible second.
• Sharing a Body: Zhou Xu agrees to share his body with the soul of his past incarnation Bu Ning, with them swapping control of Zhou Xu's body depending on which one of them wants to use it at the moment.
• Shattering the Illusion: Unlocking a cage requires doing this, with the illusions inside the cage falling apart as it dissipates into nothing.
• Soul Jar: Wen Shi turned his own soul into one by using it to form a cage to keep Chen Budao's soul inside so that their souls wouldn't have to truly part ways.
• Soul Power: Panguan arts typically draw their power from the panguan's spiritual energy and exhausting too much of it can leave the panguan drained.
• The Soulless: Wen Shi is lacking his soul and is trying to track it down. Somewhat atypically for this trope, his lack of a soul doesn't make him inhuman or devoid of a conscience and mainly just gives him Laser-Guided Amnesia and a downgrade in his powers.
• Spot the Imposter:
  • One of the possible signs that the characters have just entered a cage is them being accosted by terrifying spirits impersonating their companions or friends. The spirits tend to have an imposter-identifying detail such as a lack of shadows, a mole or scar being on the wrong side of their face, or behavior that the real person would never do.
  • Shen Manyi used to drag her relatives into playing a "Real Bride, Fake Bride" game with her where she'd hide herself under a bedsheet and they'd have to guess which section of the bedsheet she was under. After she dies, she still continues dragging strangers into playing this game with her, with the unsettling twist that she can now perfectly copy another person's appearance and won't drop the facade until the people she's with realize that she's an imposter. When she tries out this game with Wen Shi's crew, she's exposed the first time by subconsciously making a gesture of pushing her glasses up her nose when the person she was impersonating didn't wear glasses and then exposed the second time by doing a too-poor imitation of Xie Wen's personality. She does a much better job impersonating Xie Wen in her third attempt, but Wen Shi is still able to tell which one of the Xie Wens is the real one by detecting which one of them had malevolent qi he could taste and which one of them only looked like he had malevolent qi surrounding him.
  • In the Nameless Burial Mound arc, Zhang Daiyue impersonates Chen Budao inside his cage as a manifestation of his envious desire to be a half-immortal like him. Wen Shi quickly knows he's an imposter because he acted smugly pleased about the younger self of Zhang Daiyue kneeling to him in a way that the real Chen Budao would never do.
• Teacher/Student Romance: Between Wen Shi and Xie Wen, the former who used to be the latter's disciple a thousand years ago.
• This Was His True Form: When puppets die, their form reverts back into the objects that were used to create them which are usually tree branches.
• Tin Man: Wen Shi, in spite of trying his utmost best to purge himself of all worldly desires in the past and being an outwardly emotionless person who repeatedly insists in his narration that he's being perfectly calm around Xie Wen, proves to be a deeply empathetic person with a great deal of compassion for the caged souls he helps and an unquenchable yearning for Xie Wen that hasn't diminished at all in spite of all his efforts to cleanse himself of it.
• Tomato in the Mirror:
  • Xia Qiao learns during the Wooden Boy arc that he's not a human but a puppet who Shen Qiao took into his care.
  • It's mentioned at one point that a person finding out that they're a cage master who's been living in an illusionary world all along is one of the most frightening and sorrowful moments they could ever experience. Xie Wen had to go through this exact experience in the past after his family's deaths and Wen Shi also falls victim to this after he enters his soul's cage and is fooled for a while by its illusions of him still living contentedly in the past with Chen Budao and his fellow disciples.
• Tracking Spell: Zhang Lan tries multiple times to keep track of Wen Shi's location with paper talismans, but it goes embarrassingly wrong for her each time due to Wen Shi or Xie Wen tampering with her spells.
• Trigger Phrase: Zhang Daiyue secretly conditioned both Zhang Lan and Zhang Yalin to reflexively protect him whenever he uttered the sentence "Hands are the most important part of the body for puppet masters."
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Wen Shi is shown in flashbacks to have been unusually quiet and distant for a child, largely due to him being burdened with a huge amount of trauma at such a young age from being the sole survivor of a massacre that he survived only because he was Buried Alive underneath the corpses of his family and neighbors and finding himself saddled with all the worldly bonds of the hundreds of thousands of people who died in that massacre that caused him to be haunted by their screaming and crying voices whenever he couldn't keep them under control.
• Underestimating Badassery: Nearly everyone believes Xie Wen to be a sickly weakling who can't even unlock a cage, unaware that he's really Chen Budao, the mighty half-immortal master who created the entire panguan profession to begin with and has not lost his skills with time. Similarly, almost everyone initially assumes that Wen Shi can't be all that impressive a puppet master because they believe that he's just a disciple of Shen Qiao's who isn't powerful enough for his name to show up on the panguan name mural, when the real reason his name isn't lit up on the mural is that his Not Quite Dead soulless status is causing the mural to not register him as alive.
• Unfinished Business: If a soul is faced with death when they have something or someone in their life that they can't easily let go of, they're likely to form a cage that can't be unlocked until they get to resolve their lingering regrets or attachments.
• Villain Ball: Zhang Daiyue, after a thousand years of carefully and slowly solidifying his status as a Villain with Good Publicity who's trusted and respected by hundreds of people and has established a secret method to indefinitely prolong his life without anyone being the wiser, makes a rash decision to try to absorb Bu Ning's soul which ultimately leads to his public downfall and death.
• Villain with Good Publicity: The Big Bad, who has been spending over a thousand years being respected and admired by the other panguan families as a honorable family head, when he's been doing despicable deeds and stealing his heirs' bodies to extend his life and even secretly performing a ritual on every spiritually powerful panguan youth so that he could funnel all their spiritual energy into himself if he ever needed it to survive.
• Walking Wasteland: Wen Shi was this for a time in his childhood, due to the mass amount of malevolent qi within him killing or harming any living being he touched if he didn't have it under good enough control. When Chen Budao's body becomes filled with a staggering amount of the same kind of malevolent qi or worldly bonds, he begins killing or corroding everything within his vicinity, and it's shown that his modern day self Xie Wen still has this trait (albeit a lot more under control now) when a flower he picks withers away in his hands.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: In spite of the best puppet masters being able to create puppets that are realistic enough to be virtually indistinguishable from humans, most people don't regard even the most humanlike puppets to be anything more than tools or servants, with Wen Shi and Chen Budao as the only two notable exceptions to this.
• You Are Worth Hell: Wen Shi has this kind of attitude toward his shifu. When Xia Qiao asks him what he'll do if he's unable to free Xie Wen's soul from their cage, he replies that he'll just stay in the cage with him.