Yaoguai

Yaoguai are a nonhuman people or category of beings within the wasteland, distinguished by forms that may be visibly inhuman but capable of participating in human society. Their significance lies less in a fixed species morality than in the way they unsettle the world’s hierarchy between cultivator and Scrap, natural body and altered body, and human community and other forms of life. The novel presents Yaoguai through practical social encounters rather than through a detached taxonomy, making their existence part of the everyday uncertainty surrounding identity and status.

Appearance and Social Visibility

A Yaoguai encountered by Yuan Guang has silky black hair, eight eyes, and four spider legs emerging from her back. She is identified immediately as a spider-like Yaoguai, yet her appearance does not prevent her from occupying an established social role. She sits behind a counter surrounded by notebooks and scrolls, in a position associated with records, commerce, and local administration rather than isolation or wilderness.

The encounter also establishes that Yaoguai commonly manage their visibility when dealing with humans. Yuan Guang observes that they usually adopt an illusory disguise in human company. The spider-like woman has chosen not to do so, apparently because the remoteness of her home makes concealment unnecessary. This detail makes appearance a social negotiation rather than a simple biological fact: the same body can be displayed openly in one environment and hidden in another, depending on the risks and expectations imposed by the surrounding community.

Kyung-sun and the Commerce of Identity

At the establishment where Yuan Guang seeks information about Kyung-sun, a woman guard directs him to the side counter. The Yaoguai there is Kyung-sun, the manager of the establishment, and she conducts her business with a notebook and quill before acknowledging him. Her role gives the category a concrete institutional presence. She is not merely a strange resident or an object of human superstition; she oversees a place where visitors can consult records, trade, and learn about their fate.

Kyung-sun’s first question to Yuan Guang is whether he is a Scrap or a cultivator. When he challenges the distinction, she insists that it makes a significant difference and repeats the question. Yuan Guang answers that he is a First Coil cultivator, although the declaration brings him embarrassment rather than the pride he once imagined it would produce. Kyung-sun’s interrogation therefore reveals how deeply the cultivator-Scrap hierarchy governs public interaction. Her own nonhuman status does not place her outside that system: she recognizes, applies, and perhaps profits from the classifications through which the wasteland organizes people.

Her office also combines practical and supernatural forms of knowledge. She asks Yuan Guang for his zodiac sign, records that he is a Yang Metal Ox, and remarks that the sign indicates a stubborn fate. She identifies herself as the manager of the establishment and notices the bullet lodged in his head, advising him to remove it because it is unsightly. Yuan Guang refuses because he intends to catch the man who put it there. The exchange juxtaposes Kyung-sun’s commercial composure with his personal vendetta, while her many eyes and perceptive examination make his damaged body impossible to conceal.

Yaoguai Within a Stratified World

The novel’s treatment of Yaoguai parallels its treatment of other bodies that do not fit the dominant ideal of cultivation. Yuan Guang was born without the potential to form a qi core, a condition shared by roughly half the world’s inhabitants, and was consequently classified as a Scrap. Holster, after being made into a Human Pillar, possesses a core that stores qi without properly returning it to strengthen her flesh, leaving her unable to reach the Second Coil despite cycling her qi. The Metallist Sect’s speaker likewise lists sickness, congenital conditions, and Scraphood as forms of bodily exclusion while challenging the belief that birth determines destiny.

These examples do not establish that Yaoguai experience the same conditions as Scraps or Human Pillars, but they place Kyung-sun’s body within the novel’s wider argument about who is permitted to count as capable, valuable, or fully social. Her eight eyes and spider legs are conspicuous, yet her authority comes from competence and position. Yuan Guang’s discomfort is directed not simply at her species but at the classifications she forces him to confront. The scene thus makes bodily difference inseparable from social power: visible otherness can coexist with institutional control, while a seemingly human body can be degraded by the label Scrap.

Boundaries Between the Nonhuman and the Technological

The world also repeatedly blurs the boundary between biological, supernatural, and mechanical existence. The Metallist Sect’s heavily armed cyborgs stand beside a speaker whose metal body bears the sect’s gear symbol and green screen. Their presence makes mechanical alteration part of the same social landscape in which Yaoguai disguise their bodies and cultivators reshape flesh through qi. Yuan Guang himself eventually becomes something beyond an ordinary human cultivator: the Gun is absorbed into him, its power is quelled rather than simply removed, and he names his new state the Gunman.

The Yaoguai therefore belong to a broader continuum of transformed or hybrid existence. The novel does not present humanity as a stable opposite to which every other being can be compared. Spider anatomy, illusion, qi cultivation, Human Pillar modification, cyborg construction, and Gunsoul transformation all complicate the supposed boundary between an original body and an altered one. Kyung-sun’s unhidden form is especially revealing because it is neither a spectacle of pure monstrosity nor a disguise that restores human normality. It is a body that conducts business, reads fate, and exercises judgment in public.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Yaoguai give the novel a way to represent otherness without reducing it to a single function. Kyung-sun is suspicious, commercially minded, and perceptive, but the available evidence does not make her a villain or a moral emblem. Her establishment is a meeting point where travelers seek information, where bounty notices circulate, and where identities are sorted before access is granted. Through her, the category becomes part of the world’s infrastructure.

Their presence also sharpens the contrast between inherited status and earned transformation. Yuan Guang once accepted that his lack of a qi core made him permanently lesser; later, he becomes a cultivator, masters the Gun Path, and resolves to oppose tyrants and monsters rather than accept the world’s hierarchy. Kyung-sun’s body offers a parallel image from another direction: she does not need to become human-looking in order to hold authority. The narrative’s most important question is consequently not whether a being resembles a human, but how that being is treated, what roles it can claim, and whether the surrounding order recognizes its agency.

In this sense, Yaoguai are both inhabitants and structural challenges to the wasteland. They can conceal themselves, reveal themselves, administer institutions, and participate in systems that classify others. Their recurring relevance comes from the instability they expose: the world repeatedly calls certain bodies defective, dangerous, or lesser, while its most powerful figures are themselves hybrids of cultivation, machinery, spirit, weapon, and altered flesh. Yaoguai make that instability visible without resolving it into a simple distinction between human and monster.