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Who is Meng Hao?

Chinese canon2100 words

Meng Hao is the protagonist of I Shall Seal the Heavens, the third of Er Gen's six novels. He starts as a scholar in Yunjie County who has just failed the imperial examination for the third year running, and is carried off to the Reliance Sect as a menial worker. His name is 孟浩. Over 1,613 chapters he becomes the ninth-generation Demon Sealer and ends the story as the Lord of the Mountain and Sea Realm.

He fails the examination. That is the first thing worth knowing about Meng Hao, because everything after it is a man trying to stay reasonable in a place that has stopped agreeing with reason.

Er Gen opens on Mount Daqing with a scholar in a blue robe, third failure behind him, sitting on a rock and working out what a life can be worth without the degree. The book gives him a page and a half of pure disappointment. That is a deliberate amount of time. Most novels in this genre kill the boy's family in paragraph one and get the plot moving; here he is allowed to be merely a person who did not pass.

Then a voice shouts for help and the plot starts. A woman is flying a group of villagers somewhere, the head count comes up short, and she takes Meng Hao as the extra — a detail worth holding onto, because the woman is Xu Qing, and "one short" is the reason the story exists at all.

The name and the nicknames

His name is 孟浩. 孟 is the surname and also means eldest; 浩 means vast, grand. Er Gen gives ordinary names to people who are about to be told they are ordinary, and the gap between the two characters and the man is part of the design.

Three other names matter, and they arrive in a specific order. Fang Mu is the alias he chooses, and the one that sticks — at the very end it is what Chu Yuyan calls him, and the name has outlived the disguise. Fang Hao is the lineage name, from a birth on East Victory Planet into a clan whose prosperity never reached him. The third is not official at all: readers call him the hamster, because he hoards.

The hoarding is the personality, and it is why some readers bounce off the book inside its first hundred chapters. Meng Hao buys low, sells high, opens shops, refuses fights he cannot win cheaply, and treats a good spirit stone the way a farmer looks at a good wall. This is treated by the text as a virtue and by the plot as a weapon, which is unusual. Most protagonists in the genre abandon their opening method the moment they can hit harder. He does not. The method stays, the scale changes, and by the end it is the same man doing arithmetic.

Er Gen does not write swearing. What he writes instead is one expletive, issued to a parrot — Lord Fifth — who deploys it once every few hundred chapters, with total confidence and no sense of occasion. The joke is not the word. The joke is that the bird has a wider vocabulary for anger than the man holding the leash.

What he actually wants

Not the ladder. He wants a roof, a bowl of noodles, and the next few years without somebody trying to take his life.

That is the engine, and the book is 1,613 chapters of the universe refusing. He joins a sect of servants. He is tricked into taking an item everyone else thought was junk. He is nearly killed at Foundation Establishment by a man who wants the thing inside his chest. Every stage he gains arrives with a bill attached, and the bill gets bigger faster than he does.

Under all of this sits his parents, who are gone before the story can ask them anything. The absence is left to do the work for six hundred chapters: a boy lives alone in Yunjie County, the neighbours have long since stopped asking, and the examining hall in the capital does not care.

The explanation, when it arrives, is not a rescue. An outsider called Shui Dongliu advised his parents — Fang Xiufeng and Meng Li — to leave the boy's life to fate, and then arranged for him to find the road to cultivation anyway. Which is as close as the book comes to calling the abandonment a plan.

The ninth generation

His inheritance is not a bloodline and not a system. It is a seat in a lineage, and what comes with the seat is eight forbidden arts left by the generations before him, plus a ninth that the title names.

The Reliance Sect is a sect in the plain sense — a mountain, a roster, a set of grudges — and what it happens to be sitting on is the legacy of the Demon Sealers, a line that has run eight generations and produced nothing at all in the last one. The ninth seat is Meng Hao's, and what comes with it is a hex — the translation's word for 禁, a forbidden technique grown out of a sealing art. Each generation added one, and each one answers a specific question.

The most famous is the ninth, Seal the Heavens, and the book's own tagline is that hex said in plain speech: if I want it, the heavens had better have it; if I do not want it, the heavens had better not. That line is on the cover of the Chinese edition and in the first chapter of the English one, and by the end of the novel it has stopped being a boast and become a set of instructions.

Worth noticing how unfashionable this is. Inheritances in this genre usually arrive as a ring with a grandfather inside, and they resolve the plot by being bigger than whatever the hero faces. A lineage where the ninth heir has to work out what each of eight dead strangers was trying to seal, and why seven of them failed, is closer to a job with a bad history in the file.

The ninety-nine

This is the spine of the book, and it is easy to miss on a first read.

The cosmology runs on Allheaven, the will of the Vast Expanse. Allheaven wants one thing badly enough to spend eons on it: a candidate to become the Immortal, who can then be eaten before he can outgrow the appetite. So each candidate is arranged for. His world is destroyed, everyone in it is killed, and the rage does the rest. A being about to ascend becomes something that hates the heavens instead of joining them.

The wiki entry on the Demon puts the count at ninety-nine, of whom ninety-eight were quasi-demons that never became the real thing, and every one of them was, at some point, the single brightest person in his own world.

Each had the same destiny. Each watched everyone he knew die. Each reached at least the nine-essence paragon level before Allheaven collected him. Song Daozi, the one most readers remember by name, is one of the ninety-eight. Meng Hao is the ninety-ninth, and the difference is one sentence long:

All except Meng Hao, who fought against the 98 deceased quasi-demons and cracked the Demon pillar with a crack that would never heal.

That is the character. Not stronger. Not luckier. He was broken in the same way and refused to stay in the shape it left him.

Is he the immortal or the demon?

Both names are in the book, and the fight over them is the plot, not a label on a card. The short version: he is the candidate chosen to become the Immortal, Allheaven sabotages the ascension, and what comes out the other side is a Demon — the rage of the Immortal, quantified. Whether that is a fall or a promotion depends on which chapter you are standing in, and the book is honest about not settling it. There is a separate page on that question alone, because it is too large for a paragraph.

Does he win?

He becomes the Lord of the Mountain and Sea Realm, and then the book does something better than a coronation.

The curse Allheaven leaves behind cannot be lifted by killing Allheaven. It can only be lifted by Allheaven itself, of its own will — which means the only route to freeing the ninety-eight, and his own parents, and everyone in the Mountain and Sea Realm waiting to be judged, is for Meng Hao to become Allheaven and then decide to break the rule from inside it.

He does, and there is a stretch where he is a god who cannot remember whether he used to be a person. The chapter where he remembers is not a fight. It is a man saying his own name until it takes.

The last three silver

The final chapter of the main story is the one I would give anyone who thinks this genre is only arithmetic.

He takes Xu Qing to a fishing village and buys a bottle gourd from a burly fisherman for ten taels of silver. The fisherman assumes he is an idiot and takes it. Then Meng Hao gives him three more, plus pills, for "a debt of three silvers, incurred countless epochs ago" — money he borrowed as a scholar from a steward in Yunjie County before he ever cultivated, now repaid with interest so large it reads as a blessing for a family he has never met. In this cosmology that is not generosity. It is karma: a debt stays open until it is closed, whoever is holding it, and the last chapter of a 1,613-chapter book is the author settling the account.

Then he puts the gourd in one hand and Xu Qing's hand in the other, steps off the world, and explains to her, cheerfully, who the fisherman was. It is the first time in several hundred chapters that his face holds nothing but the satisfaction of a settled account.

The chapter ends on a ship. Old Man Extermination sits at the prow, Slaughter at the stern, and a young woman brings out two cups of wine and calls him Elder Brother Fang Mu. It is Chu Yuyan, and she is not sorry.

That is the man. Monstrous when the stakes are monstrous, and punctilious about three silver.

The questions people actually ask

Who is Meng Hao's wife?

Xu Qing, the disciple who pulled him off Mount Daqing in the first chapter and started him on the path. The novel closes with the two of them leaving the starry sky together, and with Chu Yuyan, the other woman in his story, meeting them on the ship as the apprentice of Old Man Extermination.

What does Meng Hao's name mean?

The characters are 孟浩: 孟, a surname that also means eldest, and 浩, vast or grand. Er Gen hands plain names to peasants and enormous names to gods, and the mismatch is part of the joke, but in this case the second character sounds like ambition and the man would rather be left alone to count his spirit stones.

Is Meng Hao good or evil?

Neither word survives contact with the book. He is a Confucian-trained scholar who in the final chapters buys a gourd from a fisherman to repay three silver he has owed a steward for hundreds of thousands of years, and he is also, for a long stretch of the middle, the reason the Southern Domain is afraid to say his name. The book keeps both facts and never picks one.

Where to start reading

The catalogue does not carry I Shall Seal the Heavens, so the picks below are the nearest thing on this site to what the book does. Read one for the shape of the plot, then decide whether 1,613 chapters of it is a promise or a warning.

Where to start reading

Scenes from the novels on this site that use the thing this page describes. Read one chapter and the term stops being abstract.

My Best Friend and I Transmigrated: Demon Lord & Immortal ForemostOne friend in the immortal sect, one in the demon abyss, and a world waiting for them to tear each other apart. The division, given to two people who will not play it. Three centuries of cultivation, yet the sect thought I had passed.Foundation at thirty-seven, Nascent Soul at a hundred and sixty-seven, three hundred years as the sect's disgrace. The ordinary career he refuses to stay inside. Signed In for 100,000 Years: I Came Out as a Great Emperor!A hundred thousand years in a place with no floor, ten years passed outside, and one finger that ends the Heavenly Demon Emperor. The same long accounting, without the manners.

All 31 free cultivation novels

FAQ

Who is Meng Hao's wife?

Xu Qing, the disciple who pulled him off Mount Daqing in the first chapter and started him on the path. The novel closes with the two of them leaving the starry sky together, and with Chu Yuyan, the other woman in his story, meeting them on the ship as the apprentice of Old Man Extermination.

What does Meng Hao's name mean?

The characters are 孟浩: 孟, a surname that also means eldest, and 浩, vast or grand. Er Gen hands plain names to peasants and enormous names to gods, and the mismatch is part of the joke, but in this case the second character sounds like ambition and the man would rather be left alone to count his spirit stones.

Is Meng Hao good or evil?

Neither word survives contact with the book. He is a Confucian-trained scholar who in the final chapters buys a gourd from a fisherman to repay three silver he has owed a steward for hundreds of thousands of years, and he is also, for a long stretch of the middle, the reason the Southern Domain is afraid to say his name. The book keeps both facts and never picks one.

Sources & References

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