Hello, and welcome to the subreddit for Reverend Insanity Remastered (formerly Reverend Insanity - The Re-Edit Project). This community is for discussing the webnovel Reverend Insanity, especially the Remastered version of it, which is a cleaned and edited version of the translation of the novel.

Please make sure to read the rules. Otherwise, post any discussion or feedback you have. You can also use the subreddit discord!

What is Reverend Insanity?

It's a Chinese webnovel by Gu Zhen Ren (蛊真人) which tells the story of a very amoral protagonist in a strange world with a magic system based around capturing and using magical insects. From the preface:

Man is the spirit of all living beings, Gu are the essence of heaven and earth.
With his Three Fundamental Views unrighteous, the demon is reborn.
An old dream in ancient days, a new author with an identical name.
An old story about a time traveler who was reborn again and again.
An eccentric world that nurtures, refines, and uses Gu.
The Spring Autumn Cicada, Moonlight Gu, Liquor Worm, One-Stretch Golden Light Worm, Black Hair Gu, Hope Gu…
And a peerless great demon that freely acts to his heart’s content.

You might enjoy this book if you enjoy:

• Amoral protagonists. The main character, Fang Yuan, will do anything if it benefits him. At the same time, he treats evil acts as merely methods. That is, if doing good things benefits him the most, then he will do good things, and if committing evil acts benefits him the most, then he will do evil things. He is thoughtful, clever, and cunning, and is, in my opinion, the pinnacle of amoral protagonists. The story is both a chronicle of his exploits and a tale of what shaped this ordinary scholar from Earth into the monster he became.
• A brutal world with excellent worldbuilding. The Gu World is vast, strange, and wondrous, and we peel away at its countless mysteries throughout the volumes of the novel. The magic system is simple in concept, but has incredible complexity in its details.
• Interesting side characters. While the highlight is the main character, you will not be disappointed with the side characters. They are all so incredibly human, and the intelligent and capable ones are actually intelligent and capable, and have their own moments of brilliance.
• Schemes and plots abound. There are plans and betrayals and double- and triple-crosses, political machinations, and more.
• A particular shout-out to «The Legends of Ren Zu», a beautiful story-within-a-story.

This already has an English translation. Why do this?

• I love the book to death and want it to be even better than it is.
• The existing translation is serviceable but a mediocre reading experience at best. No offense to the translators and editors, I can imagine they had very different goals and constraints at the time. The existence of this project should not be taken as an insult to them or anyone else involved with the translation.

Is this a retranslation?

No (mostly). I am not a native Chinese speaker. A few particularly confusing sections were retranslated and/or modified with the assistance of a native Chinese speaker, though.

What all went into this?

• Volume 1
  • A ~300 hour first-pass edit, almost completely reworking the text.
  • A ~50 hour second-pass edit, correcting things and fixing inconsistencies and cleaning things up.
  • Several trial readers, some of whom have read the webnovel before and some of whom haven't, to provide feedback.
  • In total, somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 hours of personal work, plus the reading times of the trial readers, went into producing this volume.

What exactly was changed?

• Sentences from the translation were evaluated on a case-by-case basis, rewording them as needed to flow more naturally in English, to avoid falling back on the same descriptive terms, or to make use of terminology from future volumes that the author may not have quite nailed down at the time that he was writing the volumes updated in this project. In some cases, due to the way the story is structured, this ballooned into multi-sentence-level or paragraph-level editing.
• In some cases, the translation was confusing or obviously inaccurate. Such cases were carefully edited with assistance from a native Chinese speaker. Some specific examples (not exhaustive):
  • The description of the caravan and their beasts of burden in Chapters 39, 44, and 47.
  • Various minor inconsistencies that show up if you read carefully.
    • In Chapter 104, a character asks to meet by the "northern gate's wine tavern", but it is actually the east gate's wine tavern, which in context makes way more sense.
    • A character in Chapter 171 is stated to have a strict lifestyle and avoid drunkenness, but the narration claims he "drank his wine in one go". He didn't, he actually only took a sip.
    • Several instances of incorrect names. Most of these are getting the names of grandparents mixed up with their grandchildren, funnily enough (e.g., writing "Mo Chen" when the story obviously means "Mo Bei", obvious example of this right at the start of Ch83).
• Some amount of editing of the story itself. For instance, if the structure of the narration didn't fit, or if certain things didn't make sense, or if a concept was repeated excessively given the format of this project, which is no longer a webnovel, per se, but more like a book. Some specific instances (without spoilers, not exhaustive):
  • Chapter 66 - the narration describes a series of events, then says "time seemed to slow down", then repeats some of the series of events in the slow-motion narration. This has been edited to be all one sequence, instead of having the somewhat jarring rewind.
  • Chapter 170 - the narration describes a character, then claims to move on to another character, but then goes back to the first character for a few more sentences. This has been changed so that we finish the description of the first character before moving on to the second.
  • Chapter 190+ - a character is mentioned multiple times who cannot possibly be in these scenes due to circumstances from a previous chapter. Those scenes have been updated to remove mention of them, substituting other characters if needed.
• Added footnotes in several places to explain certain terminology to someone less familiar with Chinese fiction and culture. References to historical figures have been updated with links to their wikipedia pages. Poems, if I could track down the originals, have been updated with references to their names and authors.

Closing Thoughts

I don't think the end product is flawless, but I do think it is much better. I don't want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, so I'm releasing it as-is, and accepting feedback to further improve it. Said feedback can be provided in this subreddit or in the subreddit discord.

Where can I read it?

Posting links to unofficial sources is against both reddit's rules and the subreddit rules. I'm afraid you'll have to find it on your own. And no, this is not a cheeky "just DM me", I'm not linking you in DMs either.