Chinese animation news outlets confirmed it this month: Reverend Insanity (蛊真人) has an anime registration on file — 26 episodes, produced by studio Xingyi Kaichen (兴艺凯晨). For a fandom that has spent years surviving on rumors, an official filing is the closest thing to real news the franchise has produced since the ban.

But the same reports immediately poured cold water on the celebration. The registration exists on paper; the novel it adapts is still banned domestically. Gu Zhen Ren said it himself in his tenth-anniversary fan interview, answering directly: "Reverend Insanity is still waiting for the unban." No unban, no source material legally readable on platforms — and a studio sitting on paperwork for a property it cannot currently publish.

The Qidian International signal

What has fans genuinely excited is smaller and stranger: the English Reverend Insanity page on Webnovel's Qidian International quietly became accessible again after a long blackout. A Bilibili video documenting the change crossed half a million views in days, titled exactly how the fandom felt — "completely unsealed." Nobody official has commented, but Chinese readers are treating the English restoration as a possible weather vane for the domestic edition.

The fandom didn't wait

While lawyers and platforms circle each other, the douyin creators gave up on waiting entirely. Fan-made AI-animated episodes have been rolling out steadily — one series has reached 24 episodes and started its Yi Tian Mountain arc, pulling sixty-plus thousand likes per drop. The quality debates are loud and endless, but the demand they demonstrate isn't: this is a fanbase animating its own show because nobody else would.

There was also one detail that set forums alight. On August 22, Gu Zhen Ren's Weibo account tagged the studio behind Fog Hill of Five Elements — arguably the most respected name in Chinese animation right now. A courtesy follow? A hint? Fans have been screenshotting it into every theory thread since.

The honest state of play: a registration without a date, an unban everyone awaits and nobody announces, an English page mysteriously alive, and homemade episodes filling the silence. After years of nothing, even ambiguous signals feel like movement.