The Sage Who Transcended Samsara

The Sage Who Transcended Samsara is an Eastern fantasy novel by Cuttlefish That Loves Diving (real name Yuan Ye), serialized on Qidian from August 2014, complete at about 4.44 million Chinese characters. The story begins with the outsider Meng Qi: burdened with an unknown origin, he is sent to Shaolin Temple to be tonsured and receives the dharma name "Zhending," performing the most ordinary chores amid dim lamps and ancient Buddhas. Yet a small jade Buddha draws him into a conspiracy spanning tens of millions of years—Meng Qi, along with Jiang Zhiwei, Zhang Yuanshan, Qi Zhengyan, and others, is forced into the mysterious world of the "Six Paths of Reincarnation," repeatedly thrown into different missions. Each dream is a world, each world a life; the slightest misstep means the soul scatters. In the main world, his ruthless decisiveness gets him expelled from Shaolin; he grows his hair, returns to secular life, calls himself "Mad Blade Su Meng," and fights his way from the Six Doors personnel ranking to renown throughout the jianghu. As the truth of reincarnation gradually unfolds—the Buddhist Six Paths of Reincarnation, the ancient tales in the style of Journey to the West and Investiture of the Gods, and parallel-world settings interweave—Meng Qi discovers that the jianghu he inhabits is merely one corner of a larger chess game. The book stitches the mission structure of infinite flow together with Eastern cultivation and mythological genealogy, and is regarded as one of the representative works of genre fusion in web literature. It placed third on the 2015 Forbes China Original Literature Trend List and was selected for the half-year list of the China Writers Association's 2016 Chinese Web Novel Ranking.