A Sword Beyond the Dust

One Sword Shrouds the World is the fifth full-length novel by the online author Chengfeng Yujian, following Sword Devours the World, Star God Sacrifice, Supreme True Body, and Qiu Bai. It was serialized on Qidian Chinese Network from January 18, 2012, and completed in 2013, totaling about 1.91 million Chinese characters. At the opening of the story, in the Zhenxuan World, which can be regarded as a "virtual world," Gu Fang, publicly recognized by the official forum as the foremost expert in the cultivation world of Shenzhou, obtains an ancient immortal sect's lineage inheritance in a pre-Qin ruin and is immediately besieged by the Shenzhou Alliance and more than a thousand cultivators. Ye Wandie, Sword Sage He Zhengdao, Shuang Mingyue, and others each harbor their own motives. In the end, Gu Fang dies, but through the method of body seizure, he possesses the body of the youth Lin Chen and sets out once more on the path of cultivation with a mysterious jie sword. The core premise of the book is "intercepting the void to attain the Dao": interception means killing and plundering, and each intercepted object allows one to seize its origin. When all things return to one, one can prove the great Dao. The work takes sword cultivation as its main line and advances around Lin Chen's growth in the Zhenxuan World, his confrontations with forces such as the Shenzhou Alliance, and the unfolding of the broader structure of higher-level worlds, combining cultivation and leveling up, gratifying revenge, and the satisfying thrill of the "number one under heaven" being reborn through reversal.