Eternal Immortal Vault

Everlasting Immortal Dome is a long-form xianxia novel by the web author Guan Qi. Serialized on 17K.com starting in April 2015, it runs to roughly 4.37 million characters across ten completed volumes. Its protagonist, Gu Hai, is a Go-obsessed young man from Earth who, on his thirtieth birthday, is transported by an antique Go piece into a world known as the Divine Continent. There, people seek not technology but longevity, and cultivation is the primary path to extending one’s lifespan and mastering one’s fate. Constrained by his constitution, Gu Hai remains stuck for forty years at the post-heaven perfection stage, until a turning point arrives around his seventieth birthday. Armed with the strategy, military arts, and Go board craft he learned on Earth, he first employs a chain of schemes to bring down the powerful Song and raise up the weak Chen, then goes on to found a nation that fields armies of cultivators, advancing step by step through a Divine Continent crowded with sects and contending kingdoms. The novel proceeds along two intertwined lines—growth and love and vengeance: on one side, Gu Hai’s counterattack from mortal Go player to one who plays against Heaven itself in pursuit of boundless longevity; on the other, his search for his wife’s murderer and the settling of old scores. The novel turns Go concepts such as endgame, opening layout, and capture into metaphors for cultivation and power struggles, and weaves in traditional cultural elements including the four arts of qin, Go, calligraphy, and painting, the three hun and seven po souls, and qi fortune and merit, constructing a world where Buddhist, Daoist, and divine forces coexist, and incorporating strategy, national warfare, intellectual duels, commercial competition, and romance. In 2018, the work received the Outstanding Animation Adaptation award at the first Pan-Chinese Online Literature “Golden Keyboard” Awards and was adapted into an animated series of the same name.