Ascending the Terrace

Ascending the Terrace is a long xianxia web novel by Li Ren Heng Chuan, serialized on Qidian from June 9, 2012, and completed in February 2022; it runs to about 1.586 million Chinese characters in 517 chapters. The work takes as its thematic key the lines "Lend me five hundred more years of heaven, to forge me a terrace ascending. The terrace is eighteen thousand zhang high, climb step by step and do not linger," and tells the story of the protagonist Cheng Jun, who in a previous life had cultivated to the point of being one step from the terrace but failed at the last moment and fell; reborn, he pulls himself together and lays new plans in his quest for the Dao. At the novel's opening, the reborn protagonist lands backstage at an opera troupe in the depths of winter and, under the identity of the troupe boy "Nine-Year-Old Red," secretly makes his plans, waiting amid the bustle of the season-closing performance for an answer soon to be revealed. The plot then advances volume by volume, passing through stages including "A Foothold," "Wind Rises over Yunzhou," "The Sword Pavilion Soars," "Testing the Sword at Kunlun," "Flash of Blades and Shadows," "Contending Abroad," and "Reaching the Summit"; the main line revolves around the struggles among Daoist, Buddhist, and other factions and the protagonist's schemes to climb step by step to the top. The work fuses elements of rebirth, formations, and scheming; its prose is semi-classical, its worldbuilding grand, its cultivation system different from the common five-phase qi-and-blood formulas, and its main and supporting characters mostly excel at strategy. It is a relatively well-regarded niche gem among web xianxia novels.