Erqing

Erqing is a classical xianxia novel by the web author Laibuji Youshang, serialized on Qidian from 2018 and completed that October, running about 1.66 million characters. The protagonist, Cen Qing, is a modern person reborn as a green snake, taken in by a snake charmer and named "Erqing" for his place in the household. Kept alongside him is a companion, "Daqing"; after Daqing dies, Erqing carries the performance alone and even brings back a small snake from the mountains to raise as his younger sister. As Erqing grows too large to go on stage, he is finally released into the wild. Unwilling to prey on living creatures like his kind, he feeds only on plants and grasses; by chance he witnesses a yao crossing its tribulation and comes upon the remains of a thousand-year fleeceflower root, and from there sets out on the path of cultivation, gradually forming a dan and taking human form. This world is no ordinary mortal realm: here is the monkey pressed beneath the mountain, the poised and gentle White Snake, the Eight Immortals, the Old Mother of Mount Li, Zhen Yuanzi, and the story of the Third Holy Mother of Mount Hua and Chenxiang. Erqing takes the Old Mother of Mount Li as his teacher, receives orthodox Daoist methods, and with his senior sister Bai Suzhen does good and subdues yao, accumulating merit, while along the rivers and mountains coming to see the difference between humans and yao and between good and evil. The book draws on Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, The Legend of the White Snake, Shu Mountain, Journey to the West, The Magic Lotus Lantern, and other folk myths, weaving them into a single world of cultivation; the style is half classical and half vernacular, salted with verses of the author's own composing, paced slowly, with little of the killing and treasure-seizing common to the genre, closer to a long, unhurried daily record of cultivation and travel.