Immortal Chant

Immortal Chant is a classical xianxia novel by Qidian author "Dengshui de Yu" (also writing under the pen name "Yu Lei Man Jiang"), first published on April 23, 2009, and completed on May 10, 2010. It runs to about 176 chapters and roughly 600,000 characters, unfolding across two volumes, The Source of the Dao and The Dao Is Like a Mountain, plus a VIP volume. The novel opens by declaring that "the human way is vast and hazy, the immortal way is ethereal and distant," making the tension between a limited human life and the immortal pursuit of eternal life the undertone of the whole book. The protagonist, Li Lingxi, comes from a family of blacksmiths; his family once received a spirit stone from a nameless immortal, which his father Li Youcai polished into an ordinary-looking millstone. Li Lingxi has slept with his head on the stone since childhood, never knowing he lay nightly on a mountain of treasure. At sixteen, after a New Year's Eve divination brings good fortune, he accidentally triggers a strange phenomenon within himself and is recognized by a Daoist of the Qingyuan Sect as having an immortal destiny; he is brought into the mountains but only assigned to do odd jobs in the scripture pavilion. Unwilling to accept this, he ambitiously plans to "loot" the pavilion, only to run into a shocking upheaval there, and from then on is drawn into conflicts among immortals, gods, ghosts, and demons. His cultivation path then passes through the internal turmoil of the Qingyuan Sect, the chaos of the Drunken Immortal Valley, the exploration of the Dragon-Locking Abyss, and the breaking of the Four Phases Dragon-Locking Formation, with settings such as turtle-pattern talismans, yin-yang Daoist arts, sword techniques, and talisman methods sustaining a cultivation world rooted in Daoist sources. The book's message rests on plain cultivation ideas such as "the Dao lies in Qingyuan" and "stealing the workings of heaven," and closes with ascension in broad daylight: the immortal realm is not the end but the beginning of another "source of the Dao."