Cultivating Immortality and Martial Arts Together

Cultivating Immortality and Martial Arts Together is a long xuanhuan cultivation novel by the Hubei web novelist Yue Ruhuo (real name Zhu Zeguang), serialized from 2012 on Zongheng Chinese (later part of Baidu Literature), about 7.1 million Chinese characters in total and now complete. The protagonist, Xiao Chen, is a homebody who buys a Comprehensive Guide to Cultivation online and, after swallowing an immortal pill, transmigrates to the martial-arts-dominated Tianwu Continent, becoming the young master of the Xiao family in Mohe City of the Great Qin Empire. The body's original owner cannot condense a martial soul and is regarded as trash; but Xiao Chen discovers that the Comprehensive Guide to Cultivation from his past life secretly matches this world's highest principles of cultivation, containing not only techniques but also the arts of alchemy, talisman writing, formation setting, and artifact forging. With this wondrous book he steps out of desperate straits, awakens the Azure Dragon martial soul lost for a thousand years, supplements martial arts with cultivation methods, and walks a path of "cultivating immortality and martial arts together." The novel falls roughly into two parts, the Kunlun Arc and the Great Thousand World Arc: the former covers Xiao Chen's rise on the Tianwu Continent and his struggles with the factions of the righteous and demonic paths, while the latter expands the stage to the Central Great World held up by the World Tree, the Heavenly Realm, and the Underworld, involving settings such as primordial bloodlines and epochal reincarnation. The book is driven by hot-blooded leveling-up, interspersed with the bonds between the protagonist and female characters such as Liu Ruyue, Ao Jiao, and Mo Chen, and finally closes on the choice at the kalpa of the epoch. During serialization it drew over a hundred million clicks, long ranked near the top of Baidu's trending list, and won the Most Promising Film and Television Adaptation Award at the second "King of Web Novels" selection in 2017.