Gate of the Saints

Gate of the Saints is an Eastern fantasy full-length web novel by Xiami XL (real name Xu Yin, a native of Zhangzhou, Fujian, and a member of the Fujian Writers Association), serialized on Shuqi Novel (Alibaba Literature) and completed on August 14, 2025. The full work is 4.4304 million Chinese characters in 1,416 chapters, and the first volume is titled “Hidden Taihang.” The story begins with the Xu family, a farming household in the Taihang Mountains. The Xu family has lived in seclusion in the mountains for generations and pays no heed to worldly affairs. Within the clan are five courts—Spring Birth Court, Summer Nurture Court, Autumn War Court, Winter Law Court, and Sundry Court—each holding one branch of the farming tradition; the Sundry Court has long declined and become a place for mediocre talents and errant disciples. The protagonist, Xu Zongyi, is born in the Sundry Court with a bright red character for “crime” tattooed on his face. To obtain the right to cultivate and wash away his crime, at age seven he decides to take part in the “Great Earth Hall” trial set by the farming family for its young bloodline. It is during this trial that he is discovered to possess a special bloodline—the “Heaven's Mandate Bloodline” that all saints of heaven and earth wish to refine. From then on, he embarks on a path of growth where “every step is killing.” The novel's core spirit can be summed up in one declaration: “If the saints are unkind, what can be done? I will slay the saints on behalf of the common people!” The work draws on the mythological system of Investiture of the Gods, sets the crisis of the Zhou dynasty as its era background, and unfolds the story of a farm boy rising with the times and ultimately breaking free from the cage of the saints; at the same time, it takes ancient agricultural civilization and the thought of the Agricultural School as the foundation of its setting, turning agriculture-related elements into the source of the protagonist's power to comprehend the laws of the world and establish a place for the people. The author states that he also referenced the historical background of the Shang and Zhou periods and modeled characters on figures such as Confucius, Laozi, and Jiang Taigong.