God of Confucianism

Ru Shen (The Confucian Deity) is a xianxia fantasy cultivation novel by the web author Mengru Zhuji. Serialized on Qidian from 2010 through its completion, the book runs approximately 1.3476 million Chinese characters across more than 460 chapters. At the outset, Xiao Muyu—a swordsman who roams the jianghu of another world, prideful in his mastery of the blade—is meditating in the Mingsi Forest when a female disciple of the Guiyun Sect, who transforms her sleeve into a sword and defeats him within a hundred moves, brings him into the Xuanwu Continent as an outer disciple of the sect. Having believed his swordsmanship all but perfected, he learns only upon entering the sect that there is always a higher heaven and a greater man; in the Mingsi Forest he is even mocked as a "cripple" by inner disciples, and is subsequently forced onto the path of the inner cabinet examinations, rising from outer disciple to prove himself step by step. Set against a world of cultivation, the novel follows Xiao Muyu as he breaks through the shackles of his practice—from the trials and factional strife of the Guiyun Sect to ever larger contests for power, against formidable foes such as the Netherworld Bronze, all the way to the level of the Immortal Emperor. The cultivation system of the book is centered on the way of the sword and prizes the realm in which "no sword surpasses having a sword." The "Confucian Deity" of the title resonates with the imagery of "law," and the notion that "law stands above all things" runs through the entire work, emphasizing that cultivators are unwilling merely to follow the rules of their predecessors but instead seek to "establish their own way of law." Beneath the surface of passionate power progression and struggles for dominance, the novel is at pains to lay out the cruel hierarchy of a cultivation system that advances level by level, and the choices demanded when individual will collides with the law.