Entering the Heavenly Court

Entering the Heavenly Court is a xianxia cultivation web novel by Huan Yong, serialized on Qidian from October 13, 2013, and completed on March 23, 2015, with 585 chapters and about 2.18 million characters. Its core premise is "without entering the Heavenly Court, one remains mortal." Legend holds that those with great powers live long, can move stars and shift constellations, and reach ten thousand li away in a single thought; the world calls them immortals. But in this novel's setting, unless these mighty beings step through the gates of the Heavenly Court, they are in essence still mortal. The cultivation world is thus divided by a fundamental line: however high one's cultivation, one is still "mortal"; only true entry into the Heavenly Court counts as transcendence. The protagonist is a boy named Yang Chen, nicknamed Erdann, born to a poor farming family that cannot afford to send him to school. One day on the hillside behind the village, he encounters a gravely wounded man in a black robe, who gives him a Heavenly Dao Sect token. The token startles his parents and neighbors and becomes the turning point of his fate. With it, Yang Chen travels to the Heavenly Dao Sect on the fifteenth day of the eighth month for a spiritual-root aptitude test, and so begins his path of cultivation. The work sets out a spiritual-root system of three grades and nine ranks—Heaven, Earth, and Human—with pseudo-spiritual roots regarded as the lowest qualification for cultivation; Yang Chen's talent and background are both unremarkable. After entering the sect, he takes a master, learns attraction arts and restriction arts, and tempers his character step by step amid obstruction, frame-ups, missions, and personal dealings, becoming entangled in grievances with Mu Yunqing, Liu Feng, Liu Yanran, and others. His mother's parting words—"Do no harm to others, but never fail to guard against them"—become the guiding principle of the boy's growth. The work begins with an ordinary farm boy's sect cultivation and gradually advances toward the ultimate proposition of "entering the Heavenly Court"; it is a typical long-form mortal-path xianxia novel.