Beast Fist

Beast Fist is a national-martial-arts wuxia web novel serialized by Mengnan Guren on Qidian from October 7, 2009, totaling 359 chapters in two volumes, roughly 1.28 million characters. The protagonist, Liu Wei, is a student of integrated Chinese-Western medicine at an ordinary university in City J; obsessed with martial arts since childhood, limited by family circumstances and opportunity, he could only teach himself. On a bitter winter morning he is still practicing in the pine and cypress grove of Beihai Park when he happens upon a picture album at a used-book stall, containing thirteen beast illustrations in varied forms—the very source of the so-called "beast fist." The tiger fist is fierce, the leopard fist swift, the elephant fist heavy, the wolf fist vicious; from the album Liu Wei begins to grasp the "intent" of national martial arts, and through the training systems of the three internal schools—Taiji, Xingyi, and Baguazhang—and external schools such as Shaolin and Bajiquan, he steps ever deeper into the real martial world. The story begins with sect rivalries in the domestic martial world—involving Shaolin, Wudang, the Tang clan, and others—and extends to broader arenas such as Thai mercenaries, African fight pits, and a global martial arts tournament, finally closing on a new martial-arts chapter titled "The Next Era." The work offers a fairly systematic introduction to many boxing styles and schools, and is one of the earlier mature works in the national-martial-arts genre.