The Knife Cage

The Knife Cage is a long classical xianxia novel by the web author Chong Meng, serialized on Qidian from February 24, 2020 to its completion in March 2022. It runs about 2.784 million Chinese characters in over a thousand chapters, divided into volumes including "Main Text," "Naked Wandering," "Nine Dragons Calamity," "Night Dynasty," "Donghua Sect," and "Taking Up the Knife Again." The work's keynote is "Heaven and earth are the prison, creation the cage—who can see through it?": a cultivation world layered under fate and the order of gods and Buddhas, where beyond the mortal realm lie the strange, the watchers, and all manner of immortals and deities. The protagonist, Qi Long, is the chief of the horse bandits of Black Mountain City—fierce as fire, enduring a thousand blows, yet cursed with a bad lower back. He makes his living in Black Mountain City by his blade-forging craft and knife skills, is forced into a tangled struggle over a dragon vein, and with "life as the knife, faith as the guide," strikes his first cut at his own fate. Thereafter he moves through the Seven Governor-Generals' Offices, the Day-and-Night Kingdom, the Dragon Court, and Mount Emei, rising step by step from blacksmith to human-shaped dragon vein, to sovereign of the Night Dynasty, to taking up the blade once more and contending with the Heavenly Emperor and other powers for the seat of "eternity," until at last he cleaves open the cage of heaven and earth with his knife. The book is built on "martial arts knocking on the immortal gate," fusing the sinew and force of national martial arts with the geomancy, karmic stations, and divine powers of dao arts; the fights are realistic and hard-edged, cold and bloody in spirit rather than airy level-grinding.