Sword Sect Side Door

Sword Sect Side Door is a xianxia novel by web author Chou A Chou, serialized on Qidian from May 30, 2020, and completed on May 24, 2021. It runs 810 chapters, roughly 2.17 million Chinese characters. The protagonist, Su Li, is a young Daoist acolyte of the Heaven-Rending Sword Sect. By chance he activates a ring left behind by a senior of the sect; the soul within it, Old Chi, meant to lead him into demonic cultivation but instead awakens Su Li's memories of a past life. In that life he was a doctor who performed seventeen consecutive surgeries before dying of overwork and infection. Armed with those memories and a healer's temperament, Su Li sets out on the path of cultivation, only to face a harsh truth: his talent for swordsmanship is almost nonexistent. The Heaven-Rending Sword Sect dominates through its sword arts, and the side-door lineage has never been granted the true transmission. Su Li becomes a disciple of the old Daoist Gu Zhaizi and instead digs deep into the 'side door' systems of talismans, alchemy, and divine paths. With the 'Minor Sealing Art' carried over from his past life, which can briefly halt low-mass fluids, he improves the foundation-building method, and with modern medical and engineering thinking he refines talismans, inventing techniques such as 'Void-Condensed Talismans' and 'Talismans of Deliverance from Calamity,' turning talismans from one-use consumables into mass-producible 'infrastructure.' The story unfolds from there: a sword sect disciple who cannot wield a sword grows steadily through talisman barrages, farming and alchemy, and river-taming and deliverance, living through demonic calamities, divine-path legacies, and the rise and fall of sects, until he founds the Sword Cliff Sect and sets the whole sword sect on a 'crooked path.' The book's core refrain is 'Later generations would say: that was the year the sword sect went astray.' Written in a light, humorous style, it is an offbeat cultivation story packed with jokes and brisk pacing.