Long Live Summons

Summoner's Elysium is a long-form otherworldly continent novel by the web author Xiafei Shuangjia, serialized on Qidian Chinese Network starting June 1, 2010. The full text runs to roughly 5.3 million characters and is complete. The story is set in Longteng Continent, a “pure summoning” world: there is no magic and no battle aura. Cultivators rely on summoning grimoires to contract battle beasts, growing and fighting alongside them; those without summoner potential instead become martial artists. The protagonist, Yue Yang, was originally an ordinary homebody in a modern city. A space-time shift sends him to Longteng Continent, where he wakes as the third young master of the Yue family—a “tragic loser” who attempted suicide by drowning after being jilted by a beauty and is widely regarded by the four great families as the most useless of all, having spent fifteen years still unable to contract a summoning grimoire. After the soul replacement, however, Yue Yang completes the contract in an extremely short time, revealing rare talents such as Twin Stars, Devour, Disguise, and Discernment. With Discernment he can identify the potential of battle beasts and tame special life forms such as the Gold-Crowned Thornflower Queen. Thereafter he challenges powerful foes in the Tower of Babel, snatches treasures across levels, and subdues numerous summoning beasts of varied forms. His ways— “only fond of beautiful female summoning beasts” and “no talk of state affairs, only of romance”—also stir up endless trouble. Step by step, he rises from a waste young master mocked by all toward the ranks of the strong. Written in a light, humorous style, the book combines transmigration and counterattack, battle-beast cultivation, and monster-slaying leveling-up, and is one of the more widely circulated representative works of the summoning-current web novel genre.