Lord Immortal

Lord Immortal is a fantasy cultivation web novel by Fengqi Xianyun, serialized on Qidian from April 18, 2012, and completed in May 2014. It runs to about 1.2 million characters and 352 chapters. The protagonist, Duan Junxian, is a boy born into generations of servitude in the Duan clan. Unwilling to spend his life beneath others, he secretly learns martial arts, and is then swept up in an extraordinary stroke of fortune—he obtains fragments of a divine treasure of the heavens and encounters the remnant soul of the Lingluo Daoist Lord. From then on he leaves the family courtyard and steps onto the great stage of the star domains. The novel deliberately avoids the single path of traditional cultivation—"nine realms of martial refining, six stages of dan refining, three mysteries of immortal refining"—and sets up instead a "six bodies of body cultivation" system: cultivating the body and refining the soul, proving the Dao through strength, with the tempering of flesh and the gathering of a battle soul at its core. The story's main action line is "raiding immortal mansions and seizing relics," advancing through such settings as the Tower of Divine Communication, the ruins of the ancient Thunder Clan, the Seven Ancient Ruins, the Island of the Primeval Corpse Demon, the Mystic Ancient Demon Sect, the Battlefield of the Heavens, and the Tower Reaching Heaven. The protagonist's character gradually emerges: decisive, resourceful, skilled at acting in secret, and never bound by convention. As the scope widens from a single region to the star domains, the mystery of Junxian's origins and the old affairs of the Lingluo Daoist Lord are revealed one by one, and the invasion of the star domains by the supreme Buddhist sect drives the story to its climax. The book moves at a brisk pace and is dense with worldbuilding, its personal-growth line interwoven with the line of factional strife; it is one of the more representative works of "ordinary-man" immortal cultivation.