The Great Immortal Physician

The Great Immortal Physician is a long urban cultivation novel by the web author Moody Scorpion, serialized on Hongshu Chinese Web from 2012, roughly 2.16 million characters long. A traditional Chinese edition was published by Xin Chang Press in Taiwan, and the simplified online edition ran on Qidian to its completion in 2020. The story opens with Xiao Nan (some say Xiao Yi), a master alchemist of the Mysterious Medicine Sect, dying for certain reasons; his soul is reborn into the body of a down-and-out young man named Xiao Yi in Haicheng and awakens in a traditional Chinese medicine clinic in the city. Bearing his former life's alchemy and medical mastery, he uses lost arts such as the Four Symbols Needle Technique and the Guanyin Hand to save people in the city with astonishing results, drawing the attention of famed doctors, the powerful and various factions, as well as doubt and probing. In the course of practicing medicine, he pursues the mystery of his own rebirth and the old secrets of the Mysterious Medicine Sect, becomes entangled in the struggles between the mundane world and the cultivation world, gradually uncovers larger conspiracies such as the blood demon crisis, and meets female characters including Qin Xiaoyue, Mu Qingyuan, Shu Wan and Yu Ziman. Built on a skeleton of "traditional Chinese medicine plus cultivation," the work follows the route of medical face-slapping and the master's return, combining case-like medical episodes with cultivation elements such as pills, magical treasures and spirit pets. It is one of the more widely read representative works in the male-oriented urban physician genre.