Great Black Tortoise

Great Black Tortoise is a long Eastern fantasy web novel by Qingshan Shihun, serialized on Qidian Chinese Network from 2013 and completed on September 7, 2015. The book has 966 chapters and about 3.6263 million characters, tagged "Eastern Fantasy," "Hot-blooded," "Leveling," and "Grassroots Rise," among others. Some sources say the book has 978 chapters in total (including the final chapter and afterword). The story begins in Lijiang City in the Nine Provinces: in the city's Baihua Pavilion, Guan Shaobai, a disciple of the Eight Extremes Sect, hosts a banquet for Ye Hu, young master of the Blazing Fire Sect, but a conflict breaks out when the top courtesan is summoned away by Huo Xuan, young master of Lijiang City and eldest son of the Huo family. Huo Xuan is wrongly accused, forced to leave home, pursued by men in black, and after falling off a cliff is aided by the Kunwu Stone Staff and its artifact spirit Adu, setting him on the path of "Black Tortoise Dual Cultivation." He later takes the Poison Elder as his master, learns the Great Five Elements Reincarnation Sutra and the arts of poison control and alchemy, breaks through to the Bone Tempering realm through the Buried Earth Tribulation, takes part in the Black Tortoise Assembly and the Nine Provinces Tournament, trains in perilous places such as Poison Valley, Immortal-Demon Island, and the Divine Ruins, and advances through Bone Tempering, Foundation Establishment, Core Formation, Gang Refining, and Dan Yuan all the way to the divine way. The book is built on two parallel threads—"the duel of mystery and martial arts" and "the struggle between humans and demons"—and unfolds hot-blooded battles and romantic entanglements amid sect grudges, mysteries of lineage, and reincarnation, creating a cast that includes Huo Xuan, the Poison Elder, and Yu Linglong.