Tianyuan

Tianyuan is a classical xianxia novel by the web author Xue Hong, first serialized on 17K.com and completed in December 2013; it has not been published in print. The book opens with an epigraph: the ways of immortals and demons are ever-changing; since the mid-Tang, the path of cultivation has been cut off, and apart from a few exceptionally gifted individuals who shattered the void, the former age when even household dogs rose to heaven is gone—and this novel sets out to unravel that very case. The story is set in the Tang dynasty under Emperor Xuanzong during the Kaiyuan era, before the outbreak of the An Lushan Rebellion, and begins with the young man Li Linfu of Yangzhou coming to Chang'an to seek a position: his family has declined, he is poor at poetry and letters, and he can only rely on his uncle Jiang Jiao, Duke of Chu, to enter the Thousand Bull Guard, where he befriends the boy Jiang Yu, regarded as unruly yet remarkably clever. As the gates of the cultivation world gradually open before the two, court intrigue, martial feuds, and ancient hidden realms become intertwined, and worldly wealth contends with transcendent power; beneath the splendor of the High Tang, undercurrents surge. The novel continues Xue Hong's narrative style of blending the real and the imagined, fusing historical figures and events with an invented xianxia setting to tell of human choices and fate in an age when the order of the mortal world and the power of immortals and demons pull against each other.