Sovereign of the Heavenly Dao

Sovereign of the Heavenly Dao is a long-form Eastern fantasy novel by Ye Qi, serialized on Qidian from 2015 and completed in 2017, totaling roughly 2.41 million characters across 1,139 chapters. The protagonist, Ye Qi, is one of the world's finest programmers; after transmigrating, he becomes the second son of Ye Changshan, the Prince of Zhennan of the Great Liang Kingdom. The Prince of Zhennan commands troops in Yuezhou in the southwest, and the twelve-year-old Ye Qi is sent to Shengjing nominally to study but in truth as a hostage, enduring endless humiliation in the capital. At the outset he is poisoned, and his guard, Old Mo, saves him by trading the blood-jade peach meant for the Empress Dowager's birthday for a Lingyun Pill; with the tribute lost, political enemies pushing to strip the princes of their fiefs can seize on the matter at any moment. In dire straits Ye Qi awakens to a peculiar insight: this world is like a giant piece of hardware, the Heavenly Dao its operating system, the various cultivation methods mere applications running atop it, and the world's source the source code. With a programmer's mindset, he rewrites the code of The Art of Nourishing Life to achieve automatic cultivation, setting out on a path of "deconstructing cultivation through code." Through Qi Refining, Heavenly Meridian, Pill Manifestation, Spirit Wandering, Void, Integration, and Tribulation Transcendence, he climbs step by step; court intrigue and sect struggles intertwine, and he must contend both with the persecution of the Wan family and the Second Prince and with cultivators and demonic factions of every stripe. The author folds cultivation modification, talisman programming, formation computation, and pill refinement optimization into the traditional cultivation framework, forging a distinctive "internet plus cultivation" premise.