Tai Yi

Tai Yi is a long-running divine-path xianxia novel by Wuji Shuchong, serialized on Qidian from February 2016 and completed on October 31, 2017, running about 3.25 million characters over 1,190 chapters. The title comes from the line "Tai means great, great beyond limit, the supreme values virtue; Yi means change, the meeting of sun and moon, yin and yang in turn," and the author uses it to build a mythological world framed on the "divine path": those who split heaven from earth and give form to all things are gods; those who make clouds and rain, command thunder and lightning, are gods; those who hold the mountains and rivers and turn the four seasons are gods; totem spirits and ancestral war-souls may also receive incense and stand as gods. Heaven is divided into nine tiers—Taihe, Taiming, Taimeng, Taiyu, Taichang, Taiyuan, Taiwei, Taichen, and Taiji—in ascending order. The protagonist, Xun Yi, as a child is attacked by a wolf demon that tears out his "sage's heart" (a seven-aperture exquisite heart), leaving him with a heart ailment and partial memory loss. Ten years later, at seventeen, he is summoned in a dream by the former city god of Qinglong City, granted a provisional divine seal, and set to clearing the backlog of documents in the city god's hall—his first step onto the divine path. He builds his standing on merit, enters the Way through the virtue of wood, and within the divine offices of city god, earth god, and god of letters resolves case after case of plague, hauntings, and demonic creatures, gradually mending the flaws of heaven and earth, driving reform of the divine path, and forging his own road amid alliances and maneuvers with the foreign Nine Pillar Gods pantheon. The work blends xianxia with the divine path, with detailed worldbuilding and a self-contained cosmology; its narration favors strategy and calculation and moves at a steady pace—a classical xianxia epic with "the heart of the Way" and "guardianship" at its core.