Taixu

Taixu is a xuanhuan cultivation novel by the author Luoyue, serialized on Baidu Novels and now completed, running to roughly six hundred and eighty chapters. The novel sets its tone with an opening verse—"Beneath Mount Qu, the wilds are desolate. Dusk shrouds the four wilds, bones lie scattered without direction. There is Taixu, and immortals sing. One sword cuts the dust, and all things flow free"—and begins in a mountain village at dusk, wreathed in chimney smoke, from which the protagonist Xu Lin sets out on the path of cultivation. The "Taixu" of the title is both a wisp of existence that accompanies Xu Lin, sometimes transforming into a Dharma wheel for his use, and a vehicle for the novel's reflections on the immortal path, the heavenly Dao, and order. Xu Lin holds to a philosophy of his own in cultivation: to remake the world's rules and order, one must first possess sufficient power; and power comes not from day after day of sitting in meditation within a sect, but from all the perils between heaven and earth. He therefore chooses to meet hardship head-on and hone himself in actual combat. The story blends a wealth of Eastern mythological elements—the Lord of the Primordial Chaos, Fuxi and Nüwa, Hou Yi, Xingtian, the demon clans, Spirit Mountain, and more—into a grand world where mythological figures and cultivators walk side by side; the protagonist grows through repeated encounters with powerful foes, ascending step by step onto ever higher stages of heaven and earth.