Perfect World

Perfect World is a long xuanhuan novel by the web novelist Chen Dong, written after his novel Shrouding the Heavens. It began serialization on Qidian on August 16, 2013, and concluded on August 4, 2016. It runs over 6.58 million characters and more than two thousand chapters. Because its worldbuilding connects to Shrouding the Heavens, readers call it a prequel to Shrouding the Heavens, and together with Shrouding the Heavens and Sacred Ruins it forms the Shrouding the Heavens trilogy. The story begins in a primordial wilderness: fierce birds spread wings wide enough to blot out the sky, mighty beasts can topple mountains when they rise, and humans struggle to survive among the savage descendants of the primal age, able to endure only by taking refuge with powerful beings known as guardian spirits. Deep in the wilderness, in a place called Stone Village, the villagers revere a heaven-reaching willow tree that descended one night of thunder as their guardian spirit, and it is here that the youth Shi Hao is born and raised. He is born with a supreme bone, but for various reasons ends up in Stone Village, and he begins from the most basic levels of cultivation: bone script, medicinal baths, lifting cauldrons. He ventures out of the wilderness, storms the Hundred Broken Mountains, enters the Heaven Mending Pavilion, ascends to the Void Spirit Realm, and crosses blades with prodigies of every race, all the while unraveling the mysteries left behind by the war of the ancient era and the truth behind the conflicts among the myriad races. The book opens with the line a grain of dust can fill the sea, a blade of grass can cut down the sun, moon, and stars, and builds a world in which humans and beasts coexist and countless races stand tall, using original concepts such as guardian spirits, precious techniques, and precious artifacts. Vast in scope and dense with suspense, it is one of Chen Dong's representative works and has already spawned comic, animation, and other adaptations.