Emperor's Shade

Emperor's Shade is a long Eastern fantasy novel by web author Tiangou Bailang, serialized on Qidian and completed at about 2.124 million Chinese characters and 636 chapters (including extras). The protagonist, Mo Xiu, is transported to a treacherous fantasy world by a plane crash and wakes to find two men and a woman attacking him with swords. At first he only wants to live well, but he is gradually drawn into a vast landscape of cave heavens and blessed lands, immortal sects and imperial courts, the three mountains and four seas, the five lakes and eight wilds, and the nine heavens and ten earths. This world has seen the descent of myth and the fall of emperor-level beings: a snail who achieved the Way and became an emperor with the motto "Immortals walk the world, snails walk the future," only to perish soon after; a slave forced to mine spirit ore who trusted no fate but himself and forged an era without buddhas or sages, yet could not escape death. This is an age in which even the radiance of great emperors is obscured. Mo Xiu emerges from Tiandi Mountain and cultivates upward with opportunities such as a bronze lamp, climbing from the Dao Seed realm and the Nurturing realm, accompanied by figures such as Ling Ying, who carries the bloodline of the Heavenly Artisan Immortal Lord. The story unfolds through struggles over cave heavens and blessed lands, contests of techniques and bloodlines, and the resistance of the strong against fate, ending with "A Scroll of the Human World, One Emperor Shades the Sky," portraying a new age where the strong are honored and fate can be contested. The book features a single female lead and builds a complete cultivation system from the Spirit Sea realm to the Great Emperor realm.