Long Live the Chief

Long Live the Chief is a fantasy cultivation novel by the web author Lianpian Guihua, serialized on Zongheng Chinese Network. Roughly two million words across 652 chapters, it was completed in June 2017 and is divided into three volumes: Rise from the Vast, Contention of Heroes, and Who Rules the Land. Shen Feng, a fresh graduate of a fourth-rate university, hopes to find a part-time job online that lets him stay home and earn over ten thousand a month. Before he can send the money, he is plunged into the vast cosmos; after three days and nights of flight, he lands on a floating island covered with bizarre statues, with a radiant portal at its far end. Passing through the portal, he drops onto Tiger Head Mountain on the border of the Southern Barbarian Divine Land, where he runs straight into a gang of twenty-some men brandishing hoes and cleavers and shouting, “Long live the Chief!” Before he knows it, he has become the head of the Tiger Head Gang. Chief Shen Feng, second-in-command Wu Da, strategist Li Deshu, and third-in-command Chen Dalong make their living by collecting tolls at the mountain pass. If they can win a fight, they rush in as one; if not, they scatter just as fast. Trouble soon arrives: the Three Saints of the Flying Dragon Gang send a declaration of war telling them to “prepare for their funerals.” Shen Feng attempts his first robbery and, by a twist of fate, carries off Flying Dragon Gang’s fifth-in-command, Yan Qing, embroiling him with the gang and drawing him step by step into conflicts ranging from the Demon Forest and the struggle for Wild Wind City to the Divine Land Tournament of Geniuses. Relying on a physique regarded as a “natural divine body,” he muddles through among techniques and treasures such as the World-Ending Wind Wheel, Thunder God’s Overlord Fist, Great Sage’s Heavenly Wheel, Xuanhuang Bell, and Sky-Supporting Staff, becomes entangled with figures like Qin Shiyan and Xue Long, and with a ragtag crew somehow makes a name for himself in the cultivation world. The novel inverts cultivation-genre conventions with the grassroots bandit logic of “petty men take revenge, and kick a man when he’s down.” Demons curse them as perverts, immortals curse them as scum, and the human emperor can only smile wryly and say, “Please, when you curse them, could you leave ‘human’ out of it?” Blending comedy and hot-blooded action, it is a typical lighthearted, satisfying long-form novel.