Heaven-Slaying Blade

Heaven-Slaying Blade is a long-form Eastern fantasy novel by the web novelist Xiaodao Fengli. It began serialization on Qidian on October 6, 2015, and was completed in March 2017, running to roughly 5.18 million characters and nearly two thousand chapters. The story follows Chu Mo, a youth from Daxia: abandoned by his parents as a child, he sets out on his grandfather's dying command to seek a master and his kin at the Longevity Heaven, but on the way he runs into the Demon Lord, a peerless powerhouse. At the Longevity Heaven he is publicly humiliated by the Seventh Elder for his "blocked meridians" and expelled from the sect, and he witnesses the man's hypocritical true face. That rebuff shows him the two faces of the jianghu and the sects, and he turns to take the Demon Lord as his master, cultivating the "Heaven's Will, My Will" method in bitter seclusion on Solitary God Peak and rebuilding his foundation through repeated brushes with death. Thereafter he cuts his way forward: first settling old scores and uncovering his origins in the mortal realm, then storming the Spirit Realm, the Immortal Realm, and the Heavenly Realm to clash head-on with the great powers and the old order, until he settles his grudges on a higher battlefield and becomes a mighty ruler in his own right. With "the world has no Way; the blade slays it" as its refrain, the book tells of a youth who refuses to let talent, birth, or other people's notion of "heaven's will" decide his fate, and who hacks open a road to heaven with a single blade.