The Strong Grow Stronger

The Strong Grow Stronger is an Eastern fantasy novel by web author Xiao Wu Xianggong. It was serialized on 17K and other platforms starting in December 2015 and completed in June 2016, totaling about 1.35 million Chinese characters. The story opens with the ancestral injunction of the Zhao family—"With my supreme martial arts as the foundation, with myself as the fulcrum, I can pry open the eternal ages." Countless years later, the once-prominent Zhao family has long declined and stands on the brink of ruin. The family's once-in-twenty-years "Suitian Fire Ritual" is approaching, and masters from the three great sects of the Qingyun Empire will come in person to the Zhao household. Zhao Peng, a Zhao son born with poor aptitude and terrible talent, is regarded as a worthless idler and treated with contempt and scorn. His only concern is the little sister he found five years ago by the Luoshui River and named Luo'er. On his way back from the training grounds with Luo'er, whose talent has just been assessed as outstanding, he is attacked and nearly killed, bedridden for three days and nights. At the brink of death, the soul memory of a warrior from another world—a fearsome black-market fighter—merges into his body. When Zhao Peng wakes, his timid nature turns resolute. He reexamines the "relic" his missing father left him, and reexamines his own fate and that of the Zhao family. He resolves, with an unyielding heart of the strong, to shoulder the hope of the Zhao family's revival and strive for the pinnacle of martial arts, choosing to stand against the whole world for the sake of his moral code, and to show all living beings what it means to grow stronger when facing the strong—the strong grow stronger. The work revolves around core events such as the "Suitian Fire Ritual" and the "White Tiger Sacred Seal," builds a five-tier warrior cultivation system, and advances the protagonist's battles against powerful foes through passages such as "Awakening of the Nine-Star Fate Platform" and "Descent of the Frozen Throne."