Moving the Mountain

"Moving the Mountain" is a classical xianxia novel by Douzi Re De Huo, serialized on Qidian Chinese Network from June 2010 to August 2011. Comprising roughly 2.26 million characters across more than 470 chapters, the story is set in the Great Hong Dynasty. Three hundred years earlier, the Liang clan was condemned, and its descendants were forever branded as criminals. The protagonist, Liang Xin, is denied meat, new clothes, and schooling from birth; at fourteen, he is conscripted into deadly labor such as garrisoning the frontier or quarrying stone, and his father died in such servitude. At eight, the ghost servant Feng Xixi—once in the service of Liang Xin's ancestor Liang Yi'er—comes to repay an old debt, secretly bringing him food and teaching him the "Founding Emperor's Long Fist." At twelve, an imperial edict summons all the empire's criminal youths to "break open the mountains and shatter the malevolence." Liang Xin is taken away by soldiers, and his fate turns from there. As threads like the Mountain-Moving Academy, the Liu clan descendants, the Fire-Tailed Ape, and the old demon general An surface one by one, Liang Xin draws closer to the truth behind his ancestor's condemnation and touches the novel's core proposition: the so-called "mountain" in fact refers to "immortals." The author portrays cultivators as beings who devour the essence of heaven and earth and lord it over mortals, and interprets "moving the mountain" as moving immortals out of the human world so that "the world under heaven" may once again belong to humans—which is why critics have called the book an "anti-cultivation" novel. Cultivation in the book is divided into seven stages: Bone-Scraping, Heart-Dusting, Sound and Color, Sea and Sky, Profound Mechanism, Free Roaming, and Serving Tea. The protagonist possesses cultivation but no "dao heart," always retaining a mortal heart—precisely the reason he chooses to stand on the side of "humans." The novel's language is humorous and fresh, its foreshadowing densely planted and ultimately all gathered up, and many readers regard it as one of the most underrated xianxia works in web fiction.