A Wuxia Journey

A Wuxia Journey is a long virtual-reality online-game novel by Wang Wu, serialized on Chuangshi Chinese Network (Yuewen Group) starting in December 2015 and completed, totaling about 2.31 million characters. The story is set in 2035, when the holographic online game The Great Wuxia World launches, and players can live, practice martial arts, and do business in a martial-arts world that is nearly one hundred percent simulated. The protagonist, Pang Xia, does not want to be a great hero; his goal in entering the game is to open the largest restaurant on the server—a five-star restaurant—and to that end he gives himself the game ID "Fat Shrimp." Things do not go as planned, however: his cooking is so good that the most unprovocative figures in the martial world become regulars, and they never pay. Li Xunhuan says he will come often to taste the wine he brews; Ximen Chuixue says he has few friends and Fat Shrimp counts as one; Kou Zhong and Xu Ziling complain that he tricked Sister Zhenzhen into the bun shop; and Qiao Feng, Xuzhu, and Duan Yu simply adopt him as their fourth brother, still letting the one who drinks least pay the bill. Pang Xia can only shout, "You lot, line up and pay your bills!" The game uses various classic wuxia characters and dungeon events as its stage, from Butterfly Valley and Granny Golden Flower to the fire qilin of Lingyun Cave, and the protagonist grows through a series of hilarious encounters, ultimately reaching the ending in which he ascends to Great Emperor. The book's tone is light and humorous, and the chapter titles themselves have a comic effect; it is a fairly representative wuxia online-game novel of the mid-2010s.