The Martial Mandate

The Martial Mandate is a long-form novel of traditional Chinese martial arts and world-hopping by the web novelist Yu'er Xiaoxiao. Serialized on Qidian and completed in 2022, it runs about 1.99 million characters across 780 chapters and falls under the historical and alternate-history category. The story opens in the second year of the Xuantong reign (1910): the Qing court is teetering, foreign powers press in step by step, the Qinggang gang runs roughshod through the streets, martial practice is rising among the people, and the Jingwu School of Huo Yuanjia's line is founded at just this moment. The protagonist, Yang Lin, is a spoiled son of a well-off Tianjin family with no grand ambitions, idling his days away in the streets. By a stroke of luck he obtains a supreme treasure, the Martial Mandate. The token does not simply pour power into him; instead it lets him trace martial arts back to their sources and take on the identities of past masters, experiencing Xingyi, Baguazhang, Bajiquan, Wing Chun, and other traditional arts from their very origins, observing techniques and reviewing flaws, turning the experience of predecessors into his own real practice. On this basis Yang Lin starts out a young master with no fists and no courage, first seeking to survive and protect his family and neighbors amid the chaos, then crossing hands with gang warlords, foreign fighters, and masters of every stripe; in battle after battle to the death he tempers a ruthless decisiveness and the chivalrous spirit of defending the nation through martial arts. As his cultivation advances level by level, the story expands from the local martial landscape of the late Qing to higher martial realms, then to a journey of martial performance across the myriad worlds and different martial-arts universes, finally landing on "fists that shake the mountains and rivers, martial arts that settle the myriad worlds." The book is known for its bone-crunching fight scenes and the atmosphere of the late Qing's chaotic times, balancing the thrill of leveling up with devotion to family and country.