Lingshan

Lingshan is a full-length xianxia novel in Xu Gongzi Shengzhi's "Ghost, God, Human, Mountain, Earth, Heaven, Shock" series. Serialized on Qidian from October 29, 2008 to November 6, 2009, it runs about 1,858,600 characters in 360 chapters, structured in the traditional zhanghui form with divided volumes. The story begins in the modern day: Mei Xi, an undergraduate at Beijing University of Chinese Medicine who has drifted through life since childhood, barely reaches his sophomore year when a chance encounter sends him back to the High Tang, where he becomes the embodiment of Mei Zhenyi, the simple-minded young son of Marquis Mei Xiaolang of Nanlu. He soon discovers this is not the Tang dynasty of the history books—immortals and bodhisattvas fill the skies, monsters and spirits roam everywhere, and scenes that existed only in myth are playing out around him. Are the historical records wrong, or did his arrival create the history later ages would see? With this question, Mei Zhenyi feels his way through early Tang society and jianghu: he takes masters to study medicine and the Way, receives the medical lineage's core methods from Sun Simiao, and is taught the Great Way of the Golden Elixir by Zhongli Quan, testing and confirming what he learns across the "eight great trades" of divination, astrology, physiognomy, feng shui, and more, and between the Daoist and Buddhist cultivation systems, step by step advancing on the path. Set against the early Tang background of flourishing Buddhism and Daoism and fierce intellectual debate, the novel draws on threads from Journey to the East and Journey to the West, weaving together Daoist and Buddhist canons, medical and pharmacological classics, ancient myth, and folk legend to build a layered, almost convincing cultivation system, while writing the warmth and coldness of human feeling between immortals and mortals. The title comes from old sayings such as "the sacred mountain lies only in your heart": the true place of cultivation is not beyond the deep mountains and clouds.