The Plague Immortal

The Plague Immortal is a xianxia novel by Heishan Laogui, serialized and completed on Qidian.com. It began serialization in 2014 and concluded on March 18, 2015, running approximately 1.0081 million characters, with the tag "fantasy cultivation." The novel is set in a world where the ancient human race passed down the four-character true words "birth, aging, illness, death": cultivators all seek longevity, fear aging, avoid the tribulation of death, and shun disaster and illness, yet they do not realize that by casting aside aging, illness, and death, the Great Dao can hardly be perfected. The protagonist, Meng Xuan, is a discarded disciple of a immortal sect. After being expelled, he obtains the true inheritance left by his master, the Great Illness Immortal Formula—a peculiar cultivation method that does not require seated meditation and qi refinement but instead draws illness qi from the gravely ill to cultivate. In the world, those gravely ill often have evil qi entrenched in their bodies, destroying their vitality day after day, and Meng Xuan can extract the illness qi and refine it into "great pills." The higher the patient's cultivation and the more severe the illness, the better the grade of the pill refined—but if he draws too much and cannot refine it, the illness qi backfires on him, endangering his life. He treats illness without seeking fame or profit, asking only that each cured person agree to a "Great Illness Token": when the token comes, they must unconditionally do one thing for him. Thereafter, following his master's dying wish, he goes to the sacred land of the Eastern Sea, the Tianchi Sect, becomes its chief true disciple, faces his senior sister—the "traitorous disciple" known as Fairy Hongwan—and constantly asks within the incomplete Great Dao: should one become an immortal alone, or enlighten all beings? With its subversive setting of "illness qi as pills, plague as the Dao," the book tells a cultivation story of proving the Dao through plague and reestablishing the orthodoxy.