The Ninth Pass

The Ninth Pass is an urban supernatural-abilities web novel by Xiao Dao Feng Li, a Platinum author at Yuewen Group. It was serialized on Qidian from September 2021 and completed on June 30, 2025, totaling about 1.54 million characters and 264 chapters (260 in the main text). The story is set in an alternate modern world where technology and arcane arts coexist and humans and demons live side by side: cultivators, relying on spiritual roots and arcane arts, occupy the top of society, while ordinary people can only look up; yet what the world does not know is that beneath this seemingly glorious golden age, the Eight Passes have long since collapsed, the heavens have fallen, and the gods and immortals are all dead. The protagonist, Song Yue, is born with innate superhuman strength but is turned away from the cultivation academy for lacking a spiritual root. He trains alone in a villa in Hangzhou that his parents bought at great expense, studies reading and writing with the learned and gentle Master from the neighboring academy, hones his martial skills, builds his body with hundred-kilogram stone locks, and fixes his obsession on "entering the Dao through martial arts and attaining sagehood in the flesh." The story begins when Qian Qianxue comes to his door to ask him to step in and mediate a conflict between an elite martial arts school and the cultivation academy; Song Yue shows up in a tank top, shorts, and flip-flops, offends both sides, and is thus drawn into the vortex of the Kunlun Secret Realm, the underground palace, the sects, and the Bureau of Anomalous Affairs. The work's main thread is "the opposition between martial artists and cultivators," blending secret-realm exploration, sect strife, mecha, and virtual spaces, and ultimately settling on the protagonist's duty to guard the Ninth Pass alone and hold back the demon tide. The book moves at a fierce pace with densely packed payoffs.