The Profligate Cast-Off Heir

The Profligate Cast-Off Heir is an urban supernatural novel by Zi Mo Xing Chen, serialized on Chuangshi Chinese Network from February 2014, completed in April 2016, running to about 1,221 chapters and 2.84 million Chinese characters, and never published in print. The protagonist, Sun Xing, is a fourth-generation member of the Sun family; his parents died in a plane crash when he was fourteen, and he himself was framed and driven out of the family by his uncle Sun Yao, reduced to a "cast-off heir," with his engagement to the Dongfang family annulled because of the scandal. At the opening of the story, a top master of the cultivation world (in the work's setting, Sun Xing himself, who perished in an accident on his wedding night) awakens in Sun Xing's body: everything of the cultivation world has vanished, and before him is only a broad-faced young man full of excitement. His once-unrivaled cultivation is gone entirely, and he must rise again from nothing in a modern city where spiritual energy is thin. Relying on his residual memories of cultivation and his trump card of a powerful soul, he moves in circles of feng shui and metaphysics, reading fortunes, warding off evil, and neutralizing inauspicious forces for clients, thereby accumulating wealth and connections; at the same time he settles scores one by one with the petty men who once framed him and maneuvers among the open attacks and hidden arrows of the great families. The thread of ancient martial arts sects also runs through the book: Jialin, nominally his half-sister but actually of an ancient martial sect and at the peak of the Profound level, secretly guards him to repay a life-saving debt; Xia Yuexue and other peers of his generation contend with him in a sect tournament involving sixty-two sects. The work follows the path of "cultivation power colliding with modern civilization," interspersed with mystery cases, slices of urban life, and romantic entanglements, tagged as supernatural, playing the pig to eat the tiger, hot-blooded, and "premium thrills."