Training the Martial World

Training the Martial World is a comprehensive-wuxia crossover novel by the web author "Lonely Master," roughly 500,000 characters long in 196 chapters, completed around 2014. The protagonist, Zheng Xie, is a modern homebody who spends his days immersed in web fiction, obsessed with the freewheeling feuds of martial heroes. One day, while following a serial at home, a line pops up on his screen—"Do you want to enter a real martial world? YES / NO"—and he clicks YES without hesitation, whereupon the system spirits him out of reality and sets him down by a mountain stream outside Hengyang. On waking he finds an extra "contract of training": by signing a contract with figures of the martial world, he can obtain their martial arts techniques and inner-force foundations, and his own cultivation rises accordingly. The book opens at the Huiyan Tower in Hengyang, where Zheng Xie runs into the lecher Tian Boguang and talks his way out using the claim that he was "sent by the Bodhisattva," then travels through several Jin Yong-style martial worlds: in the Green Bamboo Alley he meets Ren Yingying, at Plum Manor he sees the imprisoned Ren Woxing, at a Jiangnan martial-arts marriage contest he encounters Huang Rong, on Lake Tai he meets Hong Qigong and learns the Eighteen Dragon-Subduing Palms, in the Ancient Tomb he meets Xiaolongnü, and heading north he is drawn into the feud of Huo Du and the Golden Wheel lineage. In the latter half he steps into a world based on The Twin Dragons of Great Tang, meets Zhu Yuyan, Shang Xiufang, Shan Meixian, Fan Qinghui, and others, is caught up in the strife of the Dongming Sect, Jingnian Zen Sect, and Chang'an, captures Li Shimin, stirs up Tang politics, and finally closes with the fall of the Tang. The book takes the most straightforward path of early web fiction: the system provides the cheat, shortcuts fuel the leveling, and recruiting characters drives the plot, interspersed with martial action. The title itself signals its orientation, the content is explicit, and readers should know its genre traits beforehand. Compact overall, its 190-odd chapters can be read in one go, making it a representative early sample of the comprehensive-wuxia fanfiction genre.