The Gate of Creation

The Gate of Creation is a long xianxia cultivation novel by the web novelist E Shi Lao Wu, written after The Strongest Abandoned Young Master (later retitled The Three Lives Dao Formula). It was serialized on Qidian from June 2014 and completed in 2016, running over 1,500 chapters and roughly 4.76 million characters; in 2016 Twenty-First Century Press published a ten-volume print edition. The story opens with Ning Cheng (Ning Xiaocheng), a young man on Earth from a poor family who lives with his younger sister Ning Ruolan and, having lost his lover through a misunderstanding, is at the lowest point of his life. A yellow ray—the mysterious Xuanhuang Pearl—abruptly carries him to a shattered, forgotten otherworld, the Yixing Continent. He wakes gravely wounded and is saved by Ji Luofei, whose face has been disfigured; thereafter, relying on his photographic memory and the fortunes brought by the Xuanhuang Pearl, he rises from the lowest ranks of Qi-gathering cultivators, enters the Mingxin Academy, braves the Angry Axe Valley and crosses the Yixing Sea, surviving one peril after another through academy tournaments, sect sieges, and struggles among factions. As his cultivation advances, he masters alchemy, artifact refining, and formations, ventures into the starry sky and the broader realms of Taisu and Taiyi, fights alongside old friends such as Ye Mo, and is drawn into the great game in which sages and dao lords contend for sacred thrones and the secrets of creation, ultimately winning the Northern Sacred Throne in the great battle of creation and taking the title Xuanhuang Sage. The work is known for its tiered cultivation system and vast starry-sky cosmology and is the second book in E Shi Lao Wu's "Cultivation Trilogy."