Qingping

Qingping is a long fantasy novel that Yue Guan planned for nearly five years and officially released on Zhangyue in July 2020. It was serialized on Zhangyue, Baidu Novels, and other platforms, runs to about 4.125 million characters in 1,326 chapters, and is complete. The story centers on Chen Xuanqiu, son of a court historian. An old vendetta on Qingping Mountain sets a chain of cause and effect in motion: to avenge Qingping Mountain, Chen Xuanqiu enters the world using his own unfinished marriage as a gambit. The times are chaotic and the order of heaven and earth has broken down. In one age the Milky Way poured down and the Nine Provinces became a drowned land; in another, ten suns rose together and the earth turned into a purgatory; in yet another, the gates of hell swung open and the human realm became a haunt of ghosts. Heaven and earth are unkind and treat all things as straw dogs—who ultimately rules the eternal cycle of reincarnation becomes the great question left hanging over the whole book. Once in the world, Chen Xuanqiu moves through one contest after another among the Great Yong dynasty, the Hidden Immortal Sect, and other powers, cultivates the Scripture of Creation and Immortality, and climbs step by step from ordinary mortal onto the path of cultivation. He gradually sees through the hypocritical faces of the so-called immortals and in the end shoulders alone the burden of saving all living things. Unlike the flawless protagonists of many xianxia novels, Chen Xuanqiu is flesh and blood and makes mistakes, which makes his growth more believable. The book carries the shadow of Investiture of the Gods, yet instead of writing lofty, remote deities it sets out to write a group of flesh-and-blood immortals. Yue Guan blends the fine brushwork of historical fiction with the xianxia genre; the world-building is grand, the foreshadowing dense, and both the emotional line and the ensemble cast are handled with care. It is a long Eastern xianxia novel with steady pacing and a large canvas.