The Immortal Official of the Great Zhou

The Immortal Official of the Great Zhou is a classical xianxia epic by the web novelist Rong Xiaorong, serialized on Qidian from June 10, 2020, and completed on August 7, 2021; the main text and extras total about 2.036 million characters. The story is set on the Ten Continents, a land teeming with demons and monsters: Li Mu, a modern young man, dies of illness and his soul crosses into the body of a constable in Yangqiu County, North Commandery, in the Great Zhou Kingdom of the Ancestral Continent. The original owner's body had its three hun and seven po souls stolen by an evil cultivator and has only half a year to live. To survive, Li Mu can only set out on the path of cultivation under the guidance of Constable Li Qing and senior cultivators, gathering the power of the "seven emotions"—joy, anger, sorrow, fear, and more—to reassemble his seven po souls. The Daoist and Buddhist classics he read in his previous life, such as the Daodejing and the Heart Sutra, turn out to be astonishingly powerful techniques within the Ten Continents' system of magic—his key advantage. The story begins with a petty clerk of the county yamen handling cases: seeing ghosts in broad daylight, a ghost pleading for help, the mystery of zombies in a desolate village, and the bizarre repayment of a rescued little fox who "offers herself in marriage"—all draw him step by step from Yangqiu County into the North Commandery capital and the Great Zhou divine capital. He tries cases, captures demons, and battles evil cultivators everywhere, earning the people's faith and thought power through real achievements; he becomes chief constable of the divine capital's yamen and is called "Li the Clear-Sky" by the people; he then enters court as an official and is drawn into the factional strife between old and new parties and the empress's rule. His cultivation identity also takes root in the talisman school, and he ultimately unites the cultivators of the Ten Continents, founds the Daoist Sect, and collects all twenty-four pages of the Heavenly Book. The book advances along three interwoven lines—relaxed case-solving, demon-slaying, and court intrigue—with a humorous style and brisk pacing.