The Great Xia Duke

The Great Xia Duke is a long Eastern fantasy web novel by Yixi Yanyu, formerly titled The First-Rank Sword-Bearing Eunuch, totaling about 4.73 million characters and 1,640 chapters, completed in April 2019. The story is set in the Great Xia Dynasty, a realm that has stood for a thousand years and overawes the land. On the surface the dynasty is at the height of prosperity, but to observant eyes the signs of decline from excessive glory have already appeared: no wise ruler emerges, worthy ministers dwindle, the royal court's iron cavalry from the north repeatedly crosses the Beizhang Plain, and the Eternal Night Divine Cult, silent for a thousand years, awakens once more in the darkness. At such a moment, a shy youth named Ning Chen appears in the Xia palace. As a transmigrator, he stumbles into the Great Xia rear palace and nearly gets kept as a eunuch; he can only hide his identity and struggle to survive in the crevices between the palace and the court. Thereafter, northern border troubles, the cult's resurgence, and the court's factional strife between war and peace factions follow one after another; through crisis after crisis Ning Chen grows from a youth with no martial skill into a powerful figure, campaigning across Shenzhou, the Five Regions, and lands beyond the heavens, supporting one another with Xia Ziyi, Mu Chengxue, and others, until he finally becomes the Great Xia martial duke who wields power over a whole region, and, beneath the shadow of reincarnation fate and primordial gods and demons, moves toward the ending of a unified Sixfold Heaven. The work focuses on court intrigue and national war, with polished dialogue, vivid ensemble characters, and winding emotional threads; many readers regard it as an Eastern fantasy-historical work with a notably "literary" temperament on Zongheng Chinese Network.