Rise

Rise is a long urban novel by Chongqing web novelist Feng Tianxiao, serialized on Qidian since 2010, totaling roughly 2.71 million characters and regarded, together with the author's Chi Zha (Commanding the Storm), as a companion piece. Centered on Fang Bao, a young man from a mountain village, the novel uses a dual narrative of countryside and city: one thread follows his boyhood at the bottom of rural life, the other his struggles in the cracks of urban society as he climbs step by step toward a larger stage. In six volumes, the book traces the protagonist's growth from village to city and on to foreign lands. The author shapes his characters with heavy dialect and local flavor, using chapter titles like "Never Underestimate a Poor Young Man" and "Hidden Dragon in the Depths" to frame life's rises and falls, and repeatedly writes of the grassroots spirit of "fighting for your life." In its later sections the story weaves personal striving together with national feeling and a sense of belonging to country and people, expanding from individual fate to a larger collective narrative. Compared with conventional wish-fulfillment fiction, the book moves at a slower, more grounded pace, with a strong texture of everyday life; every ascent of the protagonist comes with a price and compromise, which led readers of the time to regard it as one of the representative works of the "countryside plus city" inspirational genre. The novel was completed in March 2012; the author died in an accident that April, making this one of the representative works he brought to a full close.