No Immortal

No Immortal is a classical xianxia novel by the author Yeguang (real name Zhang Jun). Serialization began on Zongheng Chinese Network in late 2011 and concluded in May 2015. The book runs to roughly 4.71 million characters across more than 1,500 chapters, divided into six volumes: Wind Rises over Mountains and Marshes, Clouds Cross the Vast Sea, Hidden Dragon Leaves the Abyss, The Dao Is Long and the Road Far, Soaring Through the Nine Heavens, and Since Antiquity There Has Been an Immortal. The whole work is framed by a single couplet — "Chasing the wind ten thousand li, watching the vault of heaven in solitude; a cup of wine for a thousand autumns, beyond the sky no trace of an immortal" — and follows the young Daoist Lin Yi as he sets out from a country shrine and seeks the Dao and immortality along the way. The first half of the story stays largely in the mortal world: escort agencies, taverns, jianghu sects, feuds in the streets, and wrongful cases in officialdom, as the young Daoist tempers his character through repeated encounters with human warmth and coldness and through choices of life and death. Later he takes ship to sea, travels to foreign lands, and enters a cultivation sect, ascending step by step through the realms of Qi Refining, Foundation Establishment, Golden Core, and Nascent Soul, while the horizon widens from a single jianghu to the Nine Provinces, the immortal realm, and the vast primordial world. Unlike the common "face-slapping" power-fantasy novel, the book moves at a leisurely pace and builds its scenes densely. The author has said of it, "It is not a power fantasy, yet there is often laughter; it is not a tragedy, yet there are tears." Its focus is one ordinary man's struggle and perseverance in cultivating his conduct, his heart, and the Dao along the immortal path. In 2015 the book was selected by the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television for its list of outstanding online literary works recommended to readers in the capital.