Against the Heavens: Leveling Up

Against the Heavens: Leveling Up is an Eastern fantasy novel by the web writer Wild Cabbage, serialized on Qidian Chinese Network starting July 9, 2012. The story begins twelve years earlier: Xin Lang, the most gifted alchemist of the Great Xia Dynasty, is reborn twelve years before he and his beloved Hongxiu die for love together. At this point he is still an alchemy student of low cultivation and humble standing. To gain the power to protect his beloved before the tragedy repeats, he resolutely abandons alchemy for martial arts, turning to a path he has never been good at. Yet Xin Lang is born with a bodily defect, and martial arts academies reject him without mercy, leaving his path as a martial cultivator all but cut off. Just as he struggles forward, an all-purpose leveling device falls from the sky and completely changes his fate: by completing daily quests, side quests, and main quests, he gains experience, raises his level, and unlocks functions such as storage space and a martial arts and technique zone; he can even upgrade items—low-grade spirit herbs, ordinary weapons, and common pets can all be upgraded into thousand-year spirit herbs, immortal artifacts, and divine beasts. As his power surges, Xin Lang gradually discovers that he carries the world-rejected "Heaven-Defying Severed Meridians." He befriends companions such as Gu Ge and Qian Baidu, breaks through again and again in challenges and conflicts, faces off directly against forces such as the Eternal Life Sect, and grows step by step into a mighty being able to commune with the source of the Nine Heavens, with the final truth pointing to the secret of his own identity. The book is driven by "leveling up, fighting monsters, and challenging foes above one's tier," interspersed with alchemy, martial techniques, auctions, and academy challenges; it is a fast-paced, straightforwardly plotted leveling fantasy, and the author brought the story to a satisfying close at the end due to health reasons.