Shuchong Kenshu
Online literature and its media-convergent forms (such as animation, film and television, and games adapted from web novels) are undoubtedly among the most important cultural phenomena of the new century. The question is what role online literature, as an important form of the “new popular literature and art,” plays in contemporary cultural life—and, more to the point, what demand-driven needs it meets in the contemporary cultural life in which we live. Let us take A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality (Fanren Xiuxian Zhuan) as our case for analysis.
1. The Cultural Phenomenon of A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality
I chose A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality because it genuinely deserves analysis. First, it founded an important genre of online literature: “the mortal who becomes an immortal”—stories of an ordinary person becoming an immortal. Second, its audience is vast. The novel began serialization on Qidian Chinese Network in 2008 and its main part was completed in 2013, totaling more than 7.6 million characters and receiving over 15.8 million recommendation votes to date. In 2017 the sequel, A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality: The Immortal World Arc, began updating on Qidian, finishing in 2020 at more than 4.3 million characters and receiving over 30 million recommendation votes to date. An online game of the same name launched in 2011; an animated series of the same name has been streaming on the video site Bilibili since 2020, with total views now exceeding 4.7 billion; and a 30-episode web drama of the same name, released on the long-form video platform Youku in July 2025, also set off a viewing craze, with 1.5 billion cumulative effective views, an average of 50 million per episode. In addition, there are several audiobook versions on the audio platform Ximalaya, one of which has been played more than 1.8 billion times.
We can see that A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality was first created as online literature and was then adapted into audiobooks, animation, a web drama, and an online game (a console game is in development). Through this cross-media movement, the story has remained popular in contemporary Chinese mass culture for nearly twenty years. I once borrowed Henry Jenkins's concept of “convergence culture” to explain the rapid conversion, transformation, and circulation of contemporary literature across different media. “Convergence literature” means that we need to understand literature within a comprehensive view of multiple converging media, because different media and their users jointly shape how literature is received and understood. A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality is exactly such “convergence literature”: reading, listening to, watching, and playing it requires moving across text, sound, animation, web drama, games, and other media forms.
Through media convergence, A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality has developed two new features. First, every successful act of media convergence is in fact a process of “refinement into a premium work.” During its online serialization, the high-frequency updating mechanism of web fiction left the author no time to polish plot and characters, so web novels as a whole are rather rough. The animated series, by contrast, not only remains faithful to the basic settings of the original but also polishes details and characters, making the plot tight and well connected and the characterization more nuanced; it could be said to surpass the original and has become a “premium domestic creation” (Bilibili uses the term “domestic creation” to describe A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality as a benchmark of “Chinese-made animation”). The web drama, aimed at a more diverse audience and constrained by the limited capacity of the current TV-series format for long stories, loses some fidelity to the original, but its overall quality is still good—another approach to “refinement.” Through these two media conversions, A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality has gradually been “refined into a premium work.” This process clearly differs from the canonization of traditional literature. A traditional literary classic has its quality fixed by its original author the moment it appears, and its later canonization mainly concerns evaluation and influence; online literature, by contrast, follows the route of “refinement.”
A web-fiction text first creates the “basic model” of a story, character setup, genre, and selling points. Different forms of adaptation and media conversion then take part, in different ways, in refining the quality and level of the work—that is, upgrading the “basic model” into various “enhanced models” (though there are also many failed upgrades). While expanding online literature into “online literature and art” compatible with all kinds of media, this also raises the aesthetic tone and cultural quality of the story's content.
Second, perhaps precisely because of this, the aim of the “refinement” route is not to make online literature a “classic” but to make it an IP (intellectual property). Through continuous media convergence and quality improvement, the story content of A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality has become an asset that can be continually invested in, grown in value, and circulated—that is, an IP, around which advertising revenue and merchandise profits flow endlessly. Becoming an IP rather than becoming a classic seems to have become an increasingly common phenomenon in contemporary “convergence literature.”
2. A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality Emphasizes the “Mortal” Nature of Its Hero, Han Li
In terms of content, the main genre feature of “the mortal who becomes an immortal,” founded by A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality, is that it tells the story of an ordinary person (a mortal) who, through arduous struggle, finally achieves extraordinary success. A typical “mortal becomes immortal” story has the following five features:
First, the protagonist's innate endowments are utterly ordinary in every respect—he is the most ordinary of mortals. Second, the world structure is extremely rigorous, the hierarchy especially strict, and it is particularly close to real society, with tight logic. Third, although there are all kinds of lucky breaks, the protagonist's achievements are won through struggle; the growth of his strength and his accomplishments are always the result of hard work. Fourth, the story is still full of countless regrets: though the protagonist realizes his original dream, what he gains is a life with flaws. Fifth, the protagonist's character clearly grows, and he ultimately becomes a good person adapted to the law of the jungle.
As the pioneering work of the genre, A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality fits these features perfectly. Its protagonist, Han Li, comes from the bottom of society, is ordinary-looking, and has mediocre aptitude; he was destined never to get far in a cultivation world where strength is everything, yet through his own hard struggle, rigorous caution, and meticulous thinking he finally becomes one of the strongest. As far as the core of the “mortal becomes immortal” story is concerned, it is no different from, and no newer than, a story of traditional realism. Placed within the genre narratives of online literature, however, it has its novelty.
Around 2008, the character and story type popular in web fiction was what was jokingly called “Long Aotian.” “Long Aotian” refers to a type of protagonist who is usually handsome, from an illustrious family, and supremely gifted, who easily stands out and crushes everyone; it was extremely popular in early online literature. By contrast, the “mortal becomes immortal” of A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality goes entirely the opposite way. It also differs from the “good-for-nothing” (feichai) genre founded a little later by the web novel Battle Through the Heavens (Doupo Cangqiong, by Tiancan Tudou), which usually refers to a protagonist of extremely poor aptitude who receives an unexpected, enormous stroke of fortune and so can outshine all rivals without much effort. Unlike the Long Aotian protagonist who gains without labor, and unlike the “good-for-nothing” genre whose main source of pleasure is “the nobody's comeback” and “playing the pig to eat the tiger,” the “mortal becomes immortal” protagonist must go through hard effort and enormous sacrifice to achieve what he deserves. This process seems to be something the great majority of people can genuinely feel, and so it is more relatable. We can see that, compared with similar novels, “mortal becomes immortal” sets itself apart by introducing the basic elements of traditional realism into highly fantastical web fiction and balancing them carefully; the success of A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality owes much to this.
In nature, A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality is somewhat like the realist novel Ordinary World (Pingfan de Shijie), winner of the Mao Dun Literature Prize. Both tell the story of an ordinary person, a mortal, who struggles. In fact, the title Lu Yao originally gave the first part of Ordinary World was “The Road of an Ordinary Person,” which, translated into the rhetorical system of A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality, becomes “a mortal's road to immortality.” The ordinary person or mortal is the literary subject that both Lu Yao's plain realism and “mortal becomes immortal” hope to shape. As we know, both works are widely loved by the public, which shows that both are rooted in popular appeal.
Of course, the two also differ markedly. First, A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality is a highly fantastical story (“cultivating immortality”), while Ordinary World depicts real life. Most importantly, “the road of an ordinary person” is a story of moral growth, while “a mortal's road to immortality” is a story of growth in ability. In Ordinary World, the life paths of both Sun Shaoping and Sun Shao'an are essentially a process of continual tempering of character and moral fulfillment. Sun Shaoping in particular struggles through hardship less for his personal fate than for the honing of his soul, seeking spiritual nobility and the realization of his ideals. By comparison, Han Li in A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality has fewer moral pursuits and burdens. Some call him a “Machiavellian,” describing his character as “worldly-wise” and “self-centered,” holding a belief in “cultivation individualism,” manifested as solipsistic “self-interest,” or a “transactional personality.” These descriptions have some merit, but I prefer to call it a “workplace personality.”
3. The “Workplace Personality” of Han Li, Hero of A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality
A journalist who interviewed the original author, Wangyu, noted: “In the world of A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality, the protagonist ‘Old Devil Han’ is cautious in thought and meticulous in action, with a modern way of thinking; urban readers identify with him strongly, and some readers even call it ‘a novel of workplace scheming.’ This is also related to Wangyu's own experience: at the time he had just entered the workforce, felt a stranger to society, and brought the cautious mindset he used in dealing with colleagues and bosses into the novel.”
Han Li's character design is linked to the author's workplace experience. Moreover, the “workplace personality” does not exclude the involvement of emotion and morality; rather, it holds moral principles as lower in priority than the principle of self-interest. When self-interest is fully satisfied or at least not harmed, Han Li's actions also show moral color. The most obvious example is that after Han Li forms his Nascent Soul (a high realm in the cultivation system) and has sufficient power to protect himself and to attack, he immediately keeps his promise and avenges a friend who had been “insulted and injured.” In this sense, Han Li's “workplace personality” is really a social character, a collective personality formed by the prevailing labor and working conditions of our time. It is neither immoral nor purely self-interested; it simply places moral practice within an everyday world that revolves around the workplace. Seen this way, Han Li's road to immortality can be understood as “the road of a working professional.”
Intuitively, compared with Sun Shaoping's romantic personality and “the road of an ordinary person,” Han Li's “workplace personality” and “road of a working professional” feel more realistic—or, one might say, more “mortal.” The reason for this intuition, of course, is that our imagination and understanding of what counts as “reality” and “a realistic individual” have changed dramatically; we have very different experiences of, and answers to, the question of “what makes someone realistic or mortal.” Indeed, in Sun Shaoping's era, literature could still imagine a romantic subject detached from real labor conditions and working environments, or at least locate the real subject in a concept of labor laden with values. The era in which Han Li was created is exactly the opposite: the new professional middle class, or the “wage worker,” has become the dominant way of imagining and locating the real individual. Hence the “workplace personality” seems more realistic.
4. In A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality, Han Li Is Held Firmly in Society's Hierarchical Structure
A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality strikes at the core of reality in highly fantastical form. How does it do this? Besides designing the protagonist as a “mortal” or “working professional” who closely fits present-day reality, another important reason lies in the hierarchical structure of the fantasy world's society. The novel has a clear and explicit absolute hierarchy, ranked strictly by cultivation power (from low to high: Qi Refining, Foundation Establishment (laying the foundation), Core Formation, Nascent Soul, Deity Transformation, and so on). Unless deliberately concealed, anyone in the structure can clearly sense the power level of others, as if they had been tagged with category labels; and, except for the protagonist, higher-level cultivators can usually crush lower-level ones with ease.
In fact, whether in low fantasy or high fantasy, the absolute hierarchy is a basic element of many web novels. As a basic world structure, combined with the “grinding and leveling up” model of video games, the absolute hierarchy has given rise to what is called the “leveling-up genre.” Among all the schools of web fiction, leveling-up novels have the most readers, the widest influence, and the largest number of works; one could even say the leveling-up genre is the mainstream of male-oriented web genre fiction. In essence, rather than telling of a protagonist who keeps leveling up, the leveling-up genre keeps confirming the permanence and naturalness of the hierarchy. In all web novels with a leveling-up flavor, whoever the hero is and however he acts, the rigid hierarchy is an unchanging presence, and the hero is forever defined and bounded by it. So rather than a story about people, the leveling-up genre is a story about hierarchy.
The story of A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality is also of the leveling-up genre. Compared with other kinds of leveling-up stories (such as “Long Aotian” and the “good-for-nothing” genre), the “mortal becomes immortal” kind is perhaps the most thoroughgoing. In the novel, Han Li is a cultivator completely constrained by the hierarchy. This constraint means not only that he follows the basic rules of the hierarchy more thoroughly than the typical leveling-up hero, but also that his personality (cautious, careful, anxious) and his emotions (reserved, low in desire) are filtered and shaped by the hierarchy, making Han Li thoroughly “a man within the structure.”
5. Han Li's Symptomatic Traits Become a Means of Self-Protection
In the cruel and brutal world of cultivators, too many cultivators, for the sake of gain (whether techniques, cultivation, elixirs, or extended life), set many traps and stop at nothing. For example, when Han Li first entered a sect to cultivate, he was very nearly body-seized by his own master. Again, when Yellow Maple Valley was about to be destroyed by the Ghost Spirit Sect, Patriarch Linghu, a mid-stage Nascent Soul cultivator, could disregard the lives of all the sect's disciples, abandon defense and resistance, and even sell out a disciple—Han Li—in exchange for his own path to longevity. In such a hostile environment, Han Li, with nothing to rely on, had to stay alert at all times, which brings out his most symptomatic side: even when faced with the most basic love, he would rather make concessions and sacrifices. When Han Li's cultivation was low and he was at the bottom, in order not to be drawn by love into others' troubles and become unable to protect himself, he always coldly refused or cautiously kept his distance from romance (for example, with Mo Caihuan, whom he met early in his cultivation, and Ziling, whom he met in the middle period). Even when he unintentionally became entangled emotionally, it was out of his control or transactional in nature (as in his relationship with Nangong Wan). Only when his cultivation reached great attainment and he rose to the top did he, reluctantly, develop normal emotional needs and accept emotional relationships (such as accepting Mu Peiling and seeking out Nangong Wan). One could say that Han Li's emotional needs and their intensity are entirely governed by the hierarchy of the cultivation world. By contrast, the “Long Aotian” and “good-for-nothing” genres often use a “golden finger” (an extraordinary ability, item, knowledge, or opportunity that the hero happens to obtain early on) to let the hero do as he pleases without being held back.
There is no doubt that A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality has become a representative work of fiction about cultivating the Tao and cultivating immortality. At its core, the protagonist Han Li has been accepted and embraced by the public; his characterization breaks with the traditional “child of destiny” formula and, from a “mortal” perspective, presents a real and complex philosophy of survival for a cultivator. In fact, the hard growth of “Han Li the mortal” proves that although his origins were ordinary, the course and outcome of his life were anything but mediocre. Does this not answer to, and mirror, the inner spiritual needs of the great majority of us?