Start / Xianxia / Cultivation / A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality

The genre-defining "mortal cultivator": no cheat, no genius bloodline — just grit, pills, and decades of patience.

Han Li is a mortal boy from a rural village with no spiritual root to speak of. Through a chance encounter he joins a minor sect, but his path is the slow, careful one: rely on pills, formations, and careful escape rather than raw talent. Wang Yu built the template that every "ordinary-protagonist-becomes-immortal" novel follows, and the novel remains one of the highest-rated xianxia ever written. The new English translation (Royal Road / WebNovel 2022-2024) finally lets overseas readers experience this 5-million-word classic without machine-translation pain. Dense but rewarding — read it once and every later xianxia will reference it.