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[nenjin]

This is on my wishlist but I feel like it's going to take Dwarf Fortress levels of focus to play. (i.e. pushing aside everything else I'm playing.)

[Micro102]

Tales of demons and gods is one of the few "manga" (the different words like manhua is based off the language, like Korean or Chinese, but I'm just going to stick with manga) that I really look forwards to constantly reading. The problem is that all these various Xianxia comics differ in how the worlds works, and don't really match up with the game, or each other. I know that at least some of them will feel pretty close to this game though.

[AlStar]

I mostly listen to audiobooks. There's two books in this genre that I've listened to fairly recently that were pretty good, and didn't involve protagonists that kick puppies and drown kittens to up their Ki.

Street Cultivation by Sarah Lin
(Description Blurbs from Amazon)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In the modern world, qi is money.

The days of traveling martial artists and mountaintop masters are over. Power is controlled by corporations, modernized martial arts sects, and governments. Those at the bottom of society struggle as second class citizens in a world in which power is a commodity.

Rick is a young fighter in this world. He doesn't dream of immortality or becoming the strongest, just of building a better life for himself and his sister, who suffers from a spiritual illness. Unfortunately, life isn't that easy...

Unsouled by Will Wight

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Sacred artists follow a thousand Paths to power, using their souls to control the forces of the natural world.

Lindon is Unsouled, forbidden to learn the sacred arts of his clan.

I enjoyed both, although if I had to recommend one over the other, I'd probably go with Street Cultivation, since it's got a good length to it (13 hrs and 38 mins) and has a satisfying arc to the story. Unsouled is only 8 hrs and 45 mins, which is on the short side for my spent credit, and it heavily encourages you to keep going with the (similarly short) sequels.

[Micro102]

I have heard that the light novels have shitty main characters, but the manga versions tend to remove those shitty parts. Plus a picture is worth a thousand words and it will take far less time to read the manga and get the same story.

And Street Cultivation reminds me of another one of my favorites, "Cultivation Chat Group".

[EuchreJack]

So, anyone up for a Let's Play?  Pictures + Text?

Some "recommendations" by the game.  I liked Birth of the Demonic Sword.

[Vector]

@Sirus: I think something else to think about is that xianxia + wuxia play a role fundamentally like the western fantasy genre. Most of western fantasy novels partake from a few key ingredients:

a. Tension between old pagan religion and centralized religion (reskinned Christianity)
b. Someone of low or otherwise unusual birth saves the realm
c. Fracturing within and without (e.g. invaders from beyond the ocean cause trouble at the same time as a famine)
d. Magicks

To an extent, in a certain sense, all of those books are exactly the same. They are about the crises of Christianity and what Europe lost in the process of gaining ability in science.

So what you might not notice is that there are old-old novels with xianxia or fantasy elements (Journey to the West, Mallory's King Arthur) but most modern novels with fantasy elements will partake. For example, Dragonball has significant Xianxia elements, because Dragonball draws from the "Ur" xianxia story as its source material. Especially old-school Dragonball has scenes with "drink the magic water to become stronger," for example.

My point is: my recommendation would be to read not a book designated specifically as xianxia. This would be like telling someone just jumping to read . . . IDK, whatever you think the "king" western fantasy book is. Maybe Lord of the Rings? It has a good reputation but believe you me it isn't easy to read without the entire rest of the cultural context. "Why do we keep talking about this guy's lineage? The language in this book sounds weird . . ." Let alone understanding the context of what each of the characters is supposed to represent. There's just too much baggage to decode it for a first-time reader.

To be clear: I personally no longer consider myself a fan of the fantasy genre for similar reasons to what has been cited about xianxia. I love certain elements of the genre, and do read it some, but I don't read piles and piles of it as I do e.g. science fiction or other forms of speculative fiction.

So the point is, I think you should read a xianxia book with other enjoyable elements that you find easier to wrap your mind around. I really liked the novella by Zen Cho, The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water. It has xianxia elements without screaming "I am a Book About Cultivation!!!"

[Sirus]

Funnily enough I just read the Lord of the Rings for the first time not too long ago, and I was in fact wondering why Tolkien spent so much time on ancestors and mythical figures and so on, particularly when they had no real relevance to whatever was going on in the story. Also wondering about other things, but that's outside the scope of this thread

Alright, fair enough. Xianxia/wuxia are basically Chinese Fantasy Novels, and in a lot of cases the stories will assume that the reader is familiar enough with the cultural background to understand why they're doing things the way they do. That makes sense.

As a side note: thanks to everyone leaving suggestions. I have been looking at them! There's just a lot to look at and never enough time in the day.

[nenjin]

Funnily enough I just read the Lord of the Rings for the first time not too long ago, and I was in fact wondering why Tolkien spent so much time on ancestors and mythical figures and so on, particularly when they had no real relevance to whatever was going on in the story. Also wondering about other things, but that's outside the scope of this thread

There is vastly more to Middle Earth than the Hobbit and LotR. There's several ages of the world prior to those books which set up all the things the books are about.

It just doesn't make for very engrossing reading unless you enjoy the equivalent of a dry history text. (See: The Silmarillion.)

[Frumple]

Alright, fair enough. Xianxia/wuxia are basically Chinese Fantasy Novels, and in a lot of cases the stories will assume that the reader is familiar enough with the cultural background to understand why they're doing things the way they do. That makes sense.

It's probably easier to think of them as Martial Arts/Punch Magic Fantasy rather than chinese specifically, at this point -- the genre's spread out a bit, and while a lot of it still originates from china and leans heavily on its cultural trappings, a fair bit doesn't, too. There's also lots of Chinese fantasy works that are nothing like xianxia or wuxia, heh.

So far as recommendations go, in no particular order the ones I've RRS'd from Royal Road trawls are
Molting the Mortal Coil
Beware of Chicken
The Path of Ascension (Sorta'; it's a litrpg running off a xianxia engine)
Cultivation Anomaly
Fighting to be Kind in a Cultivation World
Breaker of Horizons
Long Fang - Cultivator vs System (Again sorta', it's a xianxia critter transposed into a litrpg setting)

Other stuff I can remember... I liked 40 Millenniums of Cultivation, though it has its problems, especially later on. If the name isn't hint enough, it's basically someone doing a Warhammer 40k inspired sci-fi xianxia deal.

Haven't gotten around to reading through it again (last time I did, it wasn't finished being translated into english), and it's a subtly different genre (xuanhuan instead of xianxia, so basically folklore-y fantasy instead of punch magic, this one with a mystery tilt), but what I had read of Lord of the Mysteries was super solid.

Think I remember liking World of Cultivation quite a lot... title's kinda' generic, so you'd know it by the zombie face.

Pretty sure lots of folks would recommend Library of Heaven's Path, though from what I remember it's another one of those "Starts pretty interesting, gets less so as it goes" deals.

I'd second Desolate Era, heh.

There's... well, bunches more, many I'm forgetting. Some good, plenty kinda' bad. If you ever see someone starting to talk about pulling up roots, you'd probably be best served just ditching it before the genocide starts... if you're not really into people throwing geographic features at each other, a lot of the trappings common to punch magic fantasy are goddamn odious, heh.

If you want legit access to english ones, Royal Road has a pile, and big bonus there over the more traditional sources is many of them tend to be, well... shorter. Which can be nice for testing the waters, so to speak. One thing about xianxia/wuxia fiction is it's not uncommon for them to go long, like holy shit long. That lord of the mysteries mentioned clocks in at 1400 chapters on completion, coming up on something like 2.7 million words. 40M isn't even done and it's up to 2700 (it's something like 10 million words, and I didn't accidentally add a 0).

[Aoi]

One thing about xianxia/wuxia fiction is it's not uncommon for them to go long, like holy shit long. That lord of the mysteries mentioned clocks in at 1400 chapters on completion, coming up on something like 2.7 million words. 40M isn't even done and it's up to 2700 (it's something like 10 million words, and I didn't accidentally add a 0).

A point of reference:

Word counts of the books in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series:
The Hobbit – 95,356 words.
The Fellowship of the Ring – 187,790 words.
The Two Towers – 156,198 words.
The Return of the King – 137,115 words.
The entire Lord of the Rings series (including The Hobbit) – 576,459 words.

[EuchreJack]

Good point, but I think the difference is that most fantasy novels aren't trying to be the Lord of the Rings. At least not in one book.

[Frumple]

Eh... from what I understand, a decent chunk of what's going on there is that a fair amount of the monetization options surrounding the common modern platforms for xianxia stuff is based somewhat on word count. Add on that the format in question makes pumping out chapters easy (they're largely web based nowadays, so there's no need for discrete publishing or formatting anything as a "book") and, y'know. Word count go brrrrr.

There's other stuff going on there, too, but imagine for a moment if tolkien could have made an episodic webnovel of the Silmarillion instead of actually having to make some kind of deal with publishers to get it on the market. If he could have just chucked out a worldbuilding myth thing every couple months for years/decades and it would have been a viable production strategy that would have seen wide availability. Maybe it would have been the same size, maybe it would have ended up thick enough to sink a small ship if printed out.

[EuchreJack]

maybe it would have ended up thick enough to sink a small ship if printed out.

My guess is that one would have happened.

[Akura]

They just released a sizable update, along with a new DLC: The Immortal Tales of Wudang. ~$4 gets you a pretty sizable chunk of extra content, including the possibility of getting a giant tortoise+snake pet that apparently poops spirit stones.

[sephiroth]

Can we grow our own spirit dew? I'm trying to grew normal grass using a field on a patch of spirit soil, but no luck so far.