«Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation», Mo Xiang Tong XiuDead in the first line. 113 chapters ask why

The hero is dead. Everyone is pleased

The novel’s first line announces that its hero is dead and calls this wonderful news. The rest of the prologue is gossip: who killed him, how many people he destroyed, how ungrateful he was. The hero himself never appears in the prologue. All we know of him is what people say.

His name is Wei Wuxian and he is a cultivator: in this world such people fly on swords and put down the restless dead. He took the dark path, learned to command corpses and became known as the Yiling Patriarch. Thirteen years later his soul is summoned into a stranger’s body, and very soon Lan Wangji is at his side, the most correct man in the book.

In her afterword the author names the genre herself: BL, a love story between two men, Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji. But the book does not stand on romance alone. Under the love story lie a detective story and a tragedy, and they are put together more cunningly than you expect of a novel serialised online.

Three flashbacks, to spite the reader

There are two stories in the book, and they take turns. The first happens now and reads like a detective story: Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji find a severed arm, then a pair of legs, then a torso, and work out whose corpse it is and who cut it up. The second happened earlier: how a cheerful fifteen-year-old student became the man whose death is celebrated in the first line.

The past arrives in three big pieces: chapters 13–18, 51–62 and 69–78. That is 28 chapters out of 113 and 31% of all the words, counted in the Russian translation. In her afterword the author admits that readers began dropping the book at the very first flashback, and that she thought of cutting the past into small inserts and decided against it. The three long flashbacks stayed where they were.

The questions show what they are for. The book asks something in one chapter and answers dozens of chapters later, because the answer lies in the other story. In chapter 11 the hero sees whip scars across Lan Wangji’s back and wonders what he was punished for. He finds out in chapter 99.

Three names per person

The hard part of the early chapters is the names. The main characters have three each: a birth name, a courtesy name for everyone else, and a title. The hero is Wei Ying, Wei Wuxian and the Yiling Patriarch, and after his return also Mo Xuanyu, after the body’s owner. In the Russian translation I counted in, the full name Wei Wuxian appears 5,525 times in the 113 chapters, the Yiling Patriarch 109 times, Wei Ying only 52.

That is no accident. A birth name here is either for one’s own people or an insult: the Russian translators explain as much in a note to chapter 10. Hanguang-jun is Lan Wangji’s title, and his birth name is Lan Zhan. Wei Wuxian calls him exactly that, in his first life and in this one, and the name appears 261 times, five times as often as Wei Ying.

You will not remember everyone at first, and that is fine. The hero’s sword, though, you will remember at once: it is called Suibian, which means something like “Whatever”. Its owner went through more than twenty names, liked none of them, and said so aloud. That is what got engraved.

Why he carries no sword

In the memories Wei Wuxian goes everywhere without his sword, and is shamed for it: for a cultivator, coming to a formal gathering unarmed is like coming without formal dress. In chapter 49 someone asks outright why he has no sword. Everyone around is sure it is arrogance.

The answer comes forty chapters later. A golden core is the source of a cultivator’s power. When enemies destroyed the core of Jiang Cheng, the boy he grew up with, Wei Wuxian gave him his own: a healer cut it out of one and put it into the other. Without a core a sword is dead weight. He told no one, Jiang Cheng included. And by the prologue’s rumours it was Jiang Cheng who later led the siege against him.

The whole book works this way: the crowd has its explanation ready at once, and the real one arrives dozens of chapters late. The crowd even has a voice here, Sect Leader Yao, who is named 30 times across eight chapters and always knows who is to blame. When a new villain is found, he is cursed in the very words once used for Wei Wuxian, and the hero notices.

The man who answers “mn”

Lan Wangji grew up in a sect with three thousand rules carved on its Wall of Discipline. While the hero was dead, a thousand more were added. He says little: his “mn” (the Russian translation writes it «мгм») appears 40 times in the book, and in chapter 28 Wei Wuxian grumbles to himself that no other answer can be got out of him.

He acts instead. When everyone turned on Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji carried him off the battlefield and raised his sword against his own side: he wounded thirty-three elders of his own sect. For each of them he took a lash of the discipline whip: thirty-three scars. It is not he who tells this but his brother, in chapter 99.

The love here is written in deeds, not confessions. In chapter 55 Lan Wangji sings in a cave to Wei Wuxian, who is burning with fever. Wei Wuxian asks what the melody is called and does not catch the answer. The name is spoken in the last chapter, the 113th, and the last three chapters bear it as their title. It is made of two characters taken from their two names.

Verdict

Read it if you like a book that does not explain everything at once. It is not a classic: the novel came out online a chapter a day, and the author writes in her afterword that nearly every chapter went up without a draft. But it is built with more care than many books on the syllabus: two timelines, three flashbacks, and answers you wait 88 chapters for.

What gets in the way. It is long: 380,000 words in the Russian translation, more than twice the Russian text of Crime and Punishment. The names blur for the first chapters. And it is a book for adults: there are explicit scenes near the end and in the extra chapters. One point off for the names, and one more because the villain of the first line turned out not to be a villain. I had got myself ready.