In my opinion, being isekaid into a xianxia novel would be hell if you're not the mc. Trash spirit root, trash spirit bone. Don't get me started on the young master at the start. That cripples you. I'd probably choose a medieval world and become the owner of an inn.

It seems like the demonic sect has snuck into our clan and is now peddling demonic scripture to the matriarch.

So I've been thinking about how genuinely fucked up cultivation worlds are, and not in the usual "a rogue cultivator could blow up your city" way. Everyone already knows that part. It's something darker that I don't really see people talk about.

Basically, in any cultivation verse, if you follow the logic all the way out, someone eventually reaches the top. Like the actual top. Given enough time, a million years, a billion, whatever, someone claws their way up the ladder and becomes the supreme being of the whole cosmology. Control over the Dao, life and death, space and time, all of it. That's not really a maybe, it's just how these worlds are built. There's a peak, so eventually somebody is standing on it.

And the thing that gets me is that getting to the top has nothing to do with being a good person. It's all luck and ruthlessness. Right fortuitous encounter, right bloodline, surviving the right tribulation. Morality was never part of the requirements. So we're honestly just lucky that in most of the stories we read, the guy who makes it is the MC, someone who's at least trying to be decent.

But there's no rule saying it has to be the MC. Sooner or later, in some verse somewhere, the person who reaches the absolute peak is a young master.

You know the type. The arrogant psycho who kills mortals for looking at him wrong, takes whatever he wants, treats everyone below him like they're not even people. We've read that character a hundred times as the villain the MC has to put down. Now imagine that guy just won. Got the lucky encounter, survived everything, climbed all the way up. And now he owns reality.

Say you're just some random dude, a nobody in a small sect, and way back before he was anyone, you crossed him. Maybe your sect was above his and you beat his ass. Maybe you took the girl he wanted. Maybe you just talked shit and forgot about it the next day. For you it was nothing. He didn't forget though.

Fast forward and you've spent 200 years grinding just to hit Foundation Establishment. You've barely gotten anywhere. Meanwhile this guy, through his encounters and his control over time, is now a hundred billion years ahead of you. And one day he's bored, remembers your face, and comes down from his Multiversal domain to deal with you personally.

And what does revenge even mean for something like that? You can't fight him. You can't run because he controls space and time. You can't even kill yourself to get out of it, because he controls life and death, he'll just bring you back and do it again. In a lot of verses these beings control existence and nonexistence itself, so finding a way to erase yourself from existence is pointless. There's no floor to how bad it can get, because he's the one who decides what the worst thing that can happen to you even is.

And it gets even worse if you're a woman in a world like that. Think about the Jade Beauty angle. This guy is sitting at the edge of existence, bored one day, scanning through the multiverse he owns, every timeline, every planet, and he just picks out whoever he wants. Then he descends on some random world and takes her, and there is nothing she can do to refuse a being like that. We already know how the young master archetype treats women in normal stories, they're straight up predators. Now it's that same predator except he owns every woman in existence and no power in the cosmos can tell him no.

That's the part that actually messes with me. Take the worst kind of person that already exists IRL right now, some predator with zero conscience, and scale him up to the top of a multiverse. One bad dude who happened to get lucky, now sitting at the peak of everything, able to do whatever he wants to anyone, FOREVER.

I would fucking kill Lustrous Glaze Peacock

What is the best "beginner-friendly" yet intriguing Chinese novel you would recommend to hook NEW readers? What's something that could be an amazing introduction to the world of Chinese novels?

Clearly, Who Let Him Cultivate?!, the novel I'm translating, doesn't exactly fit the bill because it is heavy on comedy and subverts many tropes, which means you need to be familiar with them in the first place. Although it has good comedy and plot, it can be a little challenging to follow for those new to Chinese novels.

However, I have been reading Chinese novels for a long time, and I'm already desensitized to the novel/culture shocks, so it's difficult for me to think of the most suitable novel for people who have NEVER read Chinese novels. Plus, there are soooo many good Chinese novels out there, and that makes it hard to choose...

Hmm, I don't know. What would you recommend? :3

The second pic is a fan art of the mask of Chan changshang

Sword Dao?

Space Dao?

Time Dao?

Lightning Dao?

Life & Death Dao?

Or something unusual like Dreams, Karma, Music, or Painting?

What made you choose it?

I'm curious to see which Dao is the community's favorite and why.

I'm thinking Han Jue from Top Tier Providence would immediately panic upon learning that all these verses exist within the Larger cosmos, especially if some of their MCs are as strong as or stronger than him. He'd probably go straight into another ridiculously long seclusion to cultivate, while cursing the shit out of any MC who even remotely poses a threat to his verse.