Only I Shall Be Immortal

I. Overview

Only I Shall Be Immortal is a classic xianxia from one of China’s most prolific web authors, built on the oldest promise of the genre: a penniless orphan climbs from nothing to the throne of the immortals. Most cultivation heroes inherit some gift or grudge. Hai Long starts lower than that, a dirt-poor child chopping firewood in the western borderlands, mocked by his only friend for dreaming about immortals at all. The book’s title is his eventual creed, declared over a defeated enemy: above heaven and below earth, only I am immortal.

The opening is grounded and a little tender. Hai Long and his friend Zhang Hao squabble under a tree about whether gods can fly, and the boy’s stubborn longing costs him nothing and gains him everything. When the Lianyun Immortal Sect, the weakest of the seven righteous orders, holds its once-every-five-years recruitment, he arrives as its only beggar-like fifth-generation disciple. The early chapters follow a scrappy underdog learning cultivation through pranks, beatings, and a stubborn refusal to quit, and the romance with the peerless Piaomiao takes root early and never lets go.

The world widens from one mountain sect to the full Chinese pantheon. Hai Long moves through the immortal realm, the underworld, the Buddhist and demon worlds, and the households of legendary figures like Zhenyuan Daxian and Sun Wukong. He masters the Chaos path, survives tribulations that shatter his very core and rebuild him stronger, and gathers a circle of wives and sworn kin. The scope is mythic, yet the story keeps returning to personal loyalty and the one love he refuses to lose.

The book’s character is “bright and devoted.” Hai Long is less a brooding genius than a loyal, occasionally silly man who fights for the people he loves and the sect that took him in. Romance sits at the center, not the margins, and the emotional engine is his bond with Piaomiao and his redemption of the fallen Tianqin. What lingers is the warm, old-fashioned satisfaction of watching a nobody earn a place among gods without ever forgetting where he started.

II. Highlights

The beggar at the sect gate

Hai Long shows up to the great recruitment day as the sole disciple dressed in rags, and the sect that takes him is itself the laughingstock of the righteous world. The scene sets the whole underdog contract: he will out-climb everyone who looked down on him, starting from the lowest bench.

My wife, Piaomiao

When Hai Long claims Piaomiao as his wife, it reads less as a boast than as a vow the book spends volumes defending. Their bond survives tribulations, separation, and her own ascension, and it gives the power fantasy a heart most xianxia leave cold.

Tianqin falls to demons

The woman close to Hai Long is seized by dark power and turned against everything she loved. Her fall and his refusal to abandon her, even when she is the enemy, is the story’s sharpest emotional turn and its best argument that loyalty outweighs purity.

The Chaos King’s stand

Late in the book, Hai Long wields fused fire and water Chaos energy to pin an entire host of sacred beasts without killing them, proving his strength and his restraint at once. The moment shows the hero at full power yet still teaching, not merely conquering.