I’ve been following the Forge of Destiny / Threads of Destiny forum game for many years now though these days I’m just a reader and rarely participate in voting. I still consider it the best xianxia story I know of. This book is set in that same fantasy world but features stories about other characters other than Ling Qi, the protagonist of the main series. Many of these are Ling Qi’s friends and associates but there are also plenty of those from other times and places. I’ve already read most of these stories before as almost all of them are available online for free but I bought this to support the author and it’s nice to have them in a single volume. I will note that many of the stories don’t really stand on their own but feel more like worldbuilding snippets. Those who aren’t already following the main story might not get much out of this book.

By far, the longest series of stories in this volume and the one is featured on the cover art recounts Gu Xiulan’s journey home to the Golden Fields after her time in the Argent Peak Sect. The trip itself is uneventful but at the borders of the province she runs into Zheng Nan, a scion of the Zheng clan bearing a message for her father. Due to her damaging lightning tribulation, her mother shuns her but her father accepts her as a soldier and takes her on his ranging expedition across their lands. However the routine trip becomes dangerous as the undead are much more active than expected as some unknown threat has emerged deep in the Grave of the Sun. It’s a worthy continuation of Xiulan’s personal story while giving us a look at her home province and their endless struggle against the undead hordes. Placing her in the role of a junior officer commanding a squad is both plausible given her age and level of power and satisfying as we haven’t seen much in the way of serious military action against real threats in the main series. Yet it does mean that the crisis is ultimately resolved by her elders and her own part in it is relatively minor. I do appreciate author yrsillar’s usual style of portraying such high-level conflicts between sovereigns in a more poetic language but it also means that it’s hard to interpret what actually happened.

That the stories tend to leave the reader with many unanswered questions is unfortunately going to be a running theme here. The next most complete story is probably the Snake and the Spider about the courtship between Bai Meizhen and Bao Qingling. I loved this even when I first read it as it’s not only a same sex relationship but Bao Qingling is clearly coded as autistic. This is a big reason why I love this series so much as which other xianxia work would bother exploring such topics? This particular story does end on a satisfactory note while leaving open what happens to the couple in the future. Other stories are mere episodes of the supporting characters from the main series and don’t go anywhere in particular. Fans always love reading more about the romance between Gan Guangli and Su Ling but it really just is a conversation between the two. Some others don’t even make the attempt to be complete stories. The anecdote about Liu Xing, a very minor character, incorporating fireworks into his cultivation is amusing, but it’s not a story. Similarly Treasure Fleet about a sailor in a Jin fleet feels like a prologue to a novel.

That said, every chapter builds the fantastic world yrsillar has created a little more. The Snake and the Fisherman is the founding story of the Bai clan, presented in the style of a myth. Exorcist of Tonghou can be thought as a day in the life of an exorcist working as part of the law enforcement apparatus of a neglected city. King of Explorers is a series of letter detailing the adventures of a Zheng to exotic lands far from the Celestial Empire with cultivation systems that are entirely different. I enjoy reading about this world enough that I’d be hard pressed to point out anything that I actually dislike. Perhaps one such might be Over the Sea, which is a snippet about characters and lands we know very little about. It might have been alright if we got a follow up later about the same characters but we don’t so this chapter just hangs awkwardly in here by itself. More generally, the large number of large chapters and the lack of any introduction would in my opinion make this book unapproachable to anyone not familiar with Ling Qi’s story. I wish yrsillar had written something specifically for this release to serve as an introduction. A glossary wouldn’t go wrong either if this is being sold as a standalone book.

Like many other writers of web fiction, yrsillar’s writing skill slowly improved over the course of the quest and most of this collection was written in the later stages. The prose isn’t anything I would call literary but it is competent and evocative. Since the stories here weren’t part of the original quest, it doesn’t have the leftover artefacts from that format and so read more like ordinary stories. Unfortunately there are still a few mistakes in the text which suggest it could have benefited from a more thorough editing pass. As always, I thoroughly recommend this series to anyone who likes xianxia. It is everything that the genre should be, free of juvenile and misogynist tropes that usually plague it. The characters, institutions and factions are all detailed and act rationally in their respective interests. The only weakness is the author doesn’t actually speak Chinese so the names of the characters sometimes have unfortunate connotations if you assign actual Chinese characters to them. Yet with the help of readers, even this has been turned into a running in-joke. So yeah, I really enjoyed this book even if I’d already most of the stories in here before.