Wang Lin starts with nothing. Not talent, not backing, not the spiritual roots the system demands. What he has is stubbornness so absolute it borders on the inhuman, and a memory long enough to make every slight permanent. Renegade Immortal, Er Gen's foundational xianxia web novel and its donghua adaptation, built its audience on a simple, devastating promise: this underdog will not soften. He will not forgive. He will climb every stage of the cultivation ladder through sheer grinding will, and the people who dismissed him will eventually understand exactly what they lost. The series sits at the darker, lonelier end of xianxia, closer to tragedy than triumph. Wang Lin's victories rarely feel clean. Power costs relationships; immortality costs humanity. If that tension, between what a person must become to survive a brutal world and what they sacrifice to do it, is what pulls you back episode after episode, then you already know exactly what you are looking for in everything else you watch, read, and play.
If You Love the Ruthless Underdog Arc: Donghua and Anime to Watch Next
Animated series built on the same spine: a scorned protagonist who outlasts every opponent through will alone.
Lone Climbers: Films About Men Who Refuse to Stay Down
Movies that share Renegade Immortal's obsession with solitary ascent, personal cost, and the price of becoming exceptional.
Games for Players Who Want to Earn Every Power Level
Games where progression is a long, demanding climb and the satisfaction is cumulative, not handed to you.
Er Gen Writes the Only Xianxia Protagonists Who Actually Lose Things
Most xianxia web novels treat setbacks as temporary inconveniences. The protagonist loses a fight, retreats, cultivates, and returns stronger, with the trauma left offscreen. Er Gen's characters carry their losses forward. Wang Lin does not recover his childhood warmth. He does not rebuild the relationships the path destroys. What makes Renegade Immortal remarkable is that it refuses to let power fix personality. The colder Wang Lin becomes, the more isolated his victories feel, and Er Gen never pretends otherwise. That honesty is what separates his work from the genre's more optimistic competitors.
The Cultivation Genre Is Essentially a Sports Drama in Fantasy Clothing
Strip away the immortals and spirit stones and what you have is a story about a person with below-average starting ability who outworks everyone around them. The stages of cultivation map almost exactly onto athletic competition: training arcs, ranking tournaments, rivals who serve as mirrors, and coaches who appear just long enough to be lost. Renegade Immortal fans who have never watched a sports anime are missing their closest emotional relatives. The King's Avatar, Haikyuu, and Ping Pong the Animation all operate on the same engine: talent is a ceiling, not a floor, and the people who ignore that tend to win.
Elden Ring Is the Closest a Game Has Come to Capturing the Cultivation Feeling
Elden Ring does not have cultivation mechanics. It has no spirit roots or pill furnaces. What it has is the specific sensation of entering a region that is clearly designed to kill you, dying repeatedly until the patterns become readable, and then moving through that same space with a fluency that feels earned rather than granted. That is the emotional core of every good xianxia arc. The loneliness of the Lands Between, the absence of any guiding hand, and the way power accumulates through accumulated failure rather than story-given gifts: these are the same satisfactions Renegade Immortal delivers chapter by chapter.
Reverend Insanity Is What Renegade Immortal Looks Like Without the Guardrails
Reverend Insanity is banned in China and unavailable on major platforms, which has only amplified its reputation as the genre's true extremity. Where Wang Lin retains a thread of humanity, Fang Yuan in Reverend Insanity is an explicit sociopath, pursuing immortality with a clarity that removes all ambiguity about what cultivation really demands. Reading it after Renegade Immortal is instructive: it reveals how much Er Gen actually softens his protagonist compared to what the genre's internal logic implies. Fans who want to see the premise taken to its coldest conclusion will find it here.
Er Gen's Universe: A Reading Order for the Committed
- 2006Xian Ni (Renegade Immortal) begins serialization on Qidian, introducing Wang Lin and Er Gen's signature cold-protagonist style.
- 2011I Shall Seal the Heavens begins. Er Gen's second major work, widely considered his most emotionally complete novel.
- 2015Pursuit of the Truth serializes. More intimate in scale than his earlier epics, focused on identity and inherited trauma.
- 2016A Will Eternal begins. Er Gen's most accessible entry point: lighter in tone, still anchored in the same themes of will overcoming aptitude.
- 2018The Renegade Immortal donghua adaptation premieres, bringing Wang Lin's early arcs to animation for the first time. Renegade Immortal
- 2020Swallowed Star (a non-Er Gen xianxia adjacent series) premieres on Bilibili, signaling the mainstreaming of the long-form cultivation donghua format. Swallowed Star
- 2022Renegade Immortal continues airing new seasons, building one of the more sustained animated adaptations of the early web-novel xianxia wave. Renegade Immortal
The whole genre asks one question: what would you give up to become unbeatable? Er Gen is the only author who insists you answer it honestly.CrossBinge