Xuanhuan

Xuanhuan is a Chinese fantasy genre rooted in, but not limited to, Chinese culture and mythology; the name is often translated as "Eastern fantasy". It is often set in a fantasy world, and the stories include many Western fantasy elements alongside the Chinese ones. Recurring features include coming-of-age stories, martial arts and romance, a Heaven Realm and Demon Realm duality in which the Demon Realm is not purely villainous, and self-cultivation through sects or masters, with kalpa-inspired ordeals such as surviving thunderbolts marking transformations.

Its scale is enormous: Qidian alone hosted over 700,000 xuanhuan works as of 2025, which makes it one of the largest explicitly tagged genre shelves a serial writer can aim at. For the realm-and-sect machinery it shares, see cultivation and the guide to writing cultivation fiction.