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Trope: xianxia-style training and realms

Cultivation series

Series
2
Complete
1
Audio
532 h 24 m

Cultivation is the xianxia-style corner of progression fantasy: training, realms and breakthroughs instead of stat screens. Audible subtitles each Beware of Chicken book "A Xianxia Cultivation Novel", and Podium calls book 1 a laugh-out-loud, slice-of-life martial-arts fantasy, which shows how far the label stretches beyond grim training arcs.

Royal Road has a Cultivation tag that authors set themselves. Of the 15 series we opened there on October 11, 2026, five carried it: Defiance of the Fall, The Path of Ascension, Heretical Fishing, Sky Pride and Beware of Chicken. Only Beware of Chicken carried it without a LitRPG or Progression tag next to it, and three of the five mix it with LitRPG stats, so a cultivation story can still show you numbers.

This page covers series written in English for the US market, mostly started as web serials. Translated Chinese web novels are a different shelf and are not in our database.

Finished

Complete series (1)

In progress

Still coming out (1)

Sources

How we checked this

Source: our own guides, quoted under each series; a series is listed only when a published guide says it in words, never from memory. Status, book count and audiobook hours come from each series' source table (publisher, Amazon and Audible pages), latest check .

This page joins search results once 6 series with a guide carry the tag and its introduction has at least 150 words.

Pick by more than one trope in What to read next, or see LitRPG, Progression fantasy.