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Three Hundred Years of Longing: Bu Jian Shang Xian San Bai Nian
(aka: Three Hundred Years Of Longing)

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Three Hundred Years of Longing: Bu Jian Shang Xian San Bai Nian (Chinese: 不见上仙三百年) is a xianxia and danmei novel by Mu Su Li. Originally written in 2022 as a webnovel on the JJWXC site, it's the third entry of a thematic trilogy set in the same universe as Mu Su Li's earlier novels Copper Coins: Tong Qian Kan Shi and Panguan but is otherwise its own story.

Wu Xingxue wakes up to find himself in chains and with blood on his hands after having just slaughtered dozens of demons with his bare hands. He quickly learns that he's no longer the ordinary nobleman he remembers himself as being before, but an archfiend hated and feared by everyone else who committed such a massive number of foul deeds and murders – including the destruction of Heaven and nearly all the immortals living in it – that he was chained inside the inescapable prison of the Northern Domain of Tealspire for twenty years.

Wu Xingxue, freed from this prison by his demon subordinates, must continue to act like he really is the evil demonic leader everyone believes him to be as he tries to figure out how he got into this situation, why the original Wu Xingxue became this kind of fiend, and why Xiao Fuxuan, the heavenly immortal he accidentally woke up too, seems to not hate him and also know more about him than he's letting on.

Along the way, Wu Xingxue discovers that the web of secrets he's entangled in is far bigger than he could ever have imagined and involves fallen immortals, sympathetic monsters, time travel gone wrong, a dark tragedy between a master and his disciple, and a love story lasting over three hundred years.

This novel has been adapted into a manhua and audio drama, and was licensed by Seven Seas Entertainment for a four-volume English publication starting in late 2025.


Three Hundred Years of Longing: Bu Jian Shang Xian San Bai Nian provides examples of:

  • Alas, Poor Villain: Almost all the antagonists get a lengthy sequence just before they die where we see their backstory and how they started out as good people before their grief or human flaws led to them slipping into evil, eliciting a measure of sympathy for them even with the unforgivable deeds they committed.
    • Hua Xin is probably the biggest example of this; his death coming right after his discovery that his disciple Yunhai, the person he'd committed so many evil deeds to try to save, would have hated the kind of person he's become and his spirit being so completely broken by this that he lets an Alternate Universe version of Yunhai kill him is genuinely sad and moving.
  • Balance Between Good and Evil: The heavenly law makes sure there's a balance between the power of the heavenly immortals and the power of the demons in the mortal world. Deconstructed; it turns out that there doesn't need to be a balance between good and evil like this and the heavenly law's enforcement of it is meant to show how it's really a selfish and uncaring force that sees nothing wrong with making as much demons and strife appear in the human world as possible so that it can keep on being as powerful and long-lived as the evil it 'balances' out.
  • Crapsack World: The world Wu Xingxue wakes up in is in a grim state, with all the immortals save for Xiao Fuxuan being dead and the humans being increasingly helpless to hold back the encroaching demons.
  • Dating Catwoman: In spite of Wu Xingxue being a demon with a terrible reputation and Xiao Fuxuan being a heavenly immortal whose job is to purge demons, it soon becomes clear that the two of them were in a Secret Relationship even though the current Wu Xingxue has no idea how this happened.
  • Deconstructed Character Archetype: The common danmei archetypes of an immortal master and his disciple who are deeply devoted to each other even beyond death, which have been portrayed positively in some of Mu Su Li's other works, are given a darker than usual portrayal in this work. Hua Xin and Yunhai's deep affection for each other causes both of them to be so utterly incapable of letting go of each other that they're willing to commit heinous deeds and let numerous innocent people die just to be able to see the other person again, all of which almost causes The End of the World as We Know It.
  • Demonic Possession: Demons are capable of possessing humans and forcing them to do their bidding. If they possess a human for long enough, the human's soul will be eroded away to nothing.
  • End of an Age: The fall of Heaven and the deaths of nearly all the immortals shortly before the story opens signify the end of an age where the heavenly immortals were untouchable and it was possible for human cultivators to ascend and become immortals. The ending further cements this by permanently depowering the cultivators and downgrading the main characters' immortality into lengthy-but-not-endless lifespans, causing the world to become a more Low Fantasy setting in line with Copper Coins and Panguan's settings.
  • Eternal Love: Let's just say that it's titled "Three Hundred Years of Longing" for a reason.
  • Evil Is Deathly Cold: Demons regularly experience calamity periods where their bodies feel a painful, freezing coldness caused by the lingering resentment of all the souls they've killed. The only way to temporarily curb this coldness is to have intimate relations with someone who can withstand the chill.
  • Fallen Angel: Heavenly immortals can turn into demons if they violate heavenly law by meddling too much in mortal affairs or committing too foul deeds, which happens to Wu Xingxue, Yunhai, and Hua Xin.
  • Genre Deconstruction: The novel, in contrast with most other Spirit Cultivation Genre works where cultivating to immortality is an awesome thing that everyone strives for, opens in an End of an Age setting where humans can no longer cultivate to immortality because Heaven itself no longer exists. It then deconstructs it even further by revealing that the Sentient Cosmic Force that created Heaven and the immortals in the first place is the true Big Bad whose maintenance of the Balance Between Good and Evil is being done for purely selfish reasons at the expense of human lives, and also exploring how immortals being expected to detach themselves from all worldly desires and attachments can result in them having a Lack of Empathy for the common people and/or a willingness to turn a blind eye to their plights simply because heavenly law dictates it.
  • Hero with Bad Publicity: Wu Xingxue, who's known to the entire world as an evil, mass-murdering demon. This ends up being zigzagged; it turns out that he really did kill a lot of people for reasons that are sympathetic but not treated by himself or the narrative as justified, but also that he didn't actually kill a fair number of the people the public believes he did and he's been working in secret to prevent the other, much eviler demons from running as roughshod over humanity as they could have and eventually get rid of them for good.
  • Lotus-Eater Machine: Wu Xingxue's memories of being a nobleman with a peaceful life turn out to have been a self-inflicted case of this, with him using his own dream bell to give himself a happy dream when he thought Xiao Fuxuan had died. However, it wasn't quite the perfect dream for him, due to him being unable to include Xiao Fuxuan in it.
  • Make Wrong What Once Went Right: Most examples of this are unintentional cases caused by time travelers who were trying to fix their own lives without enough regard to the ripple effects the temporal changes might have on other people's lives, but a very intentional and chilling example of this is the heavenly law creating an entire alternate universe where its followers are too obedient to ever destroy it and attempting to manipulate that universe's Wu Xingxue into erasing the entire original universe and everyone in it so that the universe most favorable to it would become the 'true' timeline.
  • My Life Flashed Before My Eyes: Invoked by Xiao Fuxuan, who uses his sword to force the demons he purges to relive their lives before they die and be reminded of how and why they came to take innocent lives.
  • Rage Against the Heavens: When Wu Xingxue realized that the heavenly law he'd been obeying for so long in doing his best to destroy numerous alternate timelines, in spite of his misgivings about having to kill all the humans in them, had been the one who manipulated things to create all these alternate timelines in the first place to prevent its own death, he responded by renouncing his immortal status to become a demon and try to figure out a way to prevent the heavenly law from dooming even more innocent lives. The novel's climax features him and many other characters teaming up to kill the heavenly law for good.
  • "Reborn as Villainess" Story: The story begins with nobleman Wu Xingxue finding himself abruptly transported into the body of a reviled, mass-murdering demon. However, this is subverted when it's soon revealed that Wu Xingxue really was this demon all along and his past life memories of being a nobleman were fake ones – he just doesn't remember anything other than his falsified memories. It's also eventually revealed that he's not as much of a villain as he initially seems to be.
  • Ret-Gone: If an immortal falls far enough from grace to be exiled from heaven, everyone else will forget that immortal used to exist. Wu Xingxue and Yunhai both suffered this fate, although Amnesia Missed a Spot with Xiao Fuxuan and Hua Xin, the people closest to them.
  • Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Many humans, upon learning that the branches of a specific mystical tree could give them the ability to travel back in time, seized the chance to try to prevent past deaths or other unfavorable events. Unfortunately, not only did this frequently not work as well as they hoped for, but their meddling often caused things to become worse for many other people in the alternate timelines they created.
  • Stealth Prequel: The novel is a distant prequel to both Copper Coins: Tong Qian Kan Shi and Panguan, but this doesn't become clear until the epilogue extras where Xue Xian, the protagonist of Copper Coins, makes a cameo.
  • World Tree: There used to exist a divine tree that represented the cycle of life and death by growing a leaf for every human birth and shedding a leaf for every human death. It was visible only to humans on the verge of death and its branches had the power to turn back time, which was misused by humans desperate to change their fates. That tree developed a human consciousness over time, which became Wu Xingxue. He tried to seal away the rest of the tree to prevent humans from abusing its power, but it didn't work due to certain other people's plans.

Alternative Title(s): Bu Jian Shang Xian San Bai Nian, Unseen Immortal Of Three Hundred Years, Three Hundred Years Of Longing

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