At the same time, Chinese Paladin Online, an MMORPG jointly developed with Softstar Taipei, was released across Greater China, but the game was poorly received due to dispute with the Mainland service provider 9You (久游网) and the large amount of early gameplay bugs the players encountered.
[11] Yao Zhuangxian also revealed plans to introduce The Legend of Sword and Fairy 6 to the console platform, as well as expressing intention to remake early games of the series.
On April 25, 2018, Softstar revealed the new game would be using the Unreal Engine 4[12] and feature ray-tracing and deep learning super sampling (DLSS) with development support from Nvidia.
Seeing her creations outnumbered and in peril, Nüwa faked Fuxi's decree and recruited the deity warriors to intervene and aid the humans, turning the tide against Chiyou.
This enraged Fuxi, who had Nüwa's Sovereign title removed from the records of pantheon and had her name replaced with Xuan Yuan (軒轅), a deity general who led the charge against Chiyou.
She left behind a single lineage of female demigod descendants, whose souls do not enter transmigration after death and instead are retained inside a Supreme Spirit Pearl (聖靈珠) that can be used to command all Five Elements.
Having access to only one of the Nine Springs, the demons fight in factions over territory and resources, and seven major tribes reign supreme, namely the Yaksha (夜叉), Rakshasa (羅剎), Asura (修羅), Garuda (迦樓羅), Gandharva (乾達婆), Dragonoids (龍眾) and Kinnara (緊那羅).
As a result, the realm of humanity and beasts has diverse regions that accumulate significant amount of both ethereal and foul energy, and are subjected to seasons and cycles of fertility and natural disasters.
Creatures inhabiting this realm, humans and beasts alike, feed on natural biomass and energy to survive, and some can even nurture power far beyond their innate physicality depending on one's own aptitude, talent and luck.
These Spirit Pearls each can grant the owner vitality and great power in combat, but only Nüwa's direct descendants can use them to their full effects and manipulate nature, even from a different realm.
Some subscribe to selfless charity, hoping to accumulate enough merit to please the gods and receive divine promotion; some practise fulu and attempt to gain control of supernatural powers; some resort to alchemy and try to obtain magical elixirs and pills through waidan experiments; while some prefer to train in neidan cultivation and martial arts to achieve supreme physical and spiritual purity.
The training sites chosen by immortality cultivators tend to have great fengshui and located far away from the distractions of the secular society, often in forested mountains, caves and islands, where the practitioners can easily access clean energy from nature.
During the late Tang dynasty, various sects also organised into a larger confederation named League of Saints (仙盟) to better represent themselves to the secular jianghu and coordinate countermeasures against supernatural crises, particular concerning incursions by demons and monsters.
The extensive Kunlun Mountains in the Western Regions is located directly below the Saint Realm, and are considered the best place for cultivation due to the energy accumulation around its numerous alpine lakes.
However, after one such invasion into the realm of Huangming clan (幻瞑界) turned ugly, which resulted in the Qionghua leader being slain by the Mengmo queen Chanyou (嬋幽) after a bloody duel, many surviving members grew disillusioned of their cause and deserted the sect, among them Suyu (夙玉), the host of Wangshu Sword.
This resulted in the host of Yihe Sword, Xuanxiao (玄霄), losing control of his qi and gong berserk, forcing the sect masters to seal him inside an ice cave.
Due to their remote location, they were removed from generations of political turmoils in the secular world, and arguably lasted longer than all other cultivation sects, with their influence still present dynasties later.
Sometime during the next few hundred years, the Shushan Xianjian Sect acquired the Three Divine Artefacts (三神器) of High Antiquity, namely Fuxi's Sword (伏羲劍), Shennong's Cauldron (神農鼎) and Nüwa's Bloodstone (女媧血玉).
The Xianjian Sect recovered under the leadership of Zixuan's lover Xu Changqing (徐長卿) and reached a silver age of prosperity, with numerous masters successfully achieving immortality over the following decades.
However, 50 years later, the then-leader of the Xianjian Sect, Dugu Yuyun (獨孤宇雲), mistook Zhao Ling'er (趙靈兒, Zixuan's granddaughter and a Nüwa descendant, who was also the Miao crown princess of Nanzhao) for a snake monster and locked her inside the Suoyao Pagoda.
This led to Zhao's husband Li Xiaoyao (李逍遙), a newly inducted lay disciple of Xianjian Sect, to forcefully break into the pagoda to rescue his love.
The Suoyao Pagoda eventually crumbled due to Li's daring jailbreak, releasing all the monster captives and exposing the opening into the God-Demon Well (plot of The Legend of Sword and Fairy).
18 years after the collapse of the Suoyao Pagoda, Shu Mountains came under attack from Jingtian Cult, who sought to steal the Divine Artefacts and break the seal upon the God-Demon Well to enable an invasion from the Demon Realm.
After the invasion was eventually thwarted, the seven masters of Xianjian Sect decided to sink the floating Shu Mountains onto the God-Demon Well to permanently seal the portal (plot of The Legend of Sword and Fairy 5).
The Shushan Xianjian Sect then isolated itself to the outside world in order to guard the seal for centuries to come, and their glorious past legends gradually became forgotten and dismissed as fallacious rural myth.
Mount Luojia (落袈山) is one of the tallest mountains at the southwestern bank of Hubei's East Lake, and was home to two neighboring cultivation sects whose founders were lifelong close friends but their successors had become bitter adversaries over the following centuries.
On the foothills of Mount Luojia sat the Mingshu Sect (明庶門), who specialized in fairy-driving (御靈術), a magical art of domesticating mythical beasts using symbiotic contract and shared cultivation.
The vantaged location of their magnificent temple palace also allowed them to deploy a protective force field that helped the nearby villages repel hostile feral monsters.
The young man then revealed himself as Xiuwu (修吾), a wounded deity warrior who was stranded on Earth, and explained that he was now bonded in a magical symbiosis with Qingshu (due to her earlier bite) in order to recuperate his strength.
They tricked Li Xiaoyao, a young inn waiter in Yuhang who was desperate to heal his suddenly ill aunt, to infiltrate the island and sabotage the illusional maze protecting the palace.