Renegade Immortal
TV Series
It tells the story of Wang Lin, an ordinary young man in the countryside, who is moved by his heart and cultivates against immortality. His pursuit is not only for longevity, but also for getting rid of the ants behind it. He firmly believed in human beings and entered the path of cultivation with mediocre qualifications. After experiencing ups and downs, with his wise mind, he gradually reached the pinnacle and became famous in the cultivation world with his own strength.
Year 2023
Genres Action, Animation, Drama
TMDB rating ★ 8.3/10 audience score
Wang Lin is nobody: a countryside kid with mediocre qualifications in a world where cultivation is everything. Renegade Immortal is the story of what happens when nobody refuses to stay nobody — a slow, stubborn climb from the dirt to the pinnacle of the cultivation world, powered by nothing but a wise mind and an unreasonable refusal to quit. Audiences have it at 8.3, and they're not wrong.
The hook
Wang Lin is nobody: a countryside kid with mediocre qualifications in a world where cultivation is everything. Renegade Immortal is the story of what happens when nobody refuses to stay nobody — a slow, stubborn climb from the dirt to the pinnacle of the cultivation world, powered by nothing but a wise mind and an unreasonable refusal to quit. Audiences have it at 8.3, and they're not wrong.
The mediocre-protagonist trick is xianxia's greatest gift to the power fantasy. The chosen one is boring; the kid who wasn't chosen and cultivates anyway is riveting, because every breakthrough has to be purchased with suffering, cunning, or both. Wang Lin's pursuit isn't just longevity — it's defiance, aimed at the powers that treat ordinary lives like insects.
The deep cut
What works is the long game. Renegade Immortal is a marathon, not a sprint, and it treats Wang Lin's ascent the way great sports stories treat a career: setback, adaptation, breakthrough, repeat. Each level of power feels earned rather than granted, which makes the pinnacle moments land like avalanches. The animation does the heavy lifting in the big swings — cultivation breakthroughs staged as cosmic events, not just power-ups.
The “wise mind” framing matters, too. Wang Lin wins as often with patience and reading the room as with raw force, which keeps the series from becoming a simple escalation ladder. He's a strategist in a genre full of battering rams.
What doesn't: cultivation epics demand commitment, and the lore density of the early stretch will test newcomers. The genre's rhythms — the sect politics, the tournament arcs, the centuries-long grudges — are an acquired taste, and the show doesn't water them down for tourists. At 8.3, the faithful are clearly feasting; the curious should know what they're signing up for.
Cultural context
Renegade Immortal rides the donghua breakout — the moment Chinese animation stopped being a regional secret and became a global genre engine. Xianxia, the cultivation fantasy tradition, is arguably the biggest fantasy literature movement on earth by sheer volume, and series like this are its ambassadors: centuries of storytelling tradition, now with production values to match the imagination.
Who it's for: xianxia devotees, underdog-story addicts, and anyone who wants their power fantasy to make the protagonist earn every inch. Settle in — the climb is the point.
The verdict
Grade: A−. The slow-burn cultivation saga that earns every step of the climb.
Renegade Immortal: the stubborn climb of Wang Lin
The premise
Wang Lin is a very smart boy from the countryside with loving parents and absolutely nothing else going for him: mediocre talent at best, a crippled soul, and a cultivation world that grades you the way a casino grades a losing hand. In the genre of xianxia — China's vast literature of immortal cultivation, where heroes ascend from mortal to god through willpower, pills, techniques and centuries of grinding — Wang Lin should be background noise. Instead he becomes its most defiant protagonist: a boy who enters the path of cultivation with nothing, loses everything, and claws his way upward anyway, one breakthrough at a time, until the cultivation world knows his name.
Adapted from Er Gen's landmark web novel Xian Ni (仙逆), Renegade Immortal is the story of what stubbornness is actually worth. Where most cultivation heroes are chosen, gifted, or reincarnated, Wang Lin's defining trait is refusal: he firmly believes the Dao lies in human beings, not in talent, and he proceeds to prove it across a journey that spans sects, mortal kingdoms, alien starfields and centuries. The novel is famous among xianxia readers for two things — its scope, which goes full cosmic-horror cosmic, and its moral temperature, which is colder than the genre usually allows. Wang Lin is not a hero in the conventional sense; he is a man who decided what he wanted and paid for it in full. The donghua carries that tone straight onto the screen.
Cast and characters
Wang Lin is voiced in Chinese by Shi Zekun, who has carried the role throughout the donghua's long run — including the theatrical film Renegade Immortal: Battle of Godfall — with Bian Jiang Studio handling the dubbing production. It is a performance built on restraint: Wang Lin is not a shouter or a speechmaker; he is a watcher, a plotter, a survivor, and Zekun's read keeps the character's famous emotional economy intact — the man who feels everything and shows almost nothing.
The world around him fills out the genre's full roster: Li Muwan (voiced by Huilin Zhang), the love whose thread runs through the entire epic and whose fate is the story's most enduring heartbreak; the sly, scene-stealing spirits and seniors of the cultivation world, including the likes of Situ Nan and Xu Liguo, whose voices have become fan favorites. Er Gen's universe connects outward too — he is the same author behind A Will Eternal, I Shall Seal the Heavens, Pursuit of the Truth and Beyond the Time's Gaze, and the shared DNA of stubborn, underdog protagonists runs through all of them.
Seasons
The donghua premiered on Tencent Video (and its international arm WeTV) on September 25, 2023, produced by Tencent Penguin Pictures and animated by Build Dream (铸梦动画), the studio behind Purple River and The King of Tomb. It has run as an annual-style ongoing series — the "year番" model that keeps long-running Chinese animation in continuous production — accumulating well past a hundred episodes by 2026, with each year-block pushing deeper into the novel's cosmic middle game.
The franchise has expanded aggressively beyond the series: the online film Renegade Immortal: Battle of Gods (Battle of Godfall) arrived in 2025, with Battle of Immortal Slayer following in 2026 and a theatrical movie slated for 2027 — a sign of how seriously Tencent is treating the property. The series' global footprint has grown through WeTV and the fan-sub ecosystem, bringing one of xianxia's defining epics to an international audience that is discovering the genre through the screen rather than the page.
Critical reception
The donghua carries a strong audience rating — around 8.3 on TMDB — and it is regarded as one of the better-regarded xianxia adaptations of the streaming era, praised for taking the source material's scope seriously: the cosmic horror, the sect politics, the slow moral erosion of its protagonist. Fans of the novel have generally credited the adaptation with preserving the story's defining bleakness rather than sanding it down for a mass audience.
It has not been without friction. In 2025, coverage of the donghua's later storyline reported controversy among viewers over scenes perceived as inconsistent with Wang Lin's established characterization — a dispute centered on whether the adaptation had preserved the character's romantic loyalty and personality. It is, in a way, the highest compliment a fanbase can pay: they care enough about Wang Lin's moral architecture to fight over it. For a character whose whole identity is refusal to bend, the audience's refusal to let the adaptation bend him is almost poetic.
Cultural impact
Renegade Immortal sits at the center of the donghua boom that has turned Chinese animation from a domestic industry into a global genre. Er Gen's novels are among the founding texts of modern xianxia, and Wang Lin — the mediocre kid who out-stubborned the heavens — is one of the genre's archetypal figures, the template for a whole generation of underdog cultivation heroes. The donghua's success, alongside its films and its planned theatrical future, is proof that the global appetite for these stories is real and growing — and that the audience for cultivation fantasy does not need the edges filed off. It needs Wang Lin, exactly as he is: ordinary, relentless, and gone too far to turn back.