Mo Dao Zu Shi (Web Novel)

Mo Dao Zu Shi (魔道祖师), published in English by Seven Seas Entertainment as Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, is the Chinese danmei web novel by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu that The Untamed adapts. It was serialised chapter by chapter on Jinjiang Literature City between 31 October 2015 and 1 March 2016, running 113 main chapters plus 7 extras.

Wei Wuxian was the most gifted cultivator of his generation until he built his power out of resentful energy rather than the orthodox sword arts, and the clans turned on him for it. He dies at the siege of the Burial Mounds. Sixteen years later a young man named Mo Xuanyu burns his own soul in a summoning ritual, and Wei Wuxian wakes up in that body with a debt to settle and no reputation left to protect. The first person to recognise him is Lan Wangji, the one man who never accepted the version of events the clans had agreed on.

What follows is a murder mystery told across two timelines. In the present, a severed arm and a string of hauntings pull the two of them from one clan's territory to the next. In the past, the novel goes back to the years when Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji were students, then rivals, then the only allies each of them had left. The difference between this book and the live-action series is not the plot but the relationship: in the novel the two leads are a couple, and the story is written as a romance from the beginning.

The novel has been adapted more times than any other danmei work: a three-season donghua, a chibi spin-off, a manhua, an audio drama, an audiobook, a Japanese stage production, and the 2019 live-action The Untamed.