Old Fogey Goes Down the Mountain
Old Fogey Goes Down the Mountain
TAGS
danmei
modern fantasy
supernatural
comedy
face slapping
found family
sect building
non human leads
HE
An ancient man-eating beast borrows a rich family's deadbeat son to revive his master's defunct Taoist sect — and discovers that modern entrepreneurship is harder than subduing demons.
Chinese Title: 古董下山
Pinyin: Gǔ Dǒng Xià Shān
Common English Title: Old Fogey Goes Down the Mountain
❤️ Main Relationship
朔宗 (Shuozong) × 卫西 (Wei Xi)
✨ Introduction
Gu Dong Xia Shan is Yuan He Gu's best-known comedy: a "fengshui novel" that is really a start-up farce with ghosts. The protagonist is an ancient beast who has lived on a mountain for untold centuries. When his master Wei Dadao dies, the old monster inherits a dying little sect, the Taicang Sect (太仓宗), and borrows the body of Wei Xi — the Wei family's missing, neglected eldest son — to carry his master's last wish down the mountain: rebuild the sect and make it famous again.
What follows is a serial collision between an apex predator who eats ghosts, demons, and occasionally car parts, and the modern world of social insurance, rent, advertising, and health inspectors. Wei Xi hunts evil spirits the only way he knows how — by eating them — and accidentally becomes a celebrity exorcist. Shuozong, a stingy divine beast whose love language is invoicing, becomes entangled with him first as a rival for "food," then as the sect's strangely devoted second disciple. It is warm, absurd, and completely shameless about it.
🌏 Background
The setting is contemporary China, where old gods and monsters still exist but must file paperwork like everyone else: city gods have jurisdiction, ghost workers have labor rights, and sects compete for believers like startups compete for users. Into this bureaucratic underworld drops Wei Xi, a walking natural disaster with the survival instincts of a mountain bandit, whose master left him nothing but a broken-down temple, a handful of disciples, and one instruction: make Taicang great again. The plot strings together urban ghost cases — haunted drivers, stolen corpses, cult recruiters — while the sect grows from a scammy fortune-telling stall into a cross-industry conglomerate spanning funerals, beauty salons, and talent management.
🎭 Themes & Tone
- Old monsters versus modernity: tradition as both superpower and culture shock
- Found family and sect as small business: disciples, payroll, and loyalty
- Comedy of appetite: the Mountain King's solution to most problems is eating them
- Face-slapping wish fulfillment, aimed at frauds who prey on believers
- A surprisingly sincere core about honoring a master's legacy
Tone: rapid-fire farce with sudden dips into genuine supernatural menace.
👥 Main Characters
- 卫西 (Wei Xi) — the Taicang Sect's sixty-second-generation head; an ancient beast with bottomless appetite and zero common sense, terrifying to demons and endearing to readers
- 朔宗 (Shuozong) — a divine beast of legendary stinginess; aloof, money-minded, and quietly, thoroughly devoted
- 卫得道 (Wei Dadao) — Wei Xi's late master, whose last wish sets the whole story in motion
- 阮时行 (Ruan Shixing) — a supporting disciple whose journey from skeptic to true believer anchors the early sect-building arcs
🎬 Adaptations
- Audio Drama: Completed — three seasons on Maoer FM (猫耳FM)
🔥 Why It’s Popular
- One of danmei's most quoted comedy premises: a mountain-eating beast discovers that starting a business is the hardest tribulation of all
- Wei Xi is a rare protagonist — amoral by human standards, endlessly loyal by his own, and hilarious in both
- The ghost cases are inventive and the side characters (wronged ghosts, overworked underworld clerks) steal scenes
- A loving satire of both the cultivation genre and contemporary hustle culture
- Long-tail fandom favorite for quotable chapter titles and deadpan "scientific" exorcism
📚 Reader Notes
Beginner-friendly: ★★★★★
Angst level: ★☆☆☆☆
Plot complexity: Low
Romance visibility: Medium
Mystery focus: Low
Recommended for readers who want a laugh-out-loud supernatural comedy where the romance rides shotgun to the sect's chaotic rise.
✍️ Author
缘何故 (Yuan He Gu)
A Jinjiang author known for satisfying face-slapping plots and career-detail-rich settings, from antiques to entertainment circles; her comedies run on momentum and heart.
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