webnovel
From 'web' + 'novel'. The English compound tracks the Chinese 网络小说 (wǎngluò xiǎoshuō, 'internet novel'), the tradition that gave the form its modern shape in the late 1990s.
Fiction written for the web and released chapter by chapter, often daily, over years rather than months. The cadence defines the form: a webnovel is a live serial, with reader votes and chapter-end comments feeding back into a story still being written. The Chinese ecosystem is the largest and most developed, built on platforms like Qidian, where contracted authors writing inside a per-chapter economy sustain works that run to thousands of chapters and millions of characters. Its native genres, xianxia and xuanhuan among them, draw on Daoist cosmology, martial-arts pulp, and video-game logic in roughly equal measure. Most of this literature reaches English readers through fan translation, machine translation, or some blend of the two.