Is Song of the Sky Pacers Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Quick facts
Format	Manhua, 147 chapters, 10 volumes
Run	2018–present · ongoing
Community score	AniList 7.0 · MangaUpdates 8.0
Content	Violence, mature themes
Where to read	Bilibili Comics — official

Overview

During the Chen dynasty, a consort gives birth to fraternal twins under unusual omens — a prince marked with a cinnabar mole, a princess born with six fingers. Fortune and misfortune arrive in the same breath, and the two are separated at birth: one raised on the path of cultivation in a celestial sect, the other raised on the road by an old swordsman in the mortal world. As a heavenly tribulation looms, their diverging lives are pulled back toward each other, and toward the fates they never got to choose for themselves.

What it does well

The first thing anyone notices about Song of the Sky Pacers is the art, and it earns every bit of that reputation. Xia Da paints rather than just draws, and pages carry a texture and color sense that looks like it belongs in a gallery as much as a comic — it's the rare manhua where slowing down to actually look at a panel pays off. That craft extends to the storytelling too. The twin structure lets the manhua explore two very different versions of the same world at once, and neither sibling feels like a stock archetype; both come with real interiority and get to be shaped by circumstances rather than destiny alone.

The historical court setting does real work as well. Politics, family obligation, and the fantasy cultivation elements are woven together rather than kept in separate lanes, so the stakes feel personal even when the plot is dealing in heavenly tribulations and ancient prophecy. It's a story that clearly has a plan, even if that plan takes its time revealing itself.

Where it falls short

That patience cuts both ways. New characters, factions, and cultivation concepts arrive at a steady pace, and it's genuinely easy to lose the thread of who someone is or what a particular power or title means if you're not reading closely — this isn't a manhua built for skimming. Pacing is deliberately unhurried, which will frustrate readers who want a story that gets to its point quickly, and because it's still ongoing years into serialization, a lot of the biggest questions are still open.

Verdict

For readers willing to slow down and pay attention, Song of the Sky Pacers offers some of the best pure art in the manhua space right now, wrapped around a genuinely thoughtful story about two lives shaped by the same fate. It asks more patience than most genre webtoons, but it rewards that patience with something that actually looks and feels different from everything around it.