King of Myriad Realms

King of Myriad Realms is an Eastern fantasy novel by the web author Ni Cangtian, serialized on Zongheng Chinese from May 13, 2016, and completed on November 27, 2018. It runs to roughly 4.65 million characters in over 1,800 chapters. The story is set after the end of the primeval age: once there were colossal spirits with bodies like stars soaring through the cosmos, great lords of various races with alien blood who shattered the void and remade heaven and earth, and ancient qi-refiners who crossed the star river to teach all beings. Yet an era quietly drew to a close, the myriad realms were sealed off from one another, the primeval giants vanished one by one, and the various races scattered across separate realms—the Xuantian Realm, the Frozen Realm, the Great Wild Realm, and others—warring among themselves. Many years later, the fate of Nie Tian, a youth from a lowly clan, changes when he wins a mysterious bone in a childhood grab-bag game. Guided by a drop of blood, he is able to retrace the primeval age and enter ancient dreams, rising against the odds along the path of cultivation: from a disciple looked down upon by his family, to winning the first part of the Star-Shattering Art in the Heavenly Gate trial, to gathering the scattered fragments and obtaining the legacy of the Star-Shattering Ancient Hall, earning the name "Child of the Stars." Thereafter he roams many realms, contending with humans, the ancient spirit race, demons, and other factions, his cultivation climbing level by level, until at last he battles the Source in chaos and, by "sealing the realms for a hundred thousand years," leaves the races of the three worlds time to recover and grow anew. The work continues Ni Cangtian's favored "otherworld hot-blooded power fantasy" approach, with a world-building more expansive than his previous work, Spirit Realm, constructing a system in which bloodline tiers, qi-refiner sects, spirit-beast ranks, and the nine great realms interweave; the protagonist's climb from the bottom upward is the book's main thread. In May 2018, the book was selected among the top hundred works of the third Chenggua Online Literature Awards with a Chenggua score of 7.5.