Big Data World

Big Data World is a game-world web novel by Mo Xiang (a pen name on Qidian, a Lv.5 author of Yuewen Group), serialized on Qidian in 2014 and completed at 1,906,200 characters, with 635 chapters in total. The story is set in a future where human technology has long stagnated: hundreds of billions of people are crowded into the inner solar system, social pressure is immense and conflicts abound, and virtual-reality games have thus emerged and flourished everywhere. In the virtual world, "Breakers" who cheat with hacks and destroy game balance run rampant—vampires and werewolves, angels and demons, monsters and gods and Buddhas, ability wielders, superheroes, aliens, almost all of them cheat-powered beings; opposing them are the "Order Keepers," who uphold the mission of "expelling Breakers and maintaining world harmony." The protagonist, Sun Ran, was originally a master-level Breaker who lived for more than eight hundred years in the virtual world Earth under the identity of "Peng Zu," until his real name was tricked out of him by "Jiaoniang," an Order Keeper posing as his wife, and he was exposed. In reality he faces a sky-high claim of hundreds of millions of credits from the federal government for "seriously disrupting game balance," his welfare benefits are suspended, and to repay the debt he is forced to accept amnesty and become a "trainee Order Keeper," thereafter shuttling through data planes one after another to carry out expulsion missions. One of the novel's great pleasures is its perfect "gamification" and reinterpretation of familiar Eastern and Western myths and legends—Tang Seng's pilgrimage for scriptures, Judas's betrayal, The Legend of the White Snake, A Chinese Ghost Story—setting the player's perspective against classical stories. Densely imaginative and briskly paced in its early and middle stages, it is one of the representative works of its time combining game-world and pseudo-infinite-flow fiction.