Dream Sovereign

Dream Sovereign is a fantasy cultivation serial by Wang Yu, a platinum author at China Literature. It began serialization on Qidian on May 20, 2020, and concluded on July 22, 2022, spanning roughly 4.36 million characters and over two thousand chapters, set against the worldview of NetEase's game Fantasy Westward Journey. The protagonist, Shen Luo, is the son of a wealthy merchant in the Tang dynasty. Sickly from childhood, he nonetheless builds the Shen family business through his own efforts. Later, stricken by serious illness, he travels in search of doctors and life-extending methods, and by chance joins the Chunqiu Temple, a branch of the Lesser Maoshan lineage. There he accidentally draws a "treasure-seeking talisman" and thereby obtains a mysterious jade pillow that lets him travel between the real and the illusory. With the jade pillow, Shen Luo glimpses in dreams the calamity of the Three Realms a thousand years hence, when demons swallow the sky, ghosts and monsters run rampant, and Journey to the West figures reappear. Thus reality and dream unfold in parallel: he trains and gains experience at Chunqiu Temple and the Bai family of demon slayers, while in the illusory realm he seeks clues to break his fate. The work interweaves the worldly life of the Tang golden age with the desolate atmosphere of a millennial apocalypse, blending the traditional cultivation system, the fall of sects, demon-slaying families, and clashes among the three realms of humans, demons, and immortals. Around the suspense of "is this a prophesied dream, or a reality that has not yet come to pass," it tells the story of an ordinary mortal trying to break the demonic barrier of destiny and avert a catastrophe of the Three Realms that has not yet arrived.