The Cataclysm

The Cataclysm is a long apocalyptic novel by the web author Angry Thrall, serialized on Zongheng Chinese from 2014, totaling about 3.13 million characters and over a thousand chapters. The story opens as a mysterious "Sovereign" transforms Earth into an apocalypse overrun by monsters: the sky splits, beasts descend, and every person is forcibly assigned a hero character from League of Legends, forced to level up by hunting monsters and obtaining demon cores. Only by reaching level 100 can one obtain "Cosmic Citizen" status and survive; otherwise, death is the only outcome. The protagonist, Ye Zhan, fought for years in his previous life's apocalypse and reached level 97, just three levels short of survival, only to be devoured by a beast. Full of resentment, he is reborn hours before the Cataclysm erupts—back when he was still an ordinary office worker scolded by his supervisor and mocked by colleagues, secretly in love with his coworker Jiang Xue, his younger brother Ye Feng still in the countryside. Armed with five years of apocalyptic memory, he stockpiles supplies in advance, warns family and friends, and gathers the good brother who died for him in his past life, the "Fatty" Zeng Cheng. He predicts monster spawn points, seizes camps, recruits the strong, and builds the "Ye Alliance," rising step by step amid the carnage of zombies, beasts, and rival survivor factions. The work is known for its hybrid setting of "game characters plus apocalyptic survival," blending hero skills, equipment, and quests with brutal survival rules—a fast-paced rebirth-and-leveling power fantasy.