The God Ring

The God Ring is a supernatural-fiction web novel by Tuzi Laile ("The Rabbit Is Here"), serialized on Qidian from January 2, 2015 to its conclusion on February 1, 2016. It runs about 2,088,600 characters across 988 chapters. The story begins with Lin Yang, a young man of the present day, who is watching a web drama on his computer and complaining nonstop when a glowing ring suddenly appears hovering in midair. When he touches it, the ring slips itself onto his finger and informs him that he has completed binding with the "God Ring." The core premise is simple: every hundred days, the ring opens a new dimensional passage, allowing its owner to travel freely between worlds and carry goods with him. Lin Yang's first destination is the sixth year of the Guanghe era at the end of the Han dynasty, where he befriends Zhang Fei and trades such modern oddities as glow-in-the-dark bottles, lighters and liquor for gold, silver and reputation. He then stakes out land, raises troops and buys an official post, and from the Yellow Turban Rebellion onward rolls up the capital to contend for power. Later his footsteps extend into wuxia and xianxia worlds such as The Smiling, Proud Wanderer, Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils, The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber, A Chinese Ghost Story, Chinese Paladin and Journey to the West, where he keeps accumulating wealth by reselling modern goods, collecting martial-arts manuals and taking disciples and allies. His cultivation also climbs from mere martial arts all the way to immortal cultivation and the conquest of the heavens. The book follows a main line of "shuttling, growing, ruling, transcending": the early part is dealer-style profiteering and carefree jianghu adventure, while the middle and later sections keep widening the scale and raising the power level. The prose is brisk and packed with set pieces, and the protagonist's self-mocking slogan, "I'm Lin Yang, I endorse myself with a bag of salt," runs throughout. It is a fairly representative work of the 2015-era "multiverse" and plane-hopping genre. The novel was first serialized on Qidian; versions circulating online are mostly reader-corrected e-texts, and no official print publication has been found.