The Great Demon King

The Great Demon King is a fantasy novel by the web author Ni Cangtian. It was serialized on Qidian Chinese Network starting August 26, 2008, and completed on January 19, 2010, running about 3.72 million Chinese characters over 1,027 chapters. The story is framed by the line "A cowardly youth, step by step surpassing himself, walking toward evil, walking toward the legend of the Demon King": a modern young man with a special destiny is used by an old demon as a scapegoat, but unexpectedly transmigrates to another world, inherits the old demon's memories and knowledge, and possesses the body of a menial worker in a fantasy continent who died after being bullied at a school of necromancy. He cultivates both the techniques of Eastern demonic arts and the dark necromantic magic of the other world, practicing and cross-verifying two equally sinister and strange power systems, even using the methods of refining demonic treasures to create skeletons, zombies, and other undead creatures, rapidly rising from the lowest rung of society to become a fearsome figure. The core appeal of the book is the collision of Eastern and Western power systems: on one side is a world of battle aura and magic made up of mages, knights, and swordsmen; on the other is the hierarchical stages of demonic cultivators. The protagonist also practices thirteen types of power—light, darkness, earth, fire, wind, water, lightning, death, fate, time and space, life, destruction, and battle aura—and splits off multiple incarnations. The style is dark and sharp, and the protagonist is decisive in killing, making it a representative work of the Qidian otherworld cultivation genre of its time; older readers now often reread it nostalgically as an early "feel-good" web novel.