The Gate of Apocalypse

The Gate of Apocalypse is an urban supernatural novel by Dancing (real name Chen Bin), a platinum author on Qidian Chinese Network. Serialized on Qidian and Migu Reading starting April 1, 2015, and completed on December 25, 2020, the book runs to approximately 3.38 million Chinese characters. The story begins when eighteen-year-old web novelist Chen Xiaolian survives a plane crash: he wakes to find not only that he has gained superpowers, but that the world he inhabits is treated as a "game world" by a group of outsiders who call themselves "players," while the locals are merely "NPCs" in their parlance. In the dungeon "The Seventy-Two Pillars of King Solomon," Chen Xiaolian awakens as a "Bug," then joins the Meteor Team—a faction with a special base that can, to some extent, circumvent the system's rules—and gradually rises to become its captain. Built around the core premise of "NPCs striking back against players," the novel unfolds through time- and space-spanning dungeons—a deserted island's underground palace, the Qin Shi Huang Mausoleum, a bioterror crisis in Tokyo, a holy war in Jerusalem—weaving together a multi-faction contest among the Meteor Team, the Zero City forces, and the player faction known as the Thistle Guild. Amid a data-driven combat system and mysteries to be solved, the truth of how the system controls the world is gradually revealed. Toned with irreverent humor and laden with snarky commentary, the work nonetheless sustains its inquiry into fate and free will, marking Dancing's large-scale pivot into urban supernatural fiction.