Tianqing

Tian Qing is a full-length urban novel by the web author Saleng. It was serialized on Qidian.com starting in May 2007 and completed in April 2008, running to about 1.24 million Chinese characters. The protagonist, Duan Tianlang, is an orphan raised from childhood by Fang Chong. Fang Chong immerses him in Daoist culture for seventeen years, shaping him into a calm, reserved, and meticulously thoughtful young man, and quietly suppressing the solitary ruthlessness attributed to his so-called "Tianlang star" destiny. At fifteen or sixteen, Wang Lian, an American Chinese hailed as one of the world's greatest hackers, discovers his near-computer-like gifts for calculation and memory, takes him as an apprentice, and teaches him cutting-edge computer technology and thinking. The fusion of Daoist temperament and hacker skill soon lets Duan Tianlang surpass his teacher. Yet however great his gifts, he must still be tested in the real world. His two mentors decide to thrust this young man, raised in a closed environment, into ordinary society: he enters school, takes jobs to earn a living, meets all kinds of urban characters, and undergoes harsh training approaching the level of special agents and mercenaries. Repeated rounds of cyber attack and defense and real-world human interaction bring him step by step closer to his true goal: using neural networks to connect the human brain with computers, and creating an artificial intelligence program with learning capacity beyond imagination. But whether this creation is a blessing or a curse, whether it will make the world better or push it toward an irreversible brink, he must answer for himself. Built around threads of hacker technology, financial warfare, and urban romance, and interspersed with the rational, almost rigid yet strikingly moving love story between the protagonist and Su He, the work is one of the earlier representative Qidian urban novels to systematically explore hacker and artificial intelligence themes.