Natural Disaster

Natural Disaster is an apocalypse-themed web novel by Banzui Youzi, long serialized on Zongheng Chinese and now completed; a carefully proofread complete edition circulated online under the "Zhixuan Cangshu" label. The story begins with "the tranquil world becoming a game of death overnight": the wealthy and powerful, celebrities, and campus belles are all thrown into the same set of survival rules as ordinary people, and only those with real strength have the right to live, while the weak can only be enslaved or eliminated. The author grafts the apocalyptic catastrophe onto an online-game system—levels, basic classes (ranger, swordsman, berserker, archer, elementalist, summoner, priest, exorcist, etc.), S-to-F graded skills, equipment quality from black iron to mythic, and master-level or higher life professions are all hard indicators that decide life and death in this world. The protagonist re-enters the game with the first-mover advantage gained from "rebirth," follows a dual-wielding melee path, uses memories of his past life to grab skills first, find treasure chests, and seize resources, and in places such as the Blood Jungle, the Jungle Station, and Camp Dawn gradually gathers a team and builds a faction, growing from a lone survivor into the leader of a camp. The core conflict of the book lies both in humanity's confrontation with monsters and the otherworld, and in the struggle between people over the right to survive; the "natural disaster" in the title is both a calamity from the heavens and the disaster of human nature after order collapses. Its opening setup is often regarded by readers as a rare highlight of the apocalypse genre, and the writing leans toward a brisk leveling-up style.