Chronicles of Calamity

Cataclysm is a fantasy novel by the web author Tianyu Longxiang, set in the fictional continent of Noah. Legend has it that in ancient times the gods brought down a cataclysm that destroyed the old world, and humanity escaped aboard Noah's Ark, from which the continent took its name. A hundred thousand years ago, the once-flourishing Church of Cataclysm fell apart, and the necromancy that had terrified the world was lost with it, becoming a mystery no one could solve.

A hundred thousand years later, in the remote Maple Leaf Town in western Noah, there lives a vagrant boy named Ron who survives by begging and odd jobs. Ordinary in talent and penniless, he nonetheless vows to become a great mage. For seven years he has stopped one passing mage after another on the old maple road to ask for apprenticeship, and after more than seventy rejections he still refuses to give up. By chance he obtains a seemingly unremarkable ring, within which is sealed the soul of someone from a hundred thousand years ago—Homelin, a former member of the Church of Cataclysm. Ron thus awakens this "grandpa" who is both mentor and friend, and inherits the ancient necromancy lost for a thousand years.

The reappearance of necromancy in the world immediately draws the vigilance and pursuit of the Church and various factions. At places such as Balovax Academy, Ron hides his identity while achieving repeated battlefield successes with undead creations such as the Skeleton Hero, all the while desperately investigating the truth behind the sudden disappearance of necromancy and the collapse of the Church of Cataclysm a hundred thousand years ago. Built around two threads—"an ordinary youth defying fate" and "erased history"—the work is one of the representative titles of the necromancer genre in early Western fantasy on Qidian.