The Heavenly Dao Punishment Token

The Heavenly Dao Punishment Token is a long-form xuanhuan / high-martial-arts-world novel by the web author Dongcheng Ling, comprising roughly 3.63 million Chinese characters across 1,156 chapters; it concluded its serialization on Qidian in 2021. The work opens with the line "When a thought arises in the human heart, heaven and earth all know it. If good and evil go unrewarded, then heaven and earth must be unjust." The protagonist, Lu Sheng, was originally a detective in the real world who solved one bizarre case after another and brushed shoulders with death several times. After an accident, he is reborn with his memories into the body of a Suzhou scholar returning home in glory in ancient times, and gains an extra "Heavenly Dao Punishment Token" in his mind. The token operates on the principle of punishing evil and promoting good: whoever upholds justice in the human world, sweeps away the righteous spirit, and punishes the wicked people of the realm receives rewards and commendations from the Heavenly Dao. Lu Sheng, who depends on his younger sister and works in the Judicial Commission, uses the reasoning skills of his past life to crack one bizarre case after another — stolen treasury silver, an old case of a massacred household, a disappearance from a locked room, and a stream of murders in the jianghu. What he earns from punishing evil transforms into martial-arts manuals, miraculous elixirs, and mysterious skill cards, enabling him to learn such arts as the Huashan Swordplay, the Eighteen Dragon-Subduing Palms, the Nine Yang Divine Art, the Wave-Riding Steps, and the Little Li Flying Dagger. The story begins in a low-martial-arts world of court and jianghu and escalates level by level to high martial arts and even xianxia, blending case-solving deduction, wuxia jianghu, and righteous hot-bloodedness; multiple interlocking cases drive the main plot, which ultimately leads to a showdown with the mastermind behind it all.