The Ultimate Bliss of the Heavenly Demon

The Ultimate Bliss of the Heavenly Demon is a time-travel fantasy novel by the web author Laughter in the Coffin, set in the author's fictional Dahua Dynasty. In a hundred years of Dahua, the Yang clan, the foremost martial house, held sway, giving rise to the saying "Two Pillars of the Yang, One Prince and Three Dukes"; heaven and earth contended, the Five Elements all emerged, heaven imposed no fetters, earth bestowed true spirits, and mortals formed their cores as countless cultivators sought the Way. The protagonist Yang Cun travels from the modern era and enters the Yang household, becoming a member of this illustrious clan. Born lacking one soul and one spirit, with his souls lodged in the body of the Yang family's only son, he was frail from childhood and only began to improve after taking up martial arts. Yet life as a scion of a great house is no easy matter: the family declines, the household is broken and its people lost, and its prestige exists in name only. To live safely as a "profligate idler" in the crevice between court and jianghu is far harder than he imagined. The main thread advances through the rise and fall of the Yang clan, court power struggles, and confrontations over the power of the Five Elements. The protagonist has a complex nature and a scheming, calculating mind; he pursues martial power but is also skilled in intrigue, sometimes keeping a low, forbearing profile and sometimes domineering and arrogant. The novel blends time travel with the erotic-romance (xuanhuan) mode, its scope unfurling from the enfeoffment at Jinmen and the clash with the Prince of Zhen to the calamity of the medicine corpses, writing both jianghu grudges and officialdom's backbiting. The whole book runs about 2.4 to 2.7 million characters (statistics vary by edition); a traditional-character divided edition was also published by Hetu Culture, sixteen volumes in all.