Sleep

Sleep is a long dark fantasy novel that the fantasy author Wenzhou completed over three years after The Knight's Dune. It was published by Tianjin People's Publishing House in January 2007; the print edition is also known as Sleep 1: Blood Skeleton, and it was serialized online on Qidian. The story is set almost entirely on the continent of the Demon Realm: a space of eternal darkness and terror, where beneath the power pyramid formed by the Red Demon Clan, the Blue Demon Clan and the Black Knights, the undead can only occupy the bottom rung and serve as cannon fodder in war. The legendary turning point comes from ten "blood skeletons"—ten sets of remains of human elites combined with ten black dragon embryos to breed the legendary undead warriors. In life they were human paladins, mages and warriors who died heroically in the Great Demon War, but their bones were left behind on the Dark Continent, and thus they gained the chance to rise again. The work takes the blood skeleton king's trials in purgatory and the bloody war history of the Demon Realm continent as its main line, unfolding the landscape and history of the Demon Realm in panoramic fashion, involving dozens of racial settings such as the undead, necromancers and black knights, and is regarded by many readers as one of the founding works of Chinese dark fantasy. The main text runs to forty-nine chapters, the online version about five hundred thousand characters, and the print edition two hundred and forty-six pages. The story opens with the heroic spirit waking from white bones, with how love from a former life grows on those bones and how death, like the toss of a coin, decides between imprisonment and rebirth; the tone is gloomy, cold and not without ferocity.