Immortal Official

Immortal Official is a long-running web novel by Chen Fengxiao, serialized on Qidian from June 17, 2008, to its conclusion in March 2014, totaling roughly 14.29 million characters. The protagonist, Chen Taizhong, was once a high immortal of the Luotian heavens who cared only for cultivation and had woefully low emotional intelligence. At the critical moment of breaking through to the Zi Fu Golden Immortal stage, he is ambushed and blasted back in time to his youth. After painful reflection, he decides to take a different path: rather than cultivating in seclusion, he will plunge into the bureaucracy and use worldly experience to hone the emotional intelligence he most lacks. Thus a "freak" carrying immortal spiritual energy and refusing to play by official rules barges headlong into a rigidly rule-bound system. Starting from grassroots posts such as deputy director of the Fenghuang Science and Technology Commission and deputy director of the investment promotion office, he resolves one trouble after another amid political-business entanglements, personnel infighting, and power struggles up and down the hierarchy, using unconventional and even absurd methods: sometimes satisfying to excess, sometimes so outrageous it leaves people unsure whether to laugh or cry. Writing in a "immortal enters the mortal world" mode, the author grafts cultivation-fantasy conventions onto the real-world bureaucracy, using the protagonist's headlong clashes to depict the complex workings of grassroots power, lacing the satire with black humor and letting readers see, beyond the wish-fulfillment thrill, both the absurdity and the reality of bureaucratic life. For its immense scale and steady updates, the book is regarded as one of the "long-distance runners" among online officialdom novels.