The Official Gate

The Official Gate is a long urban officialdom novel by the Shanxi web writer Daolang (real name Zhao Wenhui), serialized on Qidian around 2012, with over 1,100 chapters in total and more than ten million characters. The story opens with a distinctly absurd touch: the protagonist, Ye Kai, though a third-generation red descendant, is considered too poorly endowed to have much room for advancement; to obtain a "ticket" into the system, he goes to the Time-Space Administration's "Three Anti" office (anti-transmigration, anti-rebirth, anti-superpower) and hands the clerk a gold card in exchange for a special twenty-year "closed-beta, no-data-wipe" qualification for his life. With this dubious predictive edge, Ye Kai starts at the grassroots and gradually builds his network in Dongshan politics, experiencing a series of events—landslide rescue, investment promotion, factional struggles, anti-corruption investigations—competing on the same stage with reincarnators, reverse-transmigrants, and reincarnated immortals of various settings, repeatedly weighing the front door, back door, public door, and private-desire door of power. The "gate" in the title refers both to the gate of officialdom and to the gate of the human heart: through officialdom games the author writes of true and false, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, wrapping real rules in exaggerated settings so that readers, while enjoying the spectacle, also see the choices and costs of grassroots officials among fame, favors, and principles.