Throne of the Dragon King

In web literature, plenty of works pit players directly against game rules; Throne of the Dragon King is one that plays its premise especially freely. Author Yan Shan does not make his protagonist an invincible template hero but instead has him scrape by in a death game through mixed class skills and system exploits—a warrior hurling fireballs, a mage swinging a blade—and these contrast gags form the book's most distinctive pleasure. Another layer of interest is whether the game is dead or alive. From the disabled respawn setting and the dragon-invaded server to the later buildup around the Abyssal Pillars and anthropomorphized data, the author is clearly not content with monster grinding and leveling but pushes layer by layer toward the nature of the world itself. Of course, at 4.19 million characters the pacing is bound to rise and fall; the early going is dense with snark and full of adolescent bravado, and readers who cannot get through it may give up on the first night. But those who enjoy absurd combat, system-exploit puzzle solving, and light power-fantasy reads will find remarkably steady pleasure here. As one of the representative Qidian game-world works from around 2014, it is also well suited to observing the popular tastes of web fiction in those years.