Phantom God

Phantom God is a long fantasy novel that web author Yun Tiankong released after The Legend of the Evil God; its traditional Chinese edition in Taiwan is titled Phantom Sword Lost City. The protagonist, Li Yi, is a sixteen-year-old first-year high school student in Shanghai. Before school starts, he goes for a walk in the suburbs but inexplicably falls into a strange grassland under a thunderstorm, and is subsequently rescued by a hunter named Chaks, only to learn that he has landed on a foreign continent where swords and magic coexist. This frail boy, whose body is "not even as good as an eight-year-old child's," first settles in a small village and begins learning the basic stances of Western swordsmanship, then blends in the philosophy of Eastern swordsmanship and the idea of fast-blade techniques to develop a lightning-fast sword strike that defeats opponents through speed. He then moves through the small city of Dis, the adventurers' guild, the underground black market, and the magical forest, forging himself through mission after mission and fierce battle after fierce battle. In the middle of the story, he reaches the lost city deep in the Misty Swamp, encounters the phantom beast system and the struggle over the city lordship, becomes connected with the four phantom beast lines of Xuanwu, Baihu, Zhuque, and Qinglong, and experiences progressively advanced combat forms such as fusion, evolution, mutant evolution, combination, armor transformation, blade transformation, and soul fusion. With "why the Four Sacred Beasts rank second only to the gods" as its thread, the book follows a typical hot-blooded leveling-up path: the protagonist grows stronger through wit, hard training, and lucky encounters, while friends, mentors, and love interests take turns appearing. Yun Tiankong has said that he wrote this book simply to let readers read it relaxedly and enjoyably, so the pace is brisk and the satisfying moments are dense. It is one of the representative works of the early web fantasy "phantom beast" genre.