The Odd Hero

The Odd Hero is a long fantasy novel by Taiwanese web author Zi Zai WADE, serialized on the Taiwan Novel Channel website from August 2002 and published in print by Shuo Pin Culture starting in January 2003. The complete work spans thirty-two volumes and concluded at the end of 2012; it long held the top spots on the Novel Channel's popularity and recommendation charts and was one of the best-selling works of early Taiwanese web fiction. The story begins with Wang Daming, an utterly ordinary vocational high school student: plain-looking, overweight, with a life consisting only of classes, joking around, and reading comics. In an accident, he saves the school beauty Lin Shihan and, by a strange twist, "eats" the sealed dragon of the wild beasts, Jue—a legendary being representing "evil" that once rampaged unopposed. From then on, this ignored fat boy gains nearly absolute power and is drawn into a hidden world where gods and monsters, Daoist arts, shikigami, magic, and wild beasts all coexist: the sword spirit Shijian teaches him martial arts, Japanese shikigami and onmyoji appear, and the grudges of Kunlun, the heavenly realm, and the Three Sects and Six Schools follow one after another. The novel's main thread is Wang Daming's relationships with Lin Shihan and Shui Wuhen, depicting how he struggles with the contradiction of "having the strongest power yet only wanting to be an ordinary person" and how he learns to bear responsibility through repeated loss and searching. The book features grand scenes, unpredictable plotting, and humorous language laced with abundant anime references and KUSO-style banter; many readers regard it as an early representative of the "magical romance" vein and an irreplaceable youthful memory for many veteran web fiction readers.