The Gate of Shock

The Gate of Shock is the seventh novel in Xu Gongzi Shengzhi's "Ghost, God, Human, Mountain, Earth, Heaven, Shock" series. It began serialization on Qidian Chinese Network in July 2012 and concluded in March 2014, totaling roughly 3.02 million Chinese characters; in the same year it was published in multiple volumes by Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House. The protagonist, Cheng Tianle, lives up to his name: past twenty and accomplished in nothing, he spends his days cheerful and carefree. When he runs out of options, he is lured into a pyramid scheme to freeload, until even the scheme cannot stand him and expels him. He drifts to Suzhou, scrounging food and lodging, and stumbles by accident into an inheritance of demonic cultivation methods. Coming to his senses, he seems to have opened a wondrous door onto another side of the world. It turns out that all around us, hidden among everyday streets and alleys, lurk all manner of demonkind: your boss may be a transformed beast-demon, and the trendy city girl you pass on the street may well be the legendary fox spirit. A string of bizarre murders in Suzhou makes Cheng Tianle suspect that demonic cultivators are at work behind the scenes, and he is drawn into the cultivation conflicts of the Three Realms and Seventy-Two Sects. Using real locations such as Suzhou's Shantang Street and Pufu Zen Temple as its skeleton, the novel weaves into its plot such allusions as Bai Juyi's construction of Shantang and Cao Xueqin and Dream of the Red Chamber, repeatedly posing through its tale of demonic cultivation the proposition that "demon nature originates in human nature": as there are people in the world, so there are otherkind. The protagonist stumbles between destitution and good fortune, pursuing cultivation while discerning right from wrong, good from evil, in a world where humans and demons coexist.