Gate of Shock

Gate of Shock is the final installment of Xu Gongzi Shengzhi's seven-book series "Ghost, God, Human, Spirit, Earth, Heaven, Shock," comprising roughly 3.02 million characters. Serialization began on Qidian in July 2012 and concluded in March 2014. The story opens on Shantang Street in Suzhou's Qili Shantang: a thousand years earlier, a great demon who had attained the Dao sealed seven demon-cultivation methods into seven stone cat statues along the street, intending to enlighten worthy demonkind of later generations. By chance, these methods fall into the hands of Cheng Tianle, a human youth in the twenty-first century. Past twenty and accomplished in nothing, Cheng Tianle lives up to his name—carefree and insouciant, drifting through Suzhou—and after stumbling into the demon-cultivation legacy, he seems to push open a door onto the marvelous. From then on he discovers that among the motley crowds in the streets and alleys, shapeshifting demons hide in plain sight. Demonic cultivation differs from human practice and cannot be undertaken at will; as he refines himself, he navigates the Three Realms and Seventy-Two Sects, dealing with fox demons, cat demons, snake spirits, and other kinds, while also facing sorcerers who abuse magic for personal gain and demon cultivators who do evil. Grounded in the traditional cultivation system and infused with Jiangnan street life, historical lore, and Daoist self-cultivation thought, the work uses a tale of humans and demons coexisting to explore the proposition that "whatever kinds of people exist in the world, so too will there be kinds of other beings."