Building a Otherworld

Building a Otherworld is a fantasy otherworld-continent web novel by Hua Renchou, serialized on Qidian from May 18, 2017, and completed on January 13, 2020, running to roughly 6,005,300 characters and 2,881 chapters. The protagonist, Jia Zhengjin, who calls himself “Fake Serious,” is a homebody addicted to games; after dying suddenly in an internet café, he is told by a ghost officer of the underworld that he is a “nine-life virtuous man.” Having missed the “Six Paths Train,” he wishes to the ghost officer to “live inside a game for a lifetime,” and so his soul is sent to a random otherworld to be reborn, with a sandbox game system thrown in. The core of the story is “playing a survival-building game in another world.” The world Jia Zhengjin inhabits blends the rules and resource settings of various sandbox survival games; readers often describe it as a mashup of Minecraft, ARK: Survival Evolved, and Don't Starve: gathering, mining, crafting, building bases, taming creatures, hunting, and trap-making. Starting from a primitive environment, he uses the system to accumulate materials, make tools, and build houses, gradually advancing to contact with human civilization, using a modern person's thinking to construct all kinds of facilities—even opening something like an internet café in the otherworld. The overall tone is light and humorous, with puns on the protagonist's name, playful chapter titles, and gags such as “stealing the king's wall bricks” and “swiping the crown.” The author is known for a steady update pace and “plenty to fill you up”; later content keeps adding new maps and construction gimmicks, and the final chapter, “Otherworld Internet Café (Grand Finale),” closes with the protagonist building an internet café in the otherworld. Overall it is a casual, satisfying read on a sandbox-game theme, stronger in creativity than in prose, suited to binge-reading over meals.