Way of Choices is an Eastern fantasy novel by the web author Mao Ni, serialized on Tencent Literature (Qidian) from May 27, 2014, and completed on May 4, 2017; it runs to 1,248 chapters and about 3.15 million characters. The story takes place in a fictional world where humans, demons, and the devil race coexist: in the first year of the Taishi era, a divine stone fell from beyond the heavens, and on a divine stone in the Eastern Continent were carved strange totems; people contemplated the totems and gained enlightenment, and afterward established a state religion. Thousands of years later, the fourteen-year-old youth Chen Changsheng has a mysterious origin—as an infant he was rescued from the jaws of a golden dragon by his master, the Daoist Ji, and raised by him, and over more than a decade he read all three thousand volumes of the Daoist canon. Yet his meridians are congenitally severed, making marrow-washing cultivation impossible, and his fate is unlikely to carry him past twenty. To cure himself and change his fate, he leaves Xining Town with a marriage contract given by his master and travels alone to the divine capital of the Great Zhou, where he unexpectedly becomes the sole student and headmaster of the National Academy, abandoned for over a decade, and befriends the lazy genius Tang Thirty-Six, the demon princess Bai Luoluo, and the bear-clan youth Xuan Yuanpo. Drawing on his deep learning from the three thousand volumes, he makes his name at the Grand Examination, enters the Heavenly Book Mausoleum to study steles and the Zhou Garden for training, and comes to fight side by side with the Southern Saint Maiden Xu Yourong, from a marriage contract's complications to shared battle. As the truth of his origin is gradually revealed, he is drawn into court coups, conflicts among the three races, and the contest between master and disciple, and eventually succeeds as pontiff of the state religion, marches north against the devil race, and sets out for the Holy Light Continent. With the core idea that there is no fate, only choice, the book chronicles a youth's passionate years of study, cultivation, and breaking the rules.
《择天记》是猫腻继《朱雀记》《庆余年》《间客》《将夜》之后的又一部长篇，也是他把“少年感”写得最纯粹的一次。与他此前作品相比，这部书的写法明显做了减法：铺陈的枝蔓少了，主角的锋芒更清晰，取而代之的是干净利落的节奏和大量机智的对话。作者把成长放进一个三族并立、以命运为秩序的世界里，让一个“天生短命、经脉断绝”的少年用读书、考试、辩论和一次次选择去撬动既定规则——所谓“逆天改命”，说到底是不肯认命的那点倔强。人物塑造是本书的强项：表面淡漠实则固执的陈长生、慵懒却通透的唐三十六、古灵精怪的白落衡，配角各有脾气，读来有滋有味。2017年，人民文学出版社首次以八卷全卷本形式推出这套书，使这部长达三百万字的网络小说以纸质书形态完整呈现；同年它入选国家新闻出版广电总局与中国作家协会联合发布的优秀网络文学原创作品推介名单。对想读猫腻却担心体量的读者，本书是很好的入口。
People's Literature Publishing House publishes across classical literature, foreign literature, documentary writing and folk literature, with 492 titles in its catalogue. Representative books range from the Chinese classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms to Lao She's Teahouse and Longxu Ditch in the Selected Works of Lao She, as well as translated foreign literature such as Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Dante's Divine Comedy and Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels, alongside documentary and fictional works including Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and João Guimarães Rosa's The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. Its authors include Chinese writers such as Lao She, translators such as Shen Emeri and Li Wenjun, and foreign authors such as James Wood. Overall, the house has a strong record in editing classic works and translating foreign literature, with a publishing character that bridges Chinese and foreign writing and values textual quality.
