God of War

Fighting God is a long-form xuanhuan novel by the web author Shi Luoye, serialized on 17K Novel Network from January 2011 to May 2012, totaling roughly one million Chinese characters. The story is set against the chaos at the end of the Qin dynasty: heaven and earth are vast, the mortal world is full of vicissitudes, and what cultivators seek is nothing more than immortality. Yet in the late Qin, the heavenly order no longer holds—ghosts and demons run rampant, the starving lie dead across the land, and thorns and wild growth stretch for a thousand li as human order collapses. Overpowering beings roam the world with undying bodies, and in the end they set themselves ablaze. The protagonist, Ye Yang, carries divine blood and is transported to an era of warlords carving out territories and heroes rising in droves. Amid family feuds and the contention of rival powers, he grows through repeated ordeals, battling gods, demons, and formidable enemies of every kind. From battlefields such as Linzi and Jibei he advances to the struggle among the three realms, and is ultimately pushed into the position of the new Fire God, bearing alone the responsibility of cleaning up the wreckage and saving the world and its people. The work uses the age of chaos as its stage, interweaving historical figures with gods, demons, and the fantastic: Xiang Yu, Liu Bang, Han Xin, Peng Yue, and others appear in another guise, while the bitter fighting of contending warlords and the scheming contests of intrigue unfold alongside a lingering romance that declares, across two thousand years, my heart remains the same. The book moves at a brisk pace with dense combat scenes; it is one of Shi Luoye's representative works in his shift from online-game fiction to Eastern fantasy, and its audience was further expanded by an adaptation into an online game of the same name.