Star Ring

Star Ring is an urban cultivation novel by the web author Kong Shen, serialized on the Zhulang Chinese Novel Network since October 2009. The full text runs to about 5.87 million characters and is now complete. The protagonist, Lin Tian, appears to be an ordinary college student but actually comes from the Lin family, an ancient martial arts clan. His parents were murdered in a staged car accident when he was young, and he has supported his studies by working and drifting. In an accident he obtains a mysterious ring called the "Star Ring" and makes it recognize him as its master, and his life is transformed. The Star Ring contains more than a hundred thousand civilized worlds; its holder can enter these worlds for training and bring back their items, techniques, and powers to reality. Lin Tian thus travels back and forth between utterly different realms—martial arts civilizations, magical civilizations, cultivation civilizations, crystal-card civilizations, soul civilizations—accumulating strength and making companions through repeated crossings and contests, while gradually uncovering the secret of the Star Ring itself. The story begins on an urban campus, ascends through the cultivation world, the immortal world, and the demon world, and finally extends to higher dimensions such as the divine world, the holy world, and the Myriad-Dimension Continent; the protagonist moves through many spaces, including the Hong Realm Void and the real world, and with the aid of the Star Ring and his own will grows all the way into the ruler of the universe. The book is driven by passionate leveling-up, with battles of wits and strength and a romance thread, and is one of the representative works of the urban cultivation and infinite-flow genres around 2010, notable for its enormous length and broad readership.