Shadow Street

Shadow Street is the debut full-length novel by web author Dark Eggplant, serialized on Qidian from November 18, 2010, to November 22, 2011, running 617 chapters and about 1.91 million characters, also known as Dark Street. The protagonist, Li Wei, is an utterly ordinary office worker with a head for calculation, until a sheet of yellow parchment (or, by another account, a package marked "strange delivery") drags him into a space called Shadow Street. There is no true daytime here; shops line both sides of the street, and so do tasks: take an order, enter a scenario, and come out alive to clear it; to exchange for power, martial arts, or items, you must pay the corresponding price, and every scenario has a cost to calculate. Li Wei is no hot-blooded youth or martial arts fanatic; he survives by calculating damage, returns, and escape routes, and "the perfect clearance plan" is what he has been doing since chapter one. The mission worlds draw on a motley range of sources—the tenderness of Chinese Paladin, the strategy of Heroes of Might and Magic, the martial arts of Jin Yong—as well as zombie hordes, dungeons, hives, and disasters; the story escalates from small scenarios to the twenty-eighth volume, "Origin of Shadow," and concludes with chapter 617, "Sword of the True Self." As an infinite-flow work from around 2011, it is notable for its restraint: no free power, a protagonist who wins by mastering the rules rather than by cheats, and twin narrative lines alternating between the real world and the cycle worlds—which is why veteran readers still remember it today.