The Strongest Hacker

The Strongest Hacker is a long urban-rebirth web novel by Gu Dashi, serialized on Qidian starting in July 2011. At about 2.33 million characters, it falls under the "Urban · Youth Campus" category, with tags "hacker," "rebirth," and "hot-blooded." The story opens with protagonist Zhang Yang in a Seattle hotel, working with his online-acquainted master Thanatos to remotely breach the intranet of the North American Aerospace Defense Command. He assumes his master merely wants to demonstrate "Red Domain" technology and will teach him the higher "Blue Domain" afterward, never guessing the whole operation is bait: the door is smashed open by the FBI, and he falls in a hail of gunfire. He wakes in his university days, a freshman again, with only an outdated secondhand computer. Using his past-life top-tier skills and familiarity with the online world, he starts over as a low-level hacker, shuttling between campus and cyberspace: handling dorm life, classes, and clubs while launching attack after attack online, creating viruses, fighting for botnet "zombies," clashing with domestic and foreign hacker groups, and gradually entering the dark side of business competition. The novel takes a brisk power-fantasy route, focusing on the thrill of attack-and-defense confrontation and technical dominance while weaving in campus life and romance; readers describe the protagonist as "decent in values but very cunning." It is one of the more widely circulated representatives of the Chinese web-novel "hacker genre" and was still frequently recommended on reading lists around 2023.