God of Slaughter

God of Slaughter is a long fantasy novel by web author Ni Cangtian, serialized on Qidian from 2011. The book runs about 5.06 million characters across more than 1,600 chapters, and in 2013 Heilongjiang Fine Arts Publishing House released a multi-volume print edition. The story opens with Shi Yan, an extreme-sports enthusiast on Earth, dying accidentally during an expedition; his soul transmigrates to the Continent of Gods' Grace, possessing a same-named scion of the Shi family of the Merchant Alliance—a youth regarded as a bookworm who never practiced martial arts. In a blood-pool ruin, Shi Yan obtains an eerie, mysterious Blood Pattern Ring and a strange martial soul, which not only transforms him but awakens several other martial souls long dormant in his body—one of them a "slaughter"-type soul that grows faster the more he kills. From then on he fights slaughter with slaughter and war to feed war, and in the Absolute Yin Valley he gains the "Star Martial Soul," his cultivation surging forward. The novel constructs seventeen martial tiers—Postnatal, Innate, Human Rank, Hundred Tribulations, Earth Rank, Nirvana, Heaven Rank, Divine Connection, True God, God King, Source God, Void God, Primordial God, Undying, and Realm Ancestor—and distinguishes martial techniques, pills, and martial souls from mortal grade up to primordial grade. Around family feuds, Merchant Alliance power struggles, racial wars, and planar crises, Shi Yan battles his way from the Continent of Gods' Grace to the Maya Star Domain, ascending toward becoming king of god kings. The book's core motto—"In this mad world where man eats man, the gods can no longer save it; let me tread the piled corpses of the heavens' gods to deliver all living beings"—marks it as a representative of Ni Cangtian's "slaughter power-fantasy" style.