Link

Link is a long-form Western fantasy novel by the internet author Xuehong. Serialization began in 2003, and the revised, completed version was published on the 17K website in 2008, comprising 199 chapters and roughly 1.067 million Chinese characters. The protagonist, Link, is an ordinary boy who dreams of becoming a great knight while shoeing horses and enduring scoldings at a forge in Coloburg, living an unremarkable life. A small incident upends his trajectory, steering his dream of the knight's path in a different direction. Set on a fantasy continent defined by an empire, border legions, and a river marking the frontier with a neighboring country, the novel constructs a ten-tier power system ranging from knight apprentice and trainee knight to junior knight, silver knight, golden knight, and holy knight, while cold-steel combat coexists with magic. Amid crises, Link gradually reveals a latent aptitude for magic, and his adventures unfold around concepts such as dragon-crystal energy and spiritual-power replenishment, his personal fate entangled with the power struggles between imperial forces and bandit gangs. The work closes with a first-person account and bears the unmistakable marks of early internet literature: an inventive main premise but relatively rough prose, with a fast pace and abundant thrills. As one of Xuehong's early representative works, it captures the fledgling state of Chinese internet fantasy fiction and serves as a stepping stone toward the subsequent boom in xuanhuan fiction.