Enemy of All Mages

Enemy of All Mages is a Western fantasy web novel by Shining Stardust. It began serialization on Qidian in April 2010 and runs to about 506,000 Chinese characters. The novel opens with “Act Zero: Summoned from Another World.” The male lead, Peng Xing, works at a medieval-European-themed park, is tired of the job, and decides to resign. After work, in the men’s locker room, he hears a strange female voice; a magic circle appears beneath his feet, his form gradually blurs, and he is summoned to another world. In this world, magic and battle aura are essentially applications of magical elements. Yet Peng Xing, an ordinary person born and raised on Earth, happens to possess a constitution that mages from the other world cannot understand—he can interfere with and even prohibit the use of magic and battle aura. Thus, in the eyes of mages, he becomes the “public enemy” who must be eliminated and hunted down. Peng Xing barely gains a foothold amid a series of seemingly absurd encounters, learning to fight with sword and magic while inquiring everywhere about a way back to Earth. On his journey he is drawn into a series of events involving the Undead Queen, soul hunters, the Lich King, and the manuscript of the Book of Creation, and is drawn layer by layer into a conspiracy involving hell monarchs and soul-transfer magic, ultimately leading to a war on the scale of floating fleets and synthetic-beast legions. The core premise of anti-magic sustains a narrative tone that combines lightness with hard-fought battles.