Bathing in Fire, Burning the Divine

Bathing in Fire, Burning the Divine is a long Eastern fantasy novel by the web author Ao Wuchang, serialized on Qidian.com from 2008. It runs to about 1.05 million Chinese characters and is complete; it has not been formally published in print, and proofread electronic texts circulate online. The protagonist, Liu Qian, is a university student who spends much of his time on Qidian.com and is devoted to "wish-fulfillment cultivation novels." One day, while following a serial in his dormitory, a Daoist-looking cultivator suddenly appears behind him, and before he can react he is lured away to another world. When he wakes, all he has is a rusty broken saber and a jade slip recording an introductory cultivation method, and his master has set a time limit on him: within that time he must adapt to the survival rules of this strange world. This other world is not a single Eastern cultivation setting; it simultaneously contains a cultivation-and-body-training system akin to the Eastern tradition and structures akin to Western magic, battle qi, and summoning. Familiar elements abound: alchemy, artifact refining, monstrous beasts, necromancers, elves, and mages' associations, and the planet the protagonist inhabits even has two suns. Drawing on the "unscrupulous tricks" and thick-skinned tactics he learned from countless web novels, Liu Qian survives and levels up among monstrous beasts and perilous situations while making adventuring companions and maneuvering among factions, gradually growing from an abducted ordinary person into a powerful figure who ranges across many sides. The work's tone is light and bantering, with strong hallmarks of the web novel's "thrill points" and an evident machismo; it is one of Qidian.com's early representative works of the otherworld cultivation and harem genres.