Drifting Classroom

Drifting Classroom is a long supernatural suspense novel by the web author Zhe Sanye (real name Chen Jun). It began exclusive serialization on Heiyan Reading Network on March 18, 2015, and was completed in August of the same year, totaling about 630 chapters and roughly 1.9 million Chinese characters. The story is told in the first person: in the school attended by the protagonist, Li He, there is a classroom that "does not exist," with crumbling walls, dim filament lights, a full seats' worth of gloomy-faced students, and a teacher at the podium. Li He wanders in by accident and from then on cannot leave or escape, trapped in this place he calls the "ghost classroom." To protect himself, he takes Zhou Tianwen as his master and learns Daoist arts, starting from the basics of drawing talismans, reading physiognomy, and distinguishing yin from yang, and is forced to take on one exorcism and ghost-catching commission after another: a haunted house in the mountains, a ghost marriage deep in the mountains, a headless corpse, a morgue at midnight, a ghost hotel at midnight... Each horrifying story links into a chapter. As his skills deepen, he is drawn from an ordinary person protecting himself into the grudges and conflicts among the various Daoist sects. The work uses an episodic structure, with one supernatural event per volume, fast-paced and dense with suspense, while also using the protagonist's growth and the network of Daoist relationships as a hidden thread; it combines horror atmosphere with hot-blooded satisfaction, and its style also mixes in humor and romance. According to the records, during its serialization the book long ranked near the top of Heiyan Reading Network's charts and is Zhe Sanye's breakout work; his later work By Order of the Evil continues the character system of this book.