The Mystic Gate Demon King

The Mystic Gate Demon King is an urban mystic-gate genre long novel by Zimengyoulong, also often called by readers The Maoshan Ghost King. It was serialized on Qidian Chinese Network starting in 2019 and completed on August 20, 2022, with 4,299 chapters in total, about 8.74 million characters. The protagonist, Ge Yu, began cultivating the Dao at the age of three and was accepted under the immortal Chenyuan Zhenren of Yuchen Temple of the Mystic Gate sect, with the religious name Longyan. He achieved great success as a youth and mastered the five mystic arts of mountain, medicine, fate, physiognomy, and divination; he can catch ghosts, heal illness, read faces, tell fortunes, and also read bones. He carries the Maoshan Seven-Star ritual sword engraved with nine holes and seven swords, and at twenty he descends the mountain on his master's orders to gain experience. The story opens on the outskirts of Jiangcheng: at Chen's Coffin Shop, Ge Yu sees through the fox demon Hu Xian'er, who has taken human form to repay a kindness; since she has never harmed anyone, he gives her a talisman and guides her to take the orphan Zhou Zhi up Mount Maoshan to seek a master, while he himself enters Jiangcheng University. Thereafter he deals with cases of encounters with evil in both campus and city while becoming drawn layer by layer into a larger world: broken-aura formations, Gu poison villages, head-dropping masters, sea-eye evil spirits, and the chaos of the demon realm appear one after another, and his opponents range from street thugs and local tyrants all the way to masters of evil sects and ancient demonic creatures. The work takes "sweeping away injustices all along the way" as its main line, advances in unit-drama fashion, and gathers its foreshadowing layer by layer, finally settling on Ge Yu taking charge of the Mystic Gate sect, quelling the demon chaos, and old friends each returning to their places. The writing is passionate, humorous, and brisk in pace, and it is one of Zimengyoulong's representative works.