Ace Evolution

Ace Evolution is a long-running science fiction infinite-flow novel by the web author Juantu. It began serialization on Qidian Chinese Network in August 2008 and concluded in 2010, running to about 4.3 million characters; the print edition was published by Taibai Literature and Art Publishing House. The protagonist, Fang Lin, was born of a consanguineous marriage and grew up amid others' cold stares and humiliation. When his parents' secret origins were exposed and they were collectively hounded until they took their own lives, he set out on a path of revenge and became a wanted fugitive murderer, while hiding in the city under identities such as odd-job worker and university student. By chance he sees a ghost-head tattoo, the “Nightmare Mark,” invisible to ordinary people, and is pulled into the mysterious “Nightmare Space”—a brutal trial ground modeled on classic arcade games such as Knights of the Round, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Street Fighter, KOF, Sangokushi, Shadow Dancer, and Metal Slug. Reincarnators must complete main quests, hidden side quests, and team confrontations, surviving within a strict hierarchy of difficulty; failure means erasure, while success can buy any wish. Fang Lin possesses extraordinary psychic power and an almost ruthless talent for calculation, and again and again defeats stronger foes through intelligence, prediction, and skill mutation, gradually building his own contract team and growing from an isolated newcomer into a figure who shakes the rules of the Space. The book stitches childhood arcade memories together with data-driven survival games, and is one of the representative works of “data-stream infinite-flow.” After its conclusion, the author released a follow-up, Final Evolution, set in the same “Evolution” system.