Ascending the Tower

Ascending the Tower is a long-running infinite-flow novel by the web author Dasong Fuhongfang, following Terror Academy. It was serialized on Zongheng Chinese Network starting in 2014 and completed in late 2016, totaling about 1.5 million characters and 630 chapters. The story is set in 2052: extreme heat has scorched the Earth into a wasteland, and humanity clings to survival on the surface. One day, dense clouds blot out the sun and a giant "Tower to Heaven" that should not exist suddenly appears on the land, towering and pointing straight at the sky. The protagonist Xin Tu, like many ordinary people swept into it, is thrown onto the arduous path of climbing the tower. The work follows the author's customary "infinite-flow" framework: each level of the Tower to Heaven corresponds to an independent mission space, where participants must carry out tasks and fight monsters and fellow participants, trading life and death for the right to climb higher. The book features levels of diverse flavors, including pyramid escapes, the Matrix world, ninjas, and superpowers, and constructs a dual space called the "Futu Realm" and the "Babel City Tower"—the tower and the city intertwined: inside the tower are trials and slaughter, while in the city are trade, alliances, and contests of human nature. The protagonist struggles to survive under cruel rules while investigating the origin of the Tower to Heaven and the secret of the "Pioneers." This is not a physically published book; it circulates mainly as a web serial and later spread among readers as e-books and collections. This entry is based on a science-fiction and supernatural e-book collection circulating online. The author later paused updates twice due to illness and hospitalization, and in the later stages encountered the common infinite-flow problem of a power system spinning out of control, introducing the "Jianmu Ascending to Heaven" setting to adjust, and finally completed the work.