Mysterious Journey

Mysterious Journey is a long fantasy novel by the web author Gun Kai (real name He Qingfeng), serialized on Qidian Chinese Network from September 4, 2013, to July 23, 2015, totaling about 4.46 million Chinese characters. At the outset, the modern young man Luo Jing dies by electrocution, and his soul crosses into another world resembling Europe during the Industrial Revolution, becoming the boy Garen Lombard. His parents work for a rubber company, and his siblings attend the St. Lark Noble Academy. Garen's advantage is his "attribute ability"—he can quantify his various qualities like a status panel into values he can allocate points to, growing through accumulation and investment. He first gains a foothold in a modern world whose power system centers on "secret martial arts," rising step by step from martial student to martial artist and higher ranks, then crosses into multiple worlds—totem, vampire, mecha—that are independent yet secretly connected, encountering different systems such as Silver Lamp Masters, Mech Engineers, and Mother River soul seeds, and pursuing the mystery of the "Mother River" that runs through all worlds and of his own reincarnation. The work is known for its grand worldbuilding, visceral combat scenes, and a cold, restrained protagonist, and is regarded as one of the early representatives of the "attribute" and "point allocation" schools of web fiction; readers also call it the founding work of Gun Kai's "Mother River system." The book follows Garen (Luo Jing) traveling through the worlds as its main thread, finally returning to the starting point to form a closed loop.