Divine Office

Divine Office is an urban supernatural-powers web novel by Duanren, first serialized on Qidian and now complete at about 1.76 million characters. The story begins with Xu Zhengyang, a young man from a North China village: after finishing junior high school he returns home to make a living, riding an old bicycle through streets and lanes to trade millet for coarse grains. One day, sheltering from a rainstorm in a long-abandoned Earth God temple outside the village, he is mistakenly struck by a bolt of heavenly lightning and thereby meets an Earth God who has lived for more than two hundred years and wants only to die. The Earth God entrusts him with the divine office and divine power, and Xu Zhengyang's life turns onto another path. He first serves as an Earth God, then rises to Merit Officer, then Judge, then City God, accumulating more divine offices, with jurisdiction expanding from a village and township to a city, and even to order between the yin and yang worlds. The book contains both the everyday hustle of neighborhood disputes, antique trading, and rural prosperity, and the underworld thread of investigating murders and judging ghosts, seizing souls and deciding cases, and inspecting the underworld. Through the protagonist's movement between the human and ghost worlds, the author writes about how divine power punishes evildoers and balances authority and responsibility, and about his wavering among family love, romantic love, and "divinity." The whole book demythologizes myth in a secular style, writing an ordinary person who "climbs from the ditch to a divine office" as vivid and approachable.