Red Robe Mage

Red Robe Mage is a Western fantasy web novel by Yan Yu, serialized on Qidian from 2011 and completed in January 2013, with more than 490 main chapters and about 1.95 million Chinese characters. The work borrows the setting of the Forgotten Realms but explicitly states that it is not an official D&D story or a tabletop rulebook. The story begins in Thay in Faerûn, a region ruled by the notorious Red Wizards, a dark mage regime known across the continent for cruelty and shadow. The transmigrator Penny Sien, a surgeon in his previous life, wakes up as an apprentice in a Red Wizard academy. In this selection mechanism that resembles a gu pot, unqualified apprentices are used as experimental material and may at any moment become consumables for others' magical research. With the steady hands and dissection experience from his previous life, Penny becomes a designated experimental assistant to some of the wizards and barely keeps his life amid factional infighting. He then rises through the ranks, is posted to the provinces, engages in business, explores ruins, becomes entangled with the goddess of commerce Waukeen, and is drawn into the internal political struggles of the Red Wizards and the conflicts among the continent's many powers. From an ordinary transmigrator who only wants to survive, he gradually becomes a mage of consequence and ultimately plays a key role in the chaotic era of invasions from Hell and the Abyss. The book has a clear rhythm, with both highlights and satisfying payoffs, a strong Western fantasy flavor, and a protagonist who is cold and detached yet never without a bottom line—a representative work in the pseudo-D&D mage genre.