Lord of the Mysteries

Lord of the Mysteries is a long-form Western fantasy novel serialized by Cuttlefish That Loves Diving, a platinum author of Yuewen Group, on Qidian Chinese Network from April 1, 2018 to May 1, 2020. It comprises eight volumes and 1,418 chapters, totaling approximately 4.4652 million Chinese characters. The story is set in an alternate world resembling Victorian England: steam engines, massive ships, airships, and difference engines form the shell of industrial civilization, while churches, divination, potions, curses, and sealed artifacts lurk beneath the polished order. The protagonist Zhou Mingrui transmigrates into Klein Moretti, a history graduate of Khoy University in the Kingdom of Loen, whose family is poor; he barely wakes up before facing a crisis of life and death. To protect himself and find a way home, he performs a mysterious ritual to ascend above the gray fog, accidentally ignites a crimson star, and, under the name "The Fool," convenes Miss Justice and The Hanged Man to form the Tarot Club. He then joins the Nighthawks squad guarding Tingen City and takes the "Seer" potion, formally embarking on the path of the extraordinary: relying on the "Acting Method" to digest potions, advancing step by step along the 22 Beyonder sequence pathways, and in the Tingen tragedy, the Backlund smog, the sea hunt, and the life-and-death struggles in the Forsaken Land of the Gods, drawing ever closer to the truth behind the world, ultimately becoming the "Lord of the Mysteries." The power system is rigorously designed and the ensemble cast vividly drawn; it is a representative work of the "Cthulhu + steampunk" genre in Chinese web literature and was added to the British Library's Chinese collection in 2024.