Fortune Across the Heavens

Fortune Across the Heavens is a long serialized infinite-worlds web novel by I Am Paiyunzhang, serialized on Qidian from April 2020 and completed in August 2021, totaling about 2.95 million characters, in Qidian's "Science Fiction · Time-Space Shuttle" category. The work is set in a classical Eastern world on the cusp of a spiritual-qi revival: the protagonist Chen Ying transmigrates into a parallel time resembling the Ming and Qing dynasties and becomes the third, concubine-born son of the Duke of Zhenbei's household. His birth mother died early and he has no support, so he keeps to the inner quarters as an inconspicuous nobody, and as soon as he comes of age his father banishes him to a domain beyond the frontier, all but leaving him to fend for himself. Well aware of the danger, he stays cautious and forbearing, never drawing attention; fortunately his gift is total recall of what he sees and hears, making him unusually sharp at reading people and situations. His true reliance is the "Fortune Pagoda" in his sea of consciousness. By accumulating fortune, he can again and again randomly transmigrate to other worlds for training: Dream of the Red Chamber is the first instance he enters, where he becomes Jia Cong, the concubine-born son of Jia She, still keeping a low profile and slowly paving his way and building strength amid social dealings and family infighting. Worlds such as Water Margin are also places for his training. In each world he must adapt to a new set of rules and weigh his choices himself, then bring what he gains back to the main world to feed his own growth. Beyond the mainline, the story also interweaves the family power struggles within the ducal household and the management of the frontier domain, as well as the crises brought by the main world's gradual evolution from low martial arts to the mystical and even to a vast cosmos. The work does not court readers with a string of one-sided victories, but values characters' scheming and the nuances of human relations, and its adaptation of famous-novel characters and plots is carefully done.