The Battle of Straying

The Battle of Straying is a long urban supernatural and cultivation novel by the web author Zhuangpo Nanqiang, serialized on Qidian Chinese Network from 2004 and completed around 2006, at roughly 1.88 million characters. The story is set in a modern city. The protagonist, Li Xinghan, is an orphan whose adoptive parents are long away doing archaeological work; in his loneliness he is raised by a teacher, Xiao Polang, who is no model of propriety and excels at scheming and strategic calculation. Xiao Polang forces him to read histories exhaustively and to spar by role-playing historical figures to deduce victories and defeats, training him into a calculating, meticulous man willing to use any means when necessary. From this starting point the novel follows the protagonist, armed with supernatural powers, ancient martial arts, and a calm, ruthless temperament, as he is drawn into the open and covert struggles among urban factions over interests, secrets, and human ties. The work's most distinctive feature is that it does not follow the old binary path of good versus evil. The protagonist's alignment leans toward "chaotic": he has his own code, repays kindness and vengeance in kind, does not cross the bottom line on matters of great right and wrong, but his methods are hardly aboveboard. The book's thematic line is "Life is never only black and white; truth is often veiled in many colors," and through multi-threaded narration and a structure running the main text and side stories in parallel, it explores the moral dilemmas and self-understanding of an antagonist-style protagonist. The book contains scenes common to early web fiction such as humiliation and killing, intrigue, assassination, and eroticism; its tone is flippant and its pace fast, making it a representative long work of the "golden decade" of Chinese web literature.