The Legend of Defying Heaven

The Legend of Defying Heaven is a fantasy martial arts novel by the web author Cang Tian (also writing under the pen name JOJO Wild Wolf), complete in the common version at about 1.16 million characters, in eighteen volumes of roughly ten chapters each. The story is set in a martial arts world the author dates to "Xuanwu Year 343": the Way wanes and demons flourish, the demon sects produce talents in abundance, and one of the three great powers, the Mingyue Sect, under the rule of the "Hell Emperor" Jun Nitian, becomes the foremost demonic sect and seems poised to sweep the world. Though the righteous martial world is unhappy with its brutal methods, no one can defeat Jun Nitian, so they can only scrape by, while others secretly gather the remnants of resistance and wait for an "opportunity." The protagonist, Jun Tianxie, just sixteen, is the son of Jun Nitian and the foremost beauty of the martial world, Yu Baixue. Burdened from childhood with an Oedipal tragedy, driven by a twisted love for his mother and hatred for his father, he takes an extremely warped path: he commits murder and evil, uses his companions and slaughters the innocent, maneuvering between good and evil by the most unscrupulous means. The work unfolds around the Mingyue Sect's expansion and the righteous world's resistance, drawing in the maneuvering of forces such as the "Heavenly Palace" and the "Underworld," and incorporates martial arts concepts such as "the Nirvana of the Evil Way," "Illusory Flowers in the Sky," "Journey Through Hell" and "the Seal of Slaying Gods," along with split personality, the reincarnation of the Holy Emperor, and Buddhist concepts such as "manas" and "alaya-consciousness," finally converging in a showdown between good and evil in which the "Lord of Floating and Sinking" intervenes. The book's style is dark and ruthless with convoluted plotting, and it is regarded as a representative "dark stream" martial arts work in Chinese web fiction, long accompanied by controversy for its abundant erotic and incestuous descriptions.