The Hidden Kill

The story begins with a top assassin who is weary of endless killing and of the cold oppression of his organization. He chooses to flee on a night when the organization’s guard is down, but on the way he runs into the organization’s experts and supernaturals cornering a phoenix—extremely weak and undergoing rebirth through fire. With no hope of escape, he fires his despairing, angry bullets at those supernaturals who have high attack power but low defense, and is then gunned down. The phoenix breaks out successfully and decides to repay his wish, so the assassin returns to the year he was ten, before his fate had been rewritten.

This time, he does not take the road that leads to the assassin organization. Instead, he first eliminates the person who was supposed to bring him into the organization, and thus gains a completely different life: a girl who grows up with him, a seasoned and lonely boy, and the trivialities, play, and stirrings of the heart on campus. But the shadows of the old days do not disappear. The organization, supernaturals, and the shadows of various forces keep closing in, and he has to take up again, in order to protect the people around him, the part of himself he had wanted to put down.

The first half of the book is distinguished by the warmth of childhood, daily life, and the awkward, tender friendships of youth; the second half gradually unfolds a larger landscape of supernatural organizations and confrontations. The author’s characteristic attention to life’s details and emotional writing is what readers praise most about this book; the author himself treats Hidden Kill as a work written “purely for relaxation,” with a tone that is self-mocking and also tinged with nostalgia for a vanished boyhood. This entry refers to the complete web version serialized on Qidian. The book was also published in Traditional Chinese in Taiwan under the title King of Assassins.