Tales of the Blue Lantern

Tales of the Blue Lantern is a supernatural novel by Chen Zhong (pen name Junzi Wuzui), serialized and completed on Qidian in 2013. It runs to about 570 chapters and more than 1.69 million Chinese characters, and was published in print by Jiuzhou Press that December under the title Tales of the Blue Lantern: Strange and Uncanny Things in the Countryside. The protagonist, Fang Datong, is a kind of Zhong Kui reborn: born with the gift of second sight, he can sense the uncanny world and speak with ghosts, and wandering spirits come to him one after another to air their grievances. To win them justice, he studies hard and comes into possession of a secret ancient book, Tales of the Blue Lantern, along with such ritual tools as the yin-yang ruler. From there he enters the world of ghosts and demons: speaking with the dead, conversing in ghost tongue, descending into hell and entering underground palaces, living through one bizarre rural episode after another—the Nine Yin Ghost Domain, the Forest of Rotting Corpses, the Corpse-Driving Inn, the Venomous Insect Mountains. The stories feature loyal and righteous ghosts as well as cunning, treacherous spirits, muddled and ignorant souls, and despicable, shameless people. The author tells it all in a folksy voice, weaving local legends and strange tales together with the plain belief that good and evil are repaid. Many readers describe it as "like an old man telling stories under a tree." The work has been played more than a hundred million times on audio platforms and stands as one of the more representative online supernatural works of the early 2010s. (Note: the versions circulating online are mostly the complete serialized text; the print edition was issued volume by volume, and this entry corresponds to the first volume of the series.)