Converging Currents

Converging Currents is an urban fantasy light novel by web writer Qi Ye Cha, serialized on Qidian and completed. It is regarded as the sequel to Downstream and belongs to the author's Eastern "Night Clan" works. The title comes from the book's motto: "Go with the current without pride, go against it without yielding; with and against the current as one—the way of the undefeated." The story begins with Xi Ye, an ordinary university student in a city of the Qing Kingdom: eating wontons at a street stall outside campus in an almost eccentric manner, he encounters a frail flower-selling girl whose age is impossible to tell. The girl is in fact an orphan girl under someone's control, and through her Xi Ye meets his sharp-fighting cousin Hui Ye, and together they are drawn into an effort to rescue her, the story gradually sliding from the daily life of this pair of cousins into a larger vortex. The work continues the series' established Night Clan setting, with the main cast undergoing transformation-related bodily changes; the narrative switches back and forth between the humor and banter of campus daily life and hard-edged elements such as otherworldly adventure, mecha battles, supernatural units, and nanotechnology, with mystery, revenge, and conspiracy interwoven, including biohazard-style disaster scenes and the crisis of a city falling. The author handles tense plots in a light, humorous tone, with concise, brisk language and tight pacing, the characters growing up amid their banter. The main text runs about 800,000-plus characters, concluding with the "Night Refining" storyline. The book is a purely online serial; no officially published simplified Chinese print edition has been found, and what circulates on the market is mostly reader-proofread electronic full texts.