Sin of the Immortals

Sin of the Immortals is a long web novel by the online author Yu Zhongyu, serialized on Qidian from December 2015 and completed in September 2016, totaling about 858,500 Chinese characters and 308 main chapters. The story revolves around the youth Shu Yu: a mysterious sandalwood ring falls into his hands and from then on changes the ordinary course of his life. The novel is set in a future world where immortals, demons, and cultivators have been "contained" and "put on display"; the once lofty Immortal Emperors and Demon Sovereigns are confined in a park called "Divine-Demonic Paradise" for people to gawk at, and Shu Yu begins as a grassroots administrator in the park. As the plot advances, through the ring and a dimensional system called VS100, he gradually masters the ability to connect the data world with the real world, becoming an outlier who "cultivates through the way of the hacker," and is thereby drawn into a multi-sided game involving immortals and demons, ancient gods, and the order of the Human Sovereign. The work's core selling point is the "triple identity"; the protagonist Shu Yu wins more through strategy, information, and data analysis, and beyond action scenes it emphasizes the imagination of code, data entities, and interaction with reality. The book consists of volumes such as "Sin in Arrogance" and "The Price of Hypocrisy," and the final chapter closes with "Regaining Order, a Brand-New Thirty-Three Heavens," returning to the themes of rebuilding order and atonement.