Overlord of Magical Beasts

Overlord of Magical Beasts is a long fantasy web novel by Gao Po. It was serialized on Qidian from May 5, 2008, to its conclusion in October 2009, running to roughly 2.67 million characters across more than eight hundred chapters. The story follows Yang Ling, a young man from the modern city who inadvertently comes into possession of a mysterious witch tower and is swept into the otherworldly continent of Tailun. By accident he crosses the threshold of witchcraft cultivation and becomes a "blood witch," able to tame magical beasts with a drop of his blood. Where others can summon at most one or two familiars, he can use witch power and the essence blood of magical beasts to tame thousands upon thousands of them, binding flying spiders, red-haired wolf spiders, beholder tyrants, dryad guards and even dragons to his service and organizing them into mutually supporting legions of magical beasts. Trading on the world's mistaken belief that he is an "ancient summoner" or "tree herder," Yang Ling gains a foothold in this other world: from a desperate struggle for survival in the Tela Forest, to entanglement in the open and covert strife between empires and nobles, to the founding of a domain of magical beasts that is his own. Along the way he forms bonds with the elf girl Sophia, the heavenly fox Yuna, the maid Alice and others, while contending with the Anka family, the forces of the Church, and the deeper powers of Masters and Arbiters. Built on the framework of "witch tower—bloodline—legion," the story ascends from blood witch through successive ranks to the Heaven-Connecting Witch Sovereign, and ultimately unravels the secret of the ancient witch clan that crossed the star sea, leaving behind corpses and a road home to their native land. The book is one of the representative early Chinese web novels of the "summoning" and "beast-taming" schools: bold in imagination, brisk in pace, dense in gratifying payoffs, and written in a distinctly old-school web-fiction style.