The Age of Magic

The Age of Magic is a long fantasy novel by web author zhttty, serialized on Qidian since 2003. Conceived before his breakthrough work Terror Infinity, it belongs with Terror Infinity and The Beginning of Death to what the author calls the "Infinity Trilogy" creative system. The book runs to more than 1.64 million characters in 491 chapters and is complete. The protagonist, Da Yunyang, is an ordinary student put into cryogenic sleep by his father; when he wakes eight hundred years later, Earth has become a world of magic, knights, and mighty Heaven-Rank powers. Starting as a boy encountering magic for the first time, he is drawn into the conflicts of the Kalan Continent and the states of Jinghua: succession struggles, slave emancipation, reforms of entrenched power, the Northern Queen's wars to unify the north, and confrontations with angelic, demonic, and even abyssal forces. The work builds a tiered magic system progressing through cultivators, warriors, knights, sub-Heaven Rank, minor Heaven Rank, and great Heaven Rank, supplemented by heterodox "ability users" who trade cost for power, with grand foreshadowing involving Observers, causality, space-time coordinates, and multiversal levels. The author states that the whole book is written as a "game within a game": the first half looks like a conventional progression story, while layer upon layer of foreshadowing is gathered up later. The line "If nothing is truly right, then nothing is truly wrong" sets the tone of the entire work.