Twelve Heavenly Tribulations

Twelve Heavenly Tribulations is an urban supernatural novel by Ma Liujia_, a contracted author on Heiyan Reading Network. Serialization began in 2015 and concluded in November 2022, totaling 1,231 chapters, with word counts on various platforms ranging from 3.1 million to 3.2 million characters. The story begins at a nightclub called "Huadu" in the city's university district: the protagonist, Ma Zhuizhu, was born during a torrential rainstorm that washed away the pigsty, and at his first-month celebration a fortune-teller pronounced a four-line prophecy saying he "courts the Five Communications" and would die in a house of ill repute at twenty, leaving the verdict that "if you meet a woman who walks without her heels touching the ground, your life is forfeit." At twenty, he indeed takes a job as an internal security guard at "Huadu," and after a Qixi party a chain of strange events unfolds: the cashier receives hell money bearing the Jade Emperor's image for days on end, the security chief Old Ding dies suddenly after going out with a short-haired woman who walks on tiptoe, and a crying sound with feet not touching the ground and a ghost car appear at the entrance. He picks up a bookmark said to have been left by Daoist Master Yang, which Xiaoru identifies as a clue deliberately left by his uncle, drawing him into tracing Master Yang's legacy and unraveling his own fate. As elements such as the Maoshan Five Ghosts soul-summoning technique, the spirit-separation formation, the Celestial Master's seal, immortal corpses, the six demonic ritual vessels, and the catastrophe of weapons successively appear, the worldview of the "Heavenly Punishment Bureau" and the "Twelve Guardians" unfolds, and the events escalate from street-level strange tales to a "heavenly tribulation" concerning the survival of the Daoist order and even of the human world, finally concluding in "Final Volume: The Last Defender of the Way." The book is narrated in the first person, colloquial and steeped in street flavor, with suspense and deduction as the main line and themes of karmic retribution woven throughout.