The Demon Hunter's Notebook

The Demon Hunter's Notebook is a long post-apocalyptic novel by the web author Yanyu Jiangnan, first serialized on 17K Novel Network in 2009. A print edition in four volumes was published by Shanghai Jinxiu Wenzhang Publishing House in 2010. The full work runs to roughly 2.16 million characters across 567 chapters. The story takes place on Earth after a nuclear war: radiation is everywhere, the genes of species have mutated on a massive scale, the order of human civilization has collapsed entirely, and the law of the jungle is the only rule left. A mysterious young man named Su comes from the wilderness, working at a mine in exchange for food and water to raise an infant girl with special abilities. After he brings her into the town of Yoxton, he is drawn step by step into the struggles among the factions of human survivors. Relying on an advancement ability with no upper limit, Su navigates among a tangled array of forces—the Dark Dragon Knights, the Inquisition, the Bloody Council, the Holy Light Crusaders, the Apostles—and rises from a wilderness survivor to a figure who shapes the world order. In his consistently refined and incisive prose, Yanyu Jiangnan evokes the gray, oppressive, and brutal atmosphere of the wasteland while probing human nature, desire, and value: when desire loses its shackles, there is no road forward—hell on the left, and hell on the right. The work is regarded as one of the representative novels of the Chinese web fiction apocalypse genre.