Thunder God of the Overbearing Heavens

Thunder God of the Overbearing Heavens is an Eastern fantasy novel by Xiao Qian, written after his A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality. It was serialized exclusively on Zongheng Chinese from April 24, 2014, to its conclusion on October 31, 2015, running to about 3.03 million Chinese characters; a traditional-character print edition was released in Taiwan. The story begins in Tiger Cliff Fort deep in the forest: remote and prowled by fierce beasts, it forces its hunters to stock food before the cold season arrives each year. The boy Lei Xingfeng makes his living by hunting and is a newly risen young master archer, and everything begins to change with the Star Python Record in his grandfather's hands. At sixteen or seventeen, Lei Xingfeng is led by his grandfather onto the path of cultivating "wheel force," gradually reveals a talent tied to thunder and lightning, and encounters unique methods such as the thunder seal and thunder wheel force amid a family crisis. Built on a cultivation hierarchy of "hundred-wheel master—thousand-wheel master—ten-thousand-wheel master—secret-wheel master—true body of rings one through nine—true lord—heavenly lord—dao lord—king," the work strings together adventures and clashes of power involving secret realm spaces, underground trading, mining-vein seizures, the starry void beyond the realm, and ancient ruins, while also tracing the mutual support between the protagonist and his companions and kin and the gradual unraveling of the mystery of his origins. Compared with Xiao Qian's earlier works, this book breaks new ground in cultivation tiers, magical-treasure design, and the scale of its starry world, making it a long-form attempt at "redefinition" after Xiao Qian's return to the cultivation genre.