Demon Refining

Demon Refining is a long Western fantasy novel by the web author Nuanfeng, first serialized and completed on Qidian.com, running about 1.5 million-plus characters. The story opens with a summoning spell going wildly awry: an ordinary college student, Li Xuefeng, is supposed to be summoned by a demon princess to serve as her familiar, but due to a slip of the tongue while the princess chants the spell, he is flung from the abyss into another wholly unfamiliar plane. Stranded in the wilderness, Li Xuefeng soon discovers that in this place where spells drive all things, he possesses the talent of an alchemist—he can reshape matter by force of will, turning leaves into clothing and ordinary materials into implements. With this ability, he is brought by the ranger Agri into Black Sun City, home to hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, where he meets all manner of residents—minotaurs, elves, half-elves—and is drawn into assorted schemes revolving around alchemy and planar magic. A half-human, half-demon Hovlin girl, a mature and alluring dark elf, and a mysterious little girl guarded by an abyssal powerhouse successively enter his life, blade-flash and tender feeling interwoven. Setting his stage in a medieval-style Western fantasy world, the author weaves together the deduction of alchemy, the power struggles of a city, and the layer-by-layer revelation of a planar conspiracy, with brisk pacing and a light tone; it is one of the more representative early Western fantasy works on Qidian.