Shrouding the Heavens

I was still in college when I first read Shrouding the Heavens.

One afternoon, I was lying around in my dorm with nothing to do. I opened Qidian on a whim and saw that Chen Dong had just launched a new novel. I already knew him as a writer with an eye for scale, and Shrouding the Heavens showed that strength from the beginning.

Nine enormous dragon corpses, hauling an ancient bronze coffin through the depths of space.

The image felt immense, oppressive, and full of mystery. In Chinese web-fiction circles today, people often talk about the “golden first three chapters,” the opening stretch that convinces a reader to stay. I was not thinking about writing technique at the time. I simply wanted to know what was inside that coffin and where the nine dragons were taking it.

I did stop reading later. I dropped the novel somewhere around the arc involving the Azure Emperor’s heart. The early pace could be slow, some of the conflicts felt repetitive, and the reasons certain antagonists had for going after Ye Fan were often rather thin.

Following the novel as it was being published made those problems harder to ignore. A single sequence could take several days of updates to finish. Sometimes I had to go back and reread earlier chapters just to remember how it had started. I do not hold that entirely against the book. Long-running serials often feel different when you read a few chapters a day instead of having a large backlog waiting for you.

I did not return until the serialization had reached Ye Fan’s journey back to Earth. By then, I had plenty of chapters to catch up on. As I worked through that backlog, I found my rhythm with the novel again during the stone-gambling arc, where Ye Fan uses the mysterious Source Arts to judge what lies inside uncut source stones. From there, the story began to gather momentum, and the ideas introduced earlier started to connect.

The scale of the world is still what I love most about Shrouding the Heavens. The story begins on Earth, moves to the cultivation world of Beidou, and eventually expands across the stars. The farther Ye Fan travels, the more the universe opens around him.

The Life Forbidden Zones made an especially strong impression on me. Hidden inside them are ancient Supremes who once stood unrivaled in their own eras. After surviving for ages, they prolong their lives by devouring the life essence of ordinary beings, unleashing the catastrophes known as the Dark Turmoil. These were figures who had once reached the summit of cultivation. In the end, they became the kind of beings their younger selves might have despised. I still find that idea powerful.

Chen Dong also knows how to write a battle on a truly enormous scale. When Ye Fan faces the imprints of ancient emperors during his breakthroughs, the whole of heaven and earth seems to enter the fight with him. I can no longer remember which chapter every battle appeared in, but I can still picture many of them.

That may be one reason readers react so strongly when a screen adaptation gets the imagery wrong. By the time a novel reaches the screen, its readers have already staged those scenes in their heads. No single adaptation can match all the versions people have been carrying around for years.

The Black Emperor is memorable for completely different reasons. He is a shameless black dog who constantly threatens to take people as his “human pets.” He is rude, greedy, and always looking for an advantage, yet he can be remarkably dependable when it matters. Perhaps I read too many Chinese myths as a child, but he always made me think of the old image of a celestial dog swallowing the sun. That association is entirely my own.

Ye Fan’s return to Earth has stayed with me for a different reason. There is an old Chinese saying.

“The tree wishes to be still, but the wind will not stop. The child wishes to care for his parents, but they are no longer there.”

After enduring countless dangers to cross the stars and return home, Ye Fan discovers that his parents have died after years of searching and waiting for him. He now possesses power beyond anything an ordinary person could imagine. He can cross distant star systems, yet he could not get home while his parents were still alive. That sorrow has stayed with me longer than many of the novel’s battles.

Chen Dong later expanded the setting through Perfect World and The Sacred Ruins. The three novels share characters, history, and a much larger timeline, and readers often group them together as the Shrouding the Heavens trilogy.

Shrouding the Heavens also left an extraordinary number of memes behind in Chinese online culture. Phrases about suffering “an ominous fate in old age” and mock titles ending in “Great Emperor” escaped the fandom years ago and are still used elsewhere online.

My favorite is probably the “Parking Lot Great Emperor.” Ye Fan drives his Mercedes to Mount Tai before the Nine Dragons carry him away from Earth, leaving the car behind in a parking lot. Readers invented a story about the poor attendant cultivating for countless years and becoming a Great Emperor, all so he could wait for Ye Fan to return and finally collect the overdue parking fee. The joke has circulated among Chinese readers for years. It still makes me laugh. At this point, Mercedes probably owes Chen Dong some advertising money.

The novel’s weaknesses are much easier to see today. The beginning is slow, the cast is enormous, and some antagonists have little motivation beyond creating the next conflict. Many ideas that felt exciting at the time have also been repeated by so many later web novels that a new reader may wonder what once made them special. Those flaws are real. They were enough to make me stop reading while the novel was still being serialized.

I came back anyway. Once I reached the stone-gambling chapters, the story kept opening outward. The Life Forbidden Zones, the Dark Turmoil, and the ancient Supremes gradually came into view, and the patience demanded by the early chapters began to pay off.

I have forgotten a great deal of Shrouding the Heavens over the years. I still remember lying in that college dorm and seeing the nine dragon corpses pulling a bronze coffin through space for the first time. That is reason enough for me to keep recommending it.