Tribulation of Myriad Races

I. Overview

Tribulation of Myriad Races is a Chinese web-novel colossus that fuses the school-progression story with an endless interstellar species war. Picture a magical-academy series where the students are scholars who reverse-engineer the languages, arts, and powers of conquered alien races, all set against a humanity fighting for survival across the stars. The story follows Su Yu, an eighteen-year-old from a border city whose father marches back to the front against the myriad races just as Su Yu’s own strange gift wakes up. His edge is a dream-bound compendium that lets him borrow the talents of the very enemies humanity fears, and he turns stolen power into his own long climb.

The opening keeps things small and human, then the war takes over. Su Yu shares a cramped, bickering dinner with his veteran father, who re-enlists at fifty to rejoin the Demon-Suppressing Army. Su Yu then carries a decade-old nightmare of being hunted by creatures that are not quite human. He aims for a safe rear post as a civilization researcher, but the academy drags him into a bitter feud between the multi-script faction and the single-script establishment, and those safe steps only pull him toward the battlefield he wanted to avoid.

Su Yu’s world widens by layers, from a single bedroom in Nanyuan City to the lecture halls of Great Xia Civilization Academy, outward to the thirty-odd human prefectures, then past the front line onto the Heavens Battlefield and its thirty-six dead-spirit cities, upward into the upper realm and the cosmic architecture of the Three Gates, until Su Yu stops climbing someone else’s ladder and opens his own heaven as Emperor Yu.

Su Yu runs a cunning game and keeps a warm heart. He blackmails his rivals, fights under borrowed names, and protects the few people he calls his own with frightening focus, while the comic bickering of the old monsters around him keeps the long road from feeling hollow. One thread runs the whole book: a son who promised to become a live-in husband and cut his father’s family line if the old man never came home, and a hero who named himself the calamity of the myriad races.

II. Highlights

The father who marched back to war

The very first scene drops you in a tiny kitchen where Su Yu’s burly father cooks dinner in a frilly apron and announces he has re-enlisted for the front. The man brags he will kill a few Wanshi-rank warriors just to prove a point, then walks out the door like he is taking out the trash. Su Yu, panicked, shouts that if his father dies out there he will marry into another family and end the Su line. It is funny and quietly devastating, and it sets the book’s stakes in one room.

The nightmare that would not end

For more than ten years Su Yu has fallen asleep to the same terror: being hunted through the dark by monsters that are not human. The dream turns out to be a gift in disguise, a compendium that records the talents of the races that hunt him and lets him wake up able to use them. Watching a scared scholarship student realize his torture is actually a weapon is the spark that launches everything after it.

Coming home to his own ruin

Midway through, Su Yu returns to his old neighborhood wearing a stolen identity, only to find his family’s building emptied and half-collapsed after treasure hunters died probing it for a relic. He strolls through the wreckage claiming out loud that the ruin is his family’s secret inheritance, deadpan and shameless, while the guards wonder if he is a fool or a menace. The scene shows how far he has come: the boy who feared the dark now walks his own destroyed home as a weapon.

Emperor Yu counts to three

Late in the war, Su Yu sits in a war council as Emperor Yu and lays out a plan to erase seven Hedao-rank dragon commanders in three minutes. He opens his Heaven Gate, reads the enemy’s Daos across the distance like marks on a map, and assigns each ally a single target with the cold confidence of someone who has already won. The trickster from chapter one now moves armies the way he once moved classmates.