#Yi want to go fast but not SO fast that he kills you by accident

[yi-dashi]

On Master Yi’s Combat Prowess

One.

//I’m sure I’ve made posts in the past about Yi’s abilities and how they translate to headcanon, but I figured I’d reiterate for the sake of having it on this new blog. That, and so I can remember. I was just going to post about his healing powers, but I figured I’d work through his in-game abilities as a whole. It’s fun to discuss, because I like laughing at how dumb and broken some of his abilities are when considered for their greatest narrative potential. Or at least, it’s fun to discuss how to you make wuju practitioners miserable create consequences for dumb broken abilities.

  But anyways. General Wuju technique primer inbound, plus the problem Yi has made of his Ult.

  The ultimate philosophy of Wuju as a martial art is to coalesce thoughts and action into one. That is to say, Practitioners value instantaneous resolutions, as well as internal and external awareness of as many simultaneous things as possible. Over time in canon this has been called Absolute Spiritual Awareness, both of one’s self and one’s enemy. I’ve always taken it in a less literal sense, especially as Wuju evolves to be a non violent art form. An enemy is metaphorical for any other entity, real or imagined, that might come into conflict with one’s perception or protection of logic. The most important factors of every day life are how you feel about something, whether it is logical to feel that way, and how that comes together with your intuition about everything else. To know you don’t know is considered Aware, oh boy, even if there is a negative category for such Awareness.

  Ideas or people are either superior or inferior, and there is no gradient in between. Every problem needs only one solution, because why spend time thinking of more than one? Better ones might come, but all the nuances of Wuju begin when they must try to consider A over B and admit someone was wrong. To a Wuju Practitioner the fastest solution is often considered the most superior, even if another solution might be more ethically sound or have a lower skill bracket. Of course, the faster you execute on a plan, the less time others have to retaliate, and the less variables the Practitioner has to calculate. This underpins every technique the art has. The goal is to find the strategy that works for as many conflicts as possible, memorize any common variables, and execute it perfectly every time. One mistake and you might die, but then you might also have deserved it for a lack of Awareness. Cautionary tales are a staple of Wuju.

  Wuju is ultimately a magical discipline though, even if they would tell you otherwise. Whatever spiritual or magical constructs that surround its Practitioners feed on literalism, and rigidity of thought. While the physical training certainly plays a role in both their speed and dexterity, their devotion to specific patterns in combat are basically the rituals that enhance their skills further. They give their way of thinking power through their reverence to symbolism they consider unarguably correct, which in turn feeds into their stern black and white thinking. With that, what Yi might call ‘The Way of the Highlander’ is this ritualism taking form. His ultimate ability is his Absolute Spiritual Awareness, even if his Masters wouldn't agree with its form.

  While it doesn’t switch off his freedom of thought completely, it heightens his tactical and physical abilities such that they come as naturally as breathing. It’s a feeling of euphoria that pumps him right up, making him feel invincibly superior. He can’t be slowed or tripped, because its almost as if he already knows how someone might do these things to him. Nearly ghost-like, there are some interactions similar to the Alpha Strike and its realm hopping too. That’s not even considering the insight he gains from being able to view magic through the lenses. He can move to the absolute limit of his physical ability, aided by magical counterbalances. They don’t regard his general health very much, but they utilize his form to its breaking point. Unless taken off guard by something even magically altered senses couldn’t predict, he is generally in a state of tactical advantage over any normal foe. Many other champ abilities might catch him off guard, unless they play into his ability to avoid entanglement by subtle realm shifting.

  He thinks of this as a technique of his own design, as it came naturally from his time in active combat. If a Master looked at him though, they’d be horrified. To be in this state is the number one demonstration of your Wuju mastery. But that being said, the way this ritual magic manifested in Yi incentivizes him to kill, and continue killing for as long as possible. Any other Wuju Master would give life to this magic through nonlethal demonstrations of swordplay, or otherwise harmless pursuits like dance and musical arts, written and knowledge works, or general athletics. It would be unthinkable in the art for Yi to use it violently, let alone to have his Mastery defined by this. Yi is only somewhat aware of this himself, though only through the vague notion that his Masters would not have wanted him to kill. He was never trained this far to know what is truly happening to him. For him to discover this, it would be a matter of piecing together burned parchment that was ancient before it was destroyed.

  At this point though, the damage is mostly done. He has to fight himself to not enter this heightened state fully, as he is more likely to end someone’s life before he can conceive of a non violent solution. That’s not to mention how Wuju, when used to its fullest, can injure him, though that’s a discussion for later. It is a technique born of slaughtering large groups of people at once with reckless abandon, and as such calling upon it expects the slaughter to continue. Over time he might be able to change his baked perception of combat, but it is a long journey to change a ritual. The meaning has already been spoken to magic. His best solution currently is to keep himself grounded, such that a situation can be considered for the sum of its parts. The ‘fastest solution’ aided him and his country in the past, but today he wants to humble himself back to Wuju’s roots.

  The blade is too sacred to spill a drop of blood, yet his always seem to thrive on it.

[tartagilicious]

𝐯𝐲𝐧'𝐬 𝐧𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐟𝐚𝐫 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐝, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐰𝐡𝐲 𝐢𝐭 𝐦𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐠𝐨 𝐚𝐬 𝐟𝐚𝐫 𝐚𝐬 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤 ;) (𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐬𝐢𝐬)

-> haha see what i did there? anyways, as of today i'm resuming my post of #1 mo yi apologist with an analysis of his permanent SSR, "Near and Far". :) requested by anonymous!

-> starting off, i'll recap the date so those who haven't had the pleasure of receiving it and/or haven't read the date are also up to speed!

-> when this card appears, and also in the date's video call, this one line appears as a teaser of sorts for the date: "a scar in exchange for never forgetting me? a bargain."

-> the date itself features the MC and Vyn, visiting a patient named Kirstie with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) at a psychiatric hospital, whom was placed there by the courts after being on trial for murdering her boyfriend. Artem was able to prove the woman "insane", letting her avoid jail. (not literally insane, of course, this term is just used in law to describe any individual that is not in their right mind for any reason)

-> for a time it was thought that her alter, modeled after her alcoholic father's behaviour, was the perpetrator and not the soft spoken woman she was otherwise. she was pitied a lot for this.

-> the MC wanted to get to know the situation better, and asked to be alone with the woman. Vyn gave her permission, but said he would check the woman's medical records in the meantime and be reachable just in case.

-> while out on a walk together, they chat, and eventually Kirstie asks the MC if she can call her "big sister". the MC hesitates, but either way, this gets a rise out of another, previously unknown, third alter that claims to actually be Kirstie's biological older sister who died along with their father in a car accident. Later, she collaterally admits that she had caused the accident to get their father away from Kirstie.

-> she's angry that her little sister wants to replace her, and in her anger she reveals that it wasn't the "father alter" that had killed Kirstie's boyfriend, it was her. She claims that he hadn't been good enough for her and slept around, hence she felt that she had done her little sister a favour.

-> after admitting this, she comes at the MC with a knife she pulls from her sleeve, only for Vyn to interrupt and use his arm as a shield. the MC is worried about Vyn and tells him was the sister has just admitted, but he doesn't seem surprised and says that they'll deal with it later.

-> after disarming and sedating Kirstie, he explains that the sister is extremely possessive of Kirstie, and was triggered by Kirstie's want to the MC her equal. All this time, the father had taken the blame for the murder as the more open and presently violent alter, to keep both her and Kirstie guilt free in the eyes of the law.

-> Vyn then says that alters do not share memories, so the trial was complicated.

-> The MC notes that he put it all together rather quickly, but assumes it's due to his skill and moves on. She then asks how he got there so fast, and he says he was already heading over because he had finished checking Kirstie's records.

-> The MC then tends to Vyn's wound, and there's a tender moment where he stares directly at her, smiling slightly.

-> After the fact, the MC visit's Kirstie's room once she's calmed down, and she asks MC to apologise to Vyn on her behalf for causing him harm. This raises red flags, because he had said previously that alters do not share memories. She tells Vyn this, and they talk about it.

-> Vyn admits that Kirstie never had a sister, and believes that she was created as a self-defence mechanism against her violent father. He also thinks that Kirstie herself caused her father's accident by tampering with the car, but at the time, was unable to differentiate between herself and the sister character she had adopted.

-> He then reassures her that this discovery will not get Kirstie in trouble, and will rather help her because it will adjust the treatments she's receiving. Vyn apologises for "what you had to go through today." and says that he was imprudent to leave her alone without supervision.

-> Vyn visits Kirstie one last time, and is cold with her, telling her to drop her act. He's agitated because Kirstie frightened the MC, which he didn't expect and expresses his displeasure about. Kirstie accuses him of using the MC to wake the sister, and he says that her theory is true.

-> He says that his reasoning was that she had hidden the sister's personality too well, and that he needed to get a rise out of her in a creative way. It's then revealed that the innocent and shy Kirstie was actually the fake sister, whereas the violent "sister" character was Kirstie's true personality.

-> "You will live out the rest of your life in this place, filled with regrets and guilt. I deem it a befitting atonement for taking the life of a young man who loved you with all his heart."

-> Kirstie calls him a madman for trying to play god, to which he responds that she's his most interesting patient. she says that he should be modest and that she'll drag him down to rock bottom someday. he responds by saying she needs to give it her best shot.

-> onto the actual analysis!! classic vyn, am i right? hahahaha *gets war flashbacks* this date seems to go back to his roots with the rose in a petri dish metaphor, wherein he believes in your ability to the extent that he's willing to put you in danger (while he's nearby, ofc, but does that make it any better)

-> and let me just set this straight, i don't wanna defend this!! this is insane!! is this man really a psychiatrist because this is some manipulative supervillain bs. vyn are you hiding a deathray somewhere be honest.

-> thankfully, we do have reason to believe that that tears of themis CGs are canonically in a chronological order, since in marius' anniversary card, he mentions past in-game events. this means, because this is one of the cards that came out with the game itself, it also represents Vyn in the early stages of the game. (plus i personally doubt he'd ever put the mc in danger again after chapter 4 of his personal story, but that's just me asdfhj)

-> and bringing up the line, "a scar in exchange for never forgetting me? a bargain." again, this also suggests that they've met just recently. and don't get me wrong, it's a charming line and i doubt i'll ever think otherwise, but it has layers. not manipulative ones though, as i reasonably doubt that he planned to get himself hurt.

-> it would be rational to say that since he was luring Kirstie's real personality out, he could've expected her to get violent and stayed close so that he could intercept it. but he does tell Kirstie that he didn't think she would harm anyone, so my guess is that he just didn't expect his plan to actually work. either way, it still doesn't explain the lack of worry for the MC after the fact in my opinion. maybe he's just confident in his ability to swoop in and protect, i don't know

-> but onto the events of the date -- i didn't mention this explicitly, but it does say in the game that Vyn invited the MC to the hospital, as in meeting the patient was wholly his idea. it might not mean much at first considering we all know how the date ends, but i think it's worth mentioning because it's evidence that this is one of vyn's little plots.

-> hence, i'm pretty much certain that there were no medical records of Kirstie's to actually check. If he thought that he knew the situation well enough to use the MC to experiment with his theory, there's nothing he should even hypothetically need in her records.

-> although i am curious what he actually did. was he waiting in the bushes for Kirstie to show her true self? did he follow them the entire time? very questionable.

-> but, what i find weird is that after he shields her, he doesn't exactly tell the mc the truth. he says that the sister figure is possessive of Kirstie, but didn't feel the need to fill her in on anything else. It's kind of questionable as to whether or not he ever would've told her at all had Kirstie not made the comment about remembering Vyn's injury first.

-> then when the mc tends to his injury, it kind of reminded me of "fake tears"... obviously the wound was real, but it didn't cause him any actual harm. he even reassured the mc of this fact multiple times. and it's not like he played it up or anything, he kind of just let the mc worry without giving any reassurement past "eh it's not as bad as it looks, as long as you're okay". so idk. not exactly bad perse but still kind of strange. i guess this was also technically pre "fake tears", so who knows, maybe this situation gave him the idea lolol

-> also i'm sorry but he looks like a lizard in the card's evolved version. it's unsettling. ily anyway vyn <3

-> also, when he explained everything to the MC about Kristie's situation towards the end, it was very cute because she still felt bad and he apologised to her genuinely. with that one expression, yk, the warm almost blushing one. 🙄🙄🙄 i guess ill forgive you for almost killing me, as a treat.

-> then his convo with Kirstie at the end 😭😭like damn bro i know she's a criminal but telling her to rot in the mental hospital is kinda a lot LMAO like he's right but as soon as she threatened the MC (WHICH HE BASICALLY ORCHESTRATED BTW) that was the ultimate dealbreaker that brought out mean vyn. like aww if it isn't the conseqences of my own actions :(((((

-> old vyn sucks, we don't like old vyn. he was giving, i'm a psychiatrist because i'm robotic and want to understand my own emotions. and good for him but like. we almost die numerous times during this era because of his little experiments. not cool if you ask me.

[veliseraptor]

Hi! Can you give a brief spoilery summary of the Untamed? I just read [the pretties from your posts] died? Oh no. I tried getting information through google but it’s confusing for someone who doesn’t know the characters.

oh lord. there are all kinds of ‘brief summaries of the Untamed’ out there but I’ve always found them vaguely irritating so...I guess that means it’s time for my comeuppance in the form of having to do it myself? I’ll do my best.

I didn’t know how detailed you wanted me to get so I decided to get pretty detailed, since you did ask for spoilery. so this is like. entirely spoilers. spoilers for everything.

also, you can use, if it’s helpful, my brief character overview (‘brief’) which includes some plot information, and could be useful as cross reference also. I’m playing pretty fast and loose with a lot of terminology for the sake of intelligibility, because otherwise this would get even longer and have a lot more links.

also, because you asked me specifically for this, it’s going to have some bias. I tried to keep my interpretive commentary to a relative minimum? but. uh. yeah.

the briefest basic plot overview is (going off The Untamed canon, which you will also see abbreviated as CQL from the pinyin transliteration of the Chinese title (Chen Qing Ling)):

Wei Wuxian, a cultivation (think, loosely, magic) prodigy and creator of his own particular style of cultivation, dies reviled by most of the known world. Sixteen years later he’s raised from the dead by Mo Xuanyu, an outcast and the bastard son of one of the leaders of the main sects of the cultivation world, in order to take revenge on Mo Xuanyu’s enemies (specifically his abusive family and ~an unknown person~).

And here is where we get into the details.

Pretty much immediately upon Wei Wuxian’s resurrection, people start dying at Mo Manor, before Wei Wuxian has even done anything, because of (it turns out) a very angry spirit of a semi-sentient weapon. Wei Wuxian books it out of town after his old best friend/crush Lan Wangji shows up to help the Lan ducklings he’s shepherding (including most notably Lan Sizhui and Lan Jingyi, the only named characters of that bunch), only to wind up running into him again on the road - and not only him, but his orphaned nephew (shorthand, go with it) Jin Ling (Wei Wuxian was responsible for his parents’ deaths) and Jiang Cheng, his martial brother who (at least according to rumor) killed him sixteen years ago and still bears a hell of a grudge. In order to save Jin Ling, Wei Wuxian summons the “Ghost General” Wen Ning, who was supposed to be destroyed and whose presence confirms his identity to a very pissed off Jiang Cheng. Lan Wangji recognizes Wei Wuxian as well. Wei Wuxian passes out.

followed any of that? no? that’s fine, because now we’re heading into a thirty episode flashback that’ll clarify some things. (but not before you forget a whole bunch of things from the first two episodes.)

I’m going to split this into arcs. I’m also going to put this under a read more, because...yeah, this came out to just a little over 10,500 words. I’m...sorry.

have fun?

Cloud Recesses Summer School Arc

The time card says “sixteen years earlier” but it isn’t sixteen years earlier because that would make no sense, but it’s better to give up on timeline now or you’ll just drive yourself nuts.

This is the part of the show where you meet the main characters, some of whom you saw earlier (notably Jiang Cheng, Wei Wuxian’s younger sort-of brother), and some of whom you only know from reference (Jiang Yanli, Wei Wuxian’s older sort-of sister) and some of whom are significantly important (Lan Wangji). You also meet Jin Zixuan, the snotty heir to the Jin Sect, who will be important later. Jiang Yanli is clearly into him and he seems to very much not return the feelings.

At this point, there are five main sects that the characters belong to. They are (with the characters you’ve met from them so far: the Jiang Sect (Jiang Cheng, Wei Wuxian, and Jiang Yanli), the Nie Sect (Nie Huaisang, a flighty and sort of feckless fellow), the Jin Sect (Jin Zixuan, his social skills translator Mianmian), the Lan Sect (Lan Wangji, his brother Lan Xichen) as well as the Wen Sect (more on them in a moment). Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian meet and immediately...something. Wei Wuxian wants to make friends, and Lan Wangji seems to emphatically Not.

You also meet Meng Yao, who is Nie Huaisang’s brother Nie Mingjue’s right hand man, and also the bastard son of Jin Guangshan (the leader of Jin Sect). He is also the son of (using the words of literally everyone) a prostitute, which people remind him of at every possible moment, in case he was in danger of forgetting, or something. He and Lan Xichen have kind of a moment. 

Later on, members of the Wen Sect, led by Wen Chao storm in, posturing disrespectfully, and drop off Wen Qing to “learn” (but secretly she has a mission looking for the Yin Iron/Metal). The Wen are ascendant in power and seem to be flexing their muscle looking for trouble. 

Wen Qing comes as a set with her brother Wen Ning - the pair of them are from sort of...a secondary branch of the main Wen family, and she’s being coerced into supporting Wen Ruohan despite being not thrilled about it. Wei Wuxian bonds with Wen Qing’s younger brother Wen Ning, who has a weird situation that makes him vulnerable to possession (this is important later).

At one point Wei Wuxian proposes - in response to a question! He’s just being innovative! - to put it simply, necromancy, which is, to say the least, not a hit. Remember that for later!

Eventually, Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian end up falling by accident into some ice caves, where they learn from one of Lan Wangji’s ancestors (Lan Yi, she’s cool) about the Yin Iron, of which she has a piece. It is an spiritually corrupted metal that can’t be destroyed so it was broken into pieces and hidden in different places. Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji resolve jointly to find the other pieces.

Wei Wuxian, Jiang Yanli, and Jiang Cheng (henceforth “the Yunmeng siblings”) are picked up early by Jiang Yanli and Jiang Cheng’s dad (Jiang Fengmian) because Wei Wuxian causes problems both on purpose and not. Wei Wuxian, however, puts together that Lan Wangji is going off on his own chasing the Yin Iron, and ditches the rest of his family to go help.

Yin Iron Hunt Arc

Wei Wuxian meets up with Lan Wangji, who is not thrilled to see him (at least, apparently). They run into Nie Huaisang, who joins them. They come to a town where everyone seems to have vanished and there is nothing fishy going on in the cave with the statue that looks like a dancing lady at all. Meanwhile, Jiang Cheng leaves home to go track down Wei Wuxian and bring him back.

The statue comes to life, Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji fight together to defeat it, and then a bunch of...undead villagers (sort of, they get better) attack them, only to be lured away by Wen Qing playing a flute (this ability will never be brought up again). Jiang Cheng reveals himself as having been hanging out watching this go down. Ultimately, by killing the Stygian Pigeon that belongs to Wen Chao, the villagers are freed and they move on.

After a brief stopover in a village, they hear some rumors about a haunted house and take off to go check it out. When they get there, everyone is dead and Xue Yang is on the roof just kind of vibing. Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan manage to get him pinned down and taken captive. This is important and not just because I said so.

Nie Huaisang, who Wei Wuxian, Jiang Cheng, and Lan Wangji ditched in town, arrives here with Meng Yao, who proposes bringing Xue Yang to Nie Mingjue for justice purposes (which when I write it like that sounds...um. moving right along), which is where everyone heads next, less Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan who have their own things to do. Wei Wuxian realizes that Xiao Xingchen had the same master as his mother, and gets really excited about it; it’s adorable.

They go to Nie Mingjue, who is talked out of executing Xue Yang because they’re trying to find out where he put the Yin Iron (which they figure he has, because reasons. there are reasons, I just don’t feel like going into it.) Lan Wangji leaves in the night without saying goodbye, and then Wen Chao arrives. He is accompanied by Wen Zhuliu, who is called the Core-Melting Hand for reasons that will be important later. There’s a fight, Xue Yang gets loose, and Nie Mingjue finds Meng Yao in a very compromising position (killing a captain of the guard and among a bunch of other dead bodies). He kicks Meng Yao out of the Nie Sect.

Meanwhile, the Wens attack Cloud Recesses. Lan Xichen’s uncle makes him leave to preserve himself and the most important texts. Everyone retreats to a cave that’s hidden and walled off; Su She (who was introduced briefly earlier) caves to threats to his life and tells the Wens how to get into the Lan’s cave sanctuary. Lan Wangji returns with Lan Yi’s Yin Iron and gives it and himself up to Wen Chao’s older brother Wen Xu to spare everyone else.

Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian leave for home (Lotus Pier). We witness family dynamics, which are terrible. The Wens want everyone to send their kids, specifically their heirs, to be reeducated in Wen territory, but they’re not hostages, we swear. No, really.

Reeducation Camp Arc

To reeducation camp with the Wens we go! Where Lan Wangji is not looking so hot, and Wei Wuxian rapidly causes problems on purpose to try to get to talk to him, but mostly just ends up getting himself tossed in a dungeon where he gets attacked by a very bad puppet of a dog. Wen Qing has told Wen Ning not to associate with Wei Wuxian because they’re on thin ice with their boss (Wen Ruohan), but Wen Ning sneaks him some medicine against Wen Qing’s orders anyway.

They go on a hunt, with the non-Wens featuring as bait. Here is where you meet Wen Chao’s main squeeze Wang Lingjiao, who was formerly a servant. Everyone ends up in a cave that contains a creature whose name is unfortunately translated as “Tortoise of Slaughter.” we’ll go with “Xuanwu of Slaughter” instead, it feels better. Wen Chao and his accompanying entourage make a run for it and ditch everyone else in the cave; they manage to sneak out but Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji end up trapped with no way out. They team up and kill the Xuanwu, partially because Wei Wuxian acquires a very cursed sword. Afterward, he is feverish and asks Lan Wangji to sing - enter Wuji! their theme. You see Lan Wangji mouth that it is called “Wangxian” before Wei Wuxian passes out. (Yes, he did name his composition after their ship name. Aww.)

I’ve skated through that very fast but it is important because it’s like...the point where they seriously bond in a major way and it’s all very...like, there was only one bed only they’re trapped in a cave and injured and forced to rely on each other. So not actually really like that.

Wei Wuxian comes around outside of the cave with Jiang Cheng and Jin Zixuan, who brought help to rescue him and Lan Wangji; Lan Wangji, however, is gone.

Oh Shit Things Went Downhill Fast Arc

Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian go back to Lotus Pier, where Wei Wuxian is in big trouble with Jiang Cheng’s mother (Yu Ziyuan, seen later emotionally terrorizing all her children), who already doesn’t like him and accuses him of bringing trouble down on them by defying the Wens. Jiang Cheng’s dad is terrible, Wei Wuxian reaffirms that he and Jiang Cheng will be Together Forever, you, the viewer, know that is absolutely not how that’s going to go.

Word comes that the Wen have attacked one of the smaller sects, and Jiang Cheng’s dad (Jiang Fengmian) goes with Jiang Yanli to talk to Jin Guangshan about how to deal with the Wens.

Then Wang Lingjiao arrives with word that they’re gonna be in big trouble if they don’t punish Wei Wuxian right now. Yu Ziyuan uses her lightning whip to beat the shit out of Wei Wuxian, but Wang Lingjiao wants her to cut off his hand. Then she makes the mistake of saying that they’ll be making Lotus Pier a supervisory office of the Wens, thank you.

Yu Ziyuan reacts...poorly, Wang Lingjiao calls on her backup Wen Zhuliu (and everyone else); seeing the writing on the wall Yu Ziyuan grabs Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng, puts them on a boat, and sends them away, bequeathing her sick-ass lightning whip (Zidian) to Jiang Cheng. They run into Jiang Fengmian and Jiang Yanli; Jiang Fengmian adds Jiang Yanli to the boat full of crying children and goes to sail back to Lotus Pier.

Lotus Pier falls, everybody dies, Jiang Cheng goes semi-catatonic and then disappears, having been captured by the Wens after going back for his parents’ bodies. (Which is more important than it probably sounds, from a Western perspective.) Wei Wuxian follows him and finds Wen Ning, who smuggles Jiang Cheng out and takes him, Wei Wuxian, and Jiang Yanli to Wen Qing for safekeeping.

Jiang Cheng wakes up; his golden core (the...thing that lets him do superpowered things, let’s go with that) was destroyed by Wen Zhuliu. Melted, if you will. And it’s not the kind of thing you can just, you know, fix. He descends into absolute despair as Wei Wuxian looks frantically for a way to fix it - and finds one! Though Wen Qing is not happy about it, she still agrees.

at this point we see the return of an old friend! Song Lan, who has a bloody bandage over his eyes, but has eyes that work, despite the fact that he was blinded by Xue Yang who also killed his entire temple. He explains that Xiao Xingchen said that he was taking Song Lan to his master Baoshan Sanren, the immortal who can cure anything, and doesn’t remember anything else.

Wei Wuxian takes Jiang Cheng to Baoshan Sanren to get his core back. Psych! It’s a lie that he totally made up to explain the fact that he’s actually getting his own core transplanted into Jiang Cheng in a highly experimental procedure. Importantly, Wei Wuxian does not tell Jiang Cheng this.

Post-surgery, rather battered Wei Wuxian gets caught by Wen Chao and Wang Lingjiao, who torture him and then throw him into a place called the Burial Mounds, which is more or less what it sounds like, is Very Cursed, and from which no one has emerged alive. Then this happens:

(I want you to appreciate how hard I’ve tried to not put any screencaps in here. but I had to do this one. I just had to.)

and you go oh shit and also well that’s sexy.

Jiang Cheng, delighted to have his core back, descends the mountain only to find that Wei Wuxian is...not there.

Cool! That seems fine.

Sunshot Campaign Arc

Timeskip to three months later! The rest of the sects have allied together to take down the Wen Sect (this is what ‘Sunshot Campaign’ refers to, because the symbol of the Wens is a sun). Things aren’t looking good for the Wens, including Wen Chao and Wang Lingjiao. Wang Lingjiao hallucinates to the sound of a flute and ends up killing herself. Meanwhile, Lan Wangji and Jiang Cheng have teamed up to look for Wei Wuxian. On their way, they start finding piles of Wen bodies killed in a mysterious and grotesque manner involving an unfamiliar method of cultivation.

(Side note: around now is where Jiang Cheng frees Wen Qing from where she was imprisoned by the Wens for being a dirty traitor during the war and gives her the comb of pining he bought way back in the Cloud Recesses arc, telling her that he will help her if she asks. This isn’t...exactly important, except I wanted to note it.)

Eventually, they find a house where Wen Chao has holed up with Wen Zhuliu, and watch as it’s revealed that he has gone through some nasty shit, is terrified and traumatized and badly injured. Ominous signs: begin to happen! Flames going out: happen! Shots of someone climbing slowly and menacingly up stairs: happen! 

Yeah, it’s Wei Wuxian. New and improved, darker and meaner and very sexy about it, and with a new sick-ass flute. He starts attacking Wen Chao, and when Wen Zhuliu moves to attack Wei Wuxian Jiang Cheng jumps down and hangs Wen Zhuliu with Zidian. Lan Wangji confronts Wei Wuxian about this darker and meaner version and Wei Wuxian breaks up with him; Lan Wangji leaves Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian to kill Wen Chao because the family that murders together stays together!

(They won’t, but.)

The war goes on, but the tides have turned, and the Wens are losing. Both of Wen Ruohan’s sons are dead. Soup drama happens here, which I don’t need to explain fully but it is clear that Wei Wuxian is extremely emotionally unstable, and also will no longer carry his sword despite everyone telling him he needs to carry his sword. All is not well with the Wei Wuxian! But nobody knows why. Lan Wangji’s repeated “LET ME FIX YOU” overtures are not well received. Lan Wangji also has a nice conversation about how the Lan rules did not prepare him for moral complexity.

Eventually Nie Mingjue proposes going to attack Wen Ruohan on his own while the others move on the Wen stronghold at Nightless City (at this point, they have received a map of Wen defenses from a ~mysterious spy~). Nie Mingjue is captured, and it is revealed that Meng Yao decided that after getting kicked out of Qinghe he could find a better boss somewhere else. Outside, an undead army shows up to kick everyone else’s ass. Things don’t look good for our heroes!

Wei Wuxian brings out his secret weapon the Yin Tiger Seal and...takes over the undead army. This is very troubling to everyone involved, but it does bring Wen Ruohan out to see what the deal is. Wei Wuxian delivers one of the sickest lines in the entire show:

(i’m restraining myself! trust me! i am!)

so yeah, that’s a normal and reassuring thing to say.

And then Meng Yao stabs Wen Ruohan in the back. And that’s it for Wen Ruohan! Our major antagonist is dead! Surely everything will be fine now.

Well We Won the War, Now What Arc

[cracks knuckles] and here’s where the politics starts.

Ready and totally psyched to step into the power vacuum left by the fall of the Wens is Jin Guangshan! Leader of the Jin Sect, least impacted by the war by vitue of joining up late. He recognizes Meng Yao as his son now that he’s, like, someone that is valuable to him politically, and Meng Yao gets a commensurate name change > Jin Guangyao. Pretty much immediately Jin Guangshan starts manuevering to consolidate power - pushing to marry Jiang Yanli and Jin Zixuan, pushing to get access to Wei Wuxian’s Yin Tiger Seal, subtly undermining everyone else...the works.

Jin Guangshan is the worst, is what I’m saying here.

Meanwhile, Nie Mingjue is very unhappy about the whole “Meng Yao helping the Wens and fucking with him when he’s captured” thing, but then Lan Xichen (remember, Lan Wangji���s older brother) steps in and reveals that Jin Guangyao was a spy delivering information, actually, and also saved his life when he was on the run from the Wens, so don’t hurt him please. Nie Mingjue is still very suspicious, but he backs off. Subsequently, after agreeing to place the Wen (civilian) captives in a holding camp, Jin Guangyao has them killed (impliedly at the order of his father).

We are given cues that Jin Guangyao is bad news. Like, heavy cues. If you are me this makes you love him.

This is also where Lan Xichen, Nie Mingjue, and Jin Guangyao become sworn brothers, which is a big deal.

Meanwhile, back in Lotus Pier, Wei Wuxian is...not doing so hot! He’s drinking heavily, shirking his responsibilities in a way that is making Jiang Cheng particularly very upset with him, generally being weird and traumatized but nobody knows how to deal with that, or him. Then Jin Zixuan arrives to invite everyone to a special hunt being hosted by his father including Jiang Yanli because he, he means his mom, really wants her to be there.

The hunt goes great! By that I mean Jin Zixuan is a spectacular failure at expressing his feelings to Jiang Yanli, Wei Wuxian almost starts a fight with Jin Zixuan, Jin Zixuan’s enormous asshole cousin gets nasty until Jiang Yanli makes him apologize, in a seriously badass moment. The whole thing comes off with Wei Wuxian really not looking good, including his decision to ditch the celebratory banquet. But also Jiang Yanli getting a liiiiittle closer to something she wants (i.e. Jin Zixuan). Jiang Cheng is like “dude what the fuck” at Wei Wuxian and gets zero percent explanation. Meanwhile everyone in the vicinity pokes at his massive insecurities, because the cultivation world’s favorite activity is actually gossip.

Things only get worse at the very bad after party. This is where we meet Su She again, who has gone and founded his own sect! Lan Xichen and Lan Wangji are sort of bitchy about it. But the real issue comes when Zixun peer pressures Lan Xichen into drinking despite the fact that it’s pretty solidly against the rules of the Lan Sect. Lan Xichen does it with a very “fuck you” smile, despite Jin Guangyao’s attempts to forestall the situation.

(I feel like I have not expressed the relationship between Jin Guangyao and Lan Xichen? It’s a whole thing. Let’s just say that it’s a fairly popular ship for a reason.)

Lan Wangji, however, is not as diplomatic as his brother.

And then Wei Wuxian arrives! To ruin another party. Because he found Wen Qing wandering around in the streets and turns out that Wen Ning was taken prisoner by Jin Zixun and friends and removed to whereabouts unknown. Wei Wuxian proceeds to give the sexiest countdown ever to annihilating Jin Zixun if he doesn’t tell him where Wen Ning is.

Wen Ning, unfortunately, is in a pile of bodies. Because the Jin have been...well, experimenting on Wen prisoners, basically. Wen Ning is...not dead in this universe because censorship, but everything makes more sense if you just say “he’s basically dead and Wei Wuxian resurrects him to fuck up everyone in the vicinity who was responsible for his death, which is...everyone other than the other Wens. Eventually Wei Wuxian stops him by yelling his second (courtesy) name that no one else has used for him in speech up to this point (Wen Qionglin), because love is stored in the name. Wei Wuxian gathers up the survivors and takes off only to run into Lan Wangji standing in his way.

They have a point of no return moment. Wei Wuxian basically says “let me go or you have to kill me” only it’s better than that because what he actually says is like “if I’m going to be killed I should be killed by you, then I would know it was right” and it’s a whole fucking thing and anyway Lan Wangji steps aside and lets them all go and it is quite literally “I’m not crying, it’s just raining on my face” except he is also crying.

So...fuck.

Burial Mounds Arc

Wei Wuxian takes the Wens to the one place nobody’s probably going to follow them: namely, the Burial Mounds. Home sweet home!

Outside in the main world, rumors are flying about the army Wei Wuxian is building and the sect he’s planning to found and how ambitious he is and how he’s disrespecting Jiang Cheng and actually Jiang Cheng he probably never loved you anyway and is better and stronger and what are you good for, but I’m saying this out of concern and to be helpful (paraphrased from Jin Guangshan).

Accordingly, Jiang Cheng agrees to go and check things out and see what’s going on in Chez Burial Mounds. What is going on is basically a bunch of civilians eking out a very depressing living. There is also a child, a-Yuan, who is adorable. This will also be important later.

(are you keeping track of all this?)

Jiang Cheng also goes to see Wen Ning, who is...recovering from being dead/undead and Wei Wuxian is working on fixing him. Jiang Cheng says he has to die, and Wei Wuxian has to come home, and things are really bad, man, so stop worrying about these losers and avoid the entire cultivation world being really pissed with you, maybe?

Wei Wuxian isn’t going for it, and tells Jiang Cheng to cut him out of Jiang Sect in order to protect Jiang Sect’s reputation. It’s upsetting. They stage a very dramatic duel and Jiang Cheng announces that friendship ended with Wei Wuxian, he has no new friend actually.

This is also where Wen Qing significantly returns the comb of pining that Jiang Cheng gave her way back (remember that?) and is like. so you wouldn’t’ve helped me and Wen Ning actually, would you. And that is the end of Chengqing as a sidebar ship that never really sailed. Well done, you two.

Meanwhile, Jin Zixuan gets his shit together and proposes to Jiang Yanli by way of making her a lotus pond at Jinlintai. So that’s nice!

A bit later Lan Wangji comes to visit! Only it’s totally coincidental, he was just passing through, that’s all. He and Wei Wuxian hang out for a little while, pretending things are sort of normal, but they have to rush back to the Burial Mounds because the Wen Ning is out. They manage to get him under control and awaken him to proper consciousness again, though! Great! Things are looking up. :)

Lan Wangji does not stay for dinner, though. :(

In my notes I have written “meanwhile...political shitshow” and that is basically a summation of what’s up in places that aren’t the Burial Mounds. Specifically, Jin Guangshan, who seems to have deputized Jin Guangyao to do his dirty work generally, is making noises about how something needs to be done about that Wei Wuxian, and what about that Yin Tiger Seal anyway, doesn’t it seem Yin Iron-like, shouldn’t something like that not be in the hands of a random person? Probably it should be in someone else’s hands instead. Someone responsible with no ulterior motives. You know.

Also in here...somewhere, Mianmian tries to stand up for Wei Wuxian being maybe right about some things, gets shouted down, and decides to leave the Jin Sect entirely. Like...just walks out. Several people look at her like ‘you can do that?’, Lan Wangji is jealous, it is a total boss move. Mianmian hasn’t been a major character but this is important enough and cool enough that I had to mention it.

Jiang Yanli and Jiang Cheng come to Yiling (by the Burial Mounds) for a very secret rendezvous where Wei Wuxian gets to see Jiang Yanli’s beautiful wedding dress and eat some of her famous soup and it is very sweet and nice and Jiang Cheng is like “so do you have a plan for if everyone attacks you” and Wei Wuxian is like “absolutely. I will kill everyone is my plan.”

also possibly Jiang Yanli is already pregnant at this point??? she and Jiang Cheng are certainly exchanging a lot of conspiratorial smiles when she tells Wei Wuxian to give her future son a courtesy name.

She is for sure pregnant later, because there is a baby named Jin Ling who shows up! (Remember that name? No? He was the bratty teenager from episode 2.)  Jin Guangshan does not allow Jin Guangyao to hold the baby, for which he deserves what he gets. For Jin Ling’s 100 day/three month (again! timelines, fuck em) celebration, Jiang Cheng, Jin Zixuan, and Lan Wangji tag team to get Wei Wuxian invited, where he will come and it will be nice and everyone will discuss this Yin Tiger Seal issue like civilized people.

An invitation is sent for Wei Wuxian to come to the celebration! Wonderful! This is in no way going to go horribly wrong.

Oh Shit, Things Went Downhill Fast (Take Two) Arc

It goes horribly wrong.

On the way to Jinlintai to greet his new baby nephew, accompanied by Wen Ning, Wei Wuxian is confronted by - surprise! - Jin Zixun, accusing Wei Wuxian of putting a curse on him. Wei Wuxian denies it, naturally, since he didn’t. Jin Zixun decides the best way to deal with this situation is to kill Wei Wuxian, which will definitely break the curse that Wei Wuxian definitely cast on him.

He attacks, and Wen Ning goes Ghost General on everyone’s ass, and Wei Wuxian brings out his flute. Things are looking pretty hairy when Jin Zixuan shows up to call off the fight, trying to get Wei Wuxian to back down; he does not back down, because that would just mean getting shot full of arrows.

Wen Ning, who seems to have completely lost his mind, fists Jin Zixuan. Through the chest. This does, in fact, kill him.

His dying words are to say that Jiang Yanli is still waiting for Wei Wuxian to show up, just to make everything worse. Wen Ning kills Jin Zixun as well. This is not actually what Wei Wuxian wanted to happen.

Back at the Burial Mounds! In the wake of Jin Zixuan’s death, an ultimatum has been issued to give up the Wen siblings or else. This is pretty clearly (in my opinion) a pretext that doesn’t mean anything, but Wen Qing and Wen Ning have already decided to sacrifice themselves. Maybe they’re hoping it’ll work? Or at least that it’ll give Wei Wuxian some time? Wen Qing knocks Wei Wuxian out so he can’t stop them. The whole thing is really fucking heartbreaking.

Wei Wuxian comes around and goes to Jinlintai, where he sees Jiang Yanli, who is mourning her dead husband who got killed by her baby brother! Cool! She sees Wei Wuxian but he runs before she can say anything, partly because guards have been sicced on him. He is pretty clearly having a mental breakdown, hallucinations and all!

Cut to a gathering of...pretty much everyone important and all their followers at Nightless City, for a combination commemorating the dead/affirming the deaths of Wen Ning and Wen Qing/gearing up to kill Wei Wuxian.

Who spares them the effort of coming to find him by showing up on the roof! He proceeds to sic dark magic on everyone there except, conspicuously, for the Jiang Sect. Lan Wangji arrives to defuse the situation and fails to defuse the situation until Wei Wuxian hears Jiang Yanli calling for him.

Because she’s arrived on an active battlefield! Not her best idea but it’s not like I can actually blame her considering the week she’s having.

Wei Wuxian goes to look for her, as does Jiang Cheng who also heard her, and...suddenly loses control of his dark magic. Cool! One of the...undead? people there wounds Jiang Yanli. Even better! Jiang Cheng pleads with Wei Wuxian to get things under control, which he can’t! They have a moment while a lot of people around them are dying but you know what, they deserve it.

because like literally a second later Jiang Yanli pushes Wei Wuxian out of the way of a sword meant to stab him in the back and instead takes it herself. And dies.

So. Yeah.

Wei Wuxian loses the last threads of his sanity and destroys the Yin Tiger Seal. While everybody is fighting over it, he goes over to the edge of a cliff, and now we’re back here where we started! With Lan Wangji clinging to Wei Wuxian’s hand as he dangles over the edge of a cliff and tells him to let go.

Jiang Cheng arrives to defuse the situation, by which I mean “he tells Wei Wuxian to go die and stabs down.” He only hits rock; Wei Wuxian breaks himself loose of Lan Wangji’s grip and falls. You are left on the image of Lan Wangji’s absolutely devastated face.

nice! great. well, that brings us up to speed for the flashforward to the future, where you have probably completely forgotten what happened in the first two episodes.

For instance: remember how we saw Wen Ning despite the fact that he’s supposed to be ashes? Yeah.

And We’re Back in the Present Now Arc (Good Times in Qinghe Arc)

For some reason this is the part of the show where I remember the least and it all kind of blurs together with the exception of one scene? so I had to go look at Wikipedia episode summaries to make sure I was putting things in the right order.

Back in the present at the Cloud Recesses, Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji discover that the very angry sword spirit last seen killing people at Mo Manor (remember that?) is pointing them in the direction of Qinghe (the Nie Sect territory). They leave to go there and run into Jin Ling, who semi-accidentally terrorizes Wei Wuxian by way of dog. 

By asking around, they also learn that there are rumors of a man-eating fortress in the woods, and that it hasn’t been dealt with because the leader of the Nie Sect is absolutely useless. The leader of the Nie Sect who is now - hey, been a while! - Nie Huaisang, since his older brother disappeared under mysterious circumstances after losing his mind years ago.

The dynamic duo go off to investigate the man-eating fortress, naturally, and what they find is a tomb full of swords and a wall full of skeletons, and also Jin Ling. 

They remove Jin Ling from the wall, Lan Wangji goes chasing a mysterious attacker, and Wei Wuxian takes Jin Ling to safety only to end up running into - oh boy! - Jiang Cheng. 

They have a calm talk about their feelings and address their dysfunction in a reasonable manner. 

Nope! Jiang Cheng corners Wei Wuxian with Jin Ling’s dog, throws a cup of tea at a wall, and yells at Wei Wuxian about how he both didn’t come home right away and also how he should die ten million times (no, like, actually). Fortunately, Jin Ling arrives, lies out his ass about how he saw Wen Ning to get Jiang Cheng to leave, and lets Wei Wuxian go. 

Back to that mysterious figure Lan Wangji went running after! Turns out it was none other than Nie Huaisang, who confesses - reluctantly - that the man-eating fortress belongs to his family and is a safe home for bloodthirsty swords after their owners die, which is a normal thing to get as a family heirloom. This is also where it becomes increasingly clear that (a) the sword spirit is Baxia, Nie Mingjue’s sword, and (b) Nie Mingjue is most likely hella dead, specifically murdered. 

With this new information, Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian move on, tracking the directions of the angry sword spirit. They overhear some very depressing story about Song Lan, Xiao Xingchen, and Xue Yang, specifically how things turned out horribly for them (though without details), which drives Lan Wangji to drink.

Lan Wangji cannot hold his liquor, at all. Wei Wuxian takes his unconsciousness as an opportunity to flute Wen Ning to him again, and removes a massive metal needle from his skull, which fixes the whole “unconscious zombie” issue. Unfortunately, Wen Ning remembers nothing about what happened to him between going to Jinlintai with Wen Qing and when he heard Wei Wuxian calling by way of flute.

And now we have Drunkji, who is the most adorable, hilarious thing ever. He gives Wei Wuxian chickens, with utmost sincerity. They are wedding chickens. It is very important that Wei Wuxian have these chickens.

This interlude is not important to the plot but it is hilarious. There is also a not hilarious interlude of Lan Wangji being very sad about how he didn’t help Wei Wuxian before, and also admitting that he likes rabbits. Again: not plot important. It is adorable. 

Wei Wuxian herds Drunkji back to the inn, where a mysterious masked man attempts to steal the pouch holding the angry sword spirit, but is driven off and teleports away. Remember this guy! He’s important.

The next morning, they set off and hit the road for a place called Yi City, which if you’ve spent any time on this blog you know is deeply important in my heart if not, like, in terms of show space.

Yi City Arc Yi City Arc Yi City Arc

yes this is three episodes but this is my summary post so I get to give it its own section if I want to.

Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji arrive at Yi City, which is empty, and very spooky. They run into the pack of juniors (Jin Ling, Lan Sizhui, sassmaster Lan Jingyi and consummate romantic Ouyang Zizhen are the named ones), and shortly thereafter into a whole bunch of undead. They also run into a ghost (???) girl who is blind and has no tongue. They also also run into Xiao Xingchen, severely wounded.

Psych! It’s Xue Yang in disguise and he has an undead Song Lan under his control. what a fun twist this is! and he wants one thing specifically: for Wei Wuxian to help him bring someone back to life. Problem is that their soul is in need of some serious super glue and super glue doesn’t work on souls.

Xue Yang informs Wei Wuxian that his consent is optional and he will be participating in Xue Yang’s necromancy experiment fantasies whether he likes it or not. Lan Wangji objects strenuously to this idea. While Lan Wangji is fighting Xue Yang and Wen Ning is fighting Song Lan (corpse fight! corpse fight!) Wei Wuxian herds the juniors into a safe courtyard where the corpses won’t go, led by the aforementioned ghost girl, who shows them a coffin.

the coffin has Xiao Xingchen in it. The actual real one. There’s a bandage over his eyes, because he doesn’t have any.

Wei Wuxian goes into the ghost girl’s memories in order to find out what happened using a technique called Empathy, and the next chunk of things I’m just going to tell in full chronologically even though there’s a break where you don’t see all of it until an episode later.

The ghost girl, a-Qing, is a con artist who pretends to be blind; she runs into Xiao Xingchen (who is actually blind) when she steals his money, and he just gives it to her after stopping someone else whose money she stole from beating him up. A-Qing decides they’re friends now. They’ve been traveling together for...some amount of time when they stumble on a badly injured man on the side of the road. Xiao Xingchen picks him up and takes him home with him (to an abandoned coffin house in Yi City). You get one guess who he’s rescued and who is totally psyched to discover that his life has been saved by Xiao Xingchen, who doesn’t know who he is, because he’s blind.

So you know, everything is coming up Xue Yang.

What follows is three years of domestic bliss, including hits like “entire villages dying by Xiao Xingchen under sort of suspicious circumstances” and “threatening grocers.” And then who should show up but Song Lan! Looking for Xiao Xingchen and he’s so happy to have finally found him.

Only he notices Xue Yang first.

A fight ensues, in which Xue Yang...sort of talks Song Lan to death by digging into the fact that Xiao Xingchen is blind because he gave his eyes to Song Lan, actually, and Song Lan hurt him so bad when they broke up, and because Xiao Xingchen is blind Xue Yang has been able to trick him into killing living people when he thinks he’s killing undead ones, and oooh do you feel bad now, well, guess what, you’re gonna feel worse when I poison you into becoming undead and cut out your tongue. :D

And even worse when this means that Xiao Xingchen stabs him because, you know, undead monster.

Cool! Things are going great.

Or they would be only a-Qing saw everything, reveals it to Xiao Xingchen, who puts it together and greets XueYang coming back from grocery shopping with a sword (rude). They break up, and by “break up” I mean “Xue Yang reveals his tragic backstory, Xiao Xingchen is not convinced that his tragic backstory means all the murder was justified, Xue Yang decides it’s time to make this all go nuclear.” So tells Xiao Xingchen about how he’s been killing people actually! And guess what, bonus, one of those people was your BFF/life partner/whatever, Song Lan. isn’t that amazing, Xiao Xingchen, isn’t that so cool--

Xiao Xingchen kills himself and this is, it turns out, Not What Xue Yang Wanted. So guess who’s in the pouch Xue Yang was hoping to resurrect? Yeah.

Back in the present, with help from a-Qing directing Lan Wangji, Xue Yang gets...hella stabbed, but not before he kills a-Qing. Song Lan, freed from Xue Yang’s control, kills Xue Yang.

Oh yeah, and then we see Xiao Xingchen tenderly laying pieces of candy on a bed, which is symbolically important, and also Xue Yang dies looking at the last piece of candy Xiao Xingchen gave him, and now I’m going to cry. anyway Yi City Arc, you’re welcome. Where the only person who survives did not, in fact, survive!

Oh, yeah, I guess it’s also important that there’s a headless body buried here and it gets...pretty conclusively identified as Nie Mingjue because the sword spirit (remember that?) takes the shape of his very distinctive large sword (Baxia). Also Xue Yang recreated the Yin Tiger Seal but it gets snatched away by the masked man from earlier. There’s also a bunch of stuff about the Yin Iron plot but you can ignore it, it doesn’t actually really matter that much.

Honestly at that point I was crying too much to pay a whole lot of attention to the whole point of them being in Yi City to begin with. So sue me.

The Plot Thickens, and Secrets Are Revealed Arc

Exeunt Yi City, rendezvous with Lan Xichen to discuss, obliquely, who could be responsible for Nie Mingjue’s death. Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji delicately imply that maybe it was Jin Guangyao; Lan Xichen is unconvinced and informs us that there are no curse marks indicating that he’d teleported on Jin Guangyao’s body, he would know, and also they’ve been together every night so he wouldn’t have time to get up to shenanigans anyway.

Hm.

Still, they go ahead together to ruin another party/investigate at Jinlintai, with Wei Wuxian safely in disguise (barely), unfortunately as Mo Xuanyu, who is not exactly welcome in the Jin Sect because he got kicked out of it earlier. Mo Xuanyu is a whole...thing that I’m not really going into here because the show doesn’t really get into it either.

Wei Wuxian ducks out to investigate, and in the form of an animated paper man, to the tune of music we have never heard before in this show and will never hear again (look, it’s just weird to me), goes sneaking into Jin Guangyao’s rooms to do some poking around. His investigations are interrupted when Jin Guangyao’s wife Qin Su, in a state of severe distress, returns, followed shortly by Jin Guangyao. They argue about an unknown revelation in a letter Qin Su received that has resulted in her being disgusted by...something, we don’t know what, and angry with Jin Guangyao. She accuses him of killing their kid.

Eventually he paralyzes her and removes her to a secret room through a mirror, which is a thing everyone has, especially one with a bunch of torture instruments and a body sized table with dried blood on it. Normal!

Remember how the body in Yi City was headless? Yeah, we found the head now.

And it’s time for another Empathy flashback! 

Empathy Flashback feat. Nie Mingjue and Jin Guangyao’s Bad Relationship Mini Arc

This time with Nie Mingjue (and Jin Guangyao). We see Jin Guangyao very quickly elevated from a servant who is spat upon by the other Nie cultivators to Nie Mingjue’s right hand man, like, literally in two seconds. Flash forward to episode 10 - remember that? - where Jin Guangyao has just been caught in a compromising murder position. Nie Mingjue accuses Jin Guangyao plotting all along and is a conniving little snake who was in league with Xue Yang (which is a thing that does not make sense, actually), and kicks him out.

We next see Nie Mingjue in Nightless City, having been captured and currently being taunted by a very sexy Meng Yao, who kills some other Nie cultivators and threatens to fuck up Nie Mingjue by shattering his sword (which would be catastrophic and is, we are informed, how Nie Mingjue’s dad died). Nie Mingjue is understandably rather displeased by this to the point of probable murder, though Lan Xichen reminds him (as he did in the previous scene) that Meng Yao was acting as a spy and Meng Yao argues that he needed to play his part.

The relationship between the two of them continues to deteriorate as Nie Mingjue becomes more unstable (something that just happens to the Nies by virtue of their cultivation style). That deterioration is being delayed by healing music from Lan Xichen. Lan Xichen teaches Jin Guangyao the healing music. Jin Guangyao seems to be possibly doing something not healing with the healing music.

This all escalates into a confrontation at the top of the stairs of Jinlintai, where Nie Mingjue and Jin Guangyao argue about class politics and justifiable violence (no, really) until Nie Mingjue explodes and kicks Jin Guangyao down the stairs. 

And then proceeds to, as Jin Guangyao looks on, have a qi deviation, which is...well, let’s just call it both a physical and a mental breakdown. Nie Huaisang arrives to see this happening, and while we saw this before and it looked like Nie Mingjue was threatening Nie Huaisang because he didn’t recognize him, this time it is more apparent that he’s directing it at Jin Guangyao.

Next we see, Nie Mingjue is chained to that body sized table in the secret room. Xue Yang is there, and uses Nie Mingjue’s sword to behead Nie Mingjue. He’s psyched as hell about it. If you’re me this is adorable.

And Now Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming Arc

Flashback ends! And we are back in Jinlintai. Wei Wuxian goes to get Lan Wangji and Lan Xichen to storm Jin Guangyao’s bedroom, to which Su She objects, but Jin Guangyao eventually allows. They all file together into the secret room and look around, but there is no longer any severed head where Wei Wuxian left it. Whoops. 

Then Qin Su kills herself, Jiang Cheng arrives to defuse the situation while Jin Guangyao pleads innocent, and Wei Wuxian, by way of drawing his sword that nobody else could draw before now, reveals that he is, in fact, Wei Wuxian. Everyone in this room actually already knew this information except for Jin Ling, who is not thrilled to discover that his cool uncle is the guy who murdered his parents. Nobody else does a very good job of faking surprise.

Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian make a run for it only to be cornered on the stairs. Extreme romance ensues where Lan Wangji announces his intent to stand by Wei Wuxian forever against the world. 

This is where the “I was like, SCREAMS” meme kicks in.

Anyway, after that love confession (look, they can’t say ‘I love you’ but basically) in front of everyone, Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian fight their way out together and are well on the way to freedom when Jin Ling stabs Wei Wuxian. 

Nobody is happy about this, including Jin Ling.

Wei Wuxian is okay overall, though he does faint and have to get swept off to the Cloud Recesses and undressed and redressed in Lan Wangji’s underwear. Don’t worry about it. And now it’s time to talk to Lan Xichen, who is currently feeling very “what the hell is going on, you have no proof and are accusing a person I trust completely of something horrible without any proof.” 

They still don’t have any proof, but Wei Wuxian reveals that in the flashback he heard Jin Guangyao playing the soothing music but different, and it comes out that there is evil Japanese music that can kill people and be used to poison someone slowly over time. It’s literally this post:

Lan Xichen is not entirely convinced but agrees to investigate; Jin Guangyao comes to Cloud Recesses and has an absolutely heartbreaking conversation with Lan Xichen about how is our friendship over, Zewu--jun :( while Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji eavesdrop.

That conversation isn’t plot important either, I just personally find it very upsetting.

The Burial Mounds, Take Two Arc

Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji leave the Cloud Recesses, heading toward the Burial Mounds because Jin Guangyao mentioned something being up there. But they end up meeting - surprise! - Mianmian, who is living her best life. This is mostly important because she is literally the only female character who makes it out of this show alive. 

She mentions that there’s been some trouble around the Burial Mounds, so they head in that direction, running into Wen Ning along the way, who has been following them around because he loves Wei Wuxian. The Burial Mounds are indeed full of active undead and they fight their way up to the old farming commune location, which is less empty than expected because there are a bunch of kids tied up in Wei Wuxian’s old lair/cave/house. Like, all of them. Including Jin Ling, who really is having a terrible time lately, and I just feel the need to note that sometimes.

As they free the children and start to leave, everyone else arrives with the plan of killing Wei Wuxian again, because once wasn’t enough and obviously he’s Up To No Good, where else would these corpses be coming from, huh? 

Speaking of corpses. 

A small army of them shows up! All the cultivators who aren’t children lose their powers! Everyone has to retreat back into the lair/cave/house where they’ll be safe! So this is all...going well.

Fortunately, everyone being stuck in one place gives Wei Wuxian the opportunity to get his Hercule Poirot on and walk everyone through a series of deductions to get them to a place of realizing that (a) they were poisoned by evil music, (b) the evil music came from Su She, (c) Su She is working for Jin Guangyao who (d) planned all of this whole ‘everyone is going to the Burial Mounds to get killed’ thing.

Su She panics, inadvertently reveals that he alone still has his powers, and teleports out. Wei Wuxian decides that a reasonable solution to all these problems is to make himself bait for all the undead so everyone else can make a run for it, because Wei Wuxian is kind of like that. 

It’s okay, though, he and Lan Wangji make a spectacular battle couple.

(Oh, yeah. Throughout here it is becoming increasingly clear that Lan Sizhui’s identity is Significant and actually we Might Have Seen Him Before.)

Back to Lotus Pier Arc, or Jin Ling Has a Very Bad Day, Continued Arc

Safely out of the Burial Mounds thanks to Wei Wuxian, everybody goes ahead and invites themselves back to Jiang Cheng’s house. To be fair, it is closest. 

My notes here say “Wen Ning figures out that Lan Sizhui is a-Yuan, Jin Ling has an emotional breakdown” which is a more or less accurate summation of the situation. Honestly, though, I feel so bad for Jin Ling at this point, he’s had an absolute nightmare of a month and then today happened and like. I feel for him.

But Wen Ning reuniting with the last remaining member of his family! Though he doesn’t...actally tell Lan Sizhui this, and Lan Sizhui doesn’t have any memories of his early years. 

Jiang Cheng reluctantly allows Wei Wuxian inside. Wen Ning has to stay on the porch, but Lan Sizhui stays with him to keep him company, because he is a good boy.

This next part...hoo boy. It’s a lot of exposition featuring two ladies who appear to relate their stories about Jin Guangyao, featuring the part where he murdered his father by using a bunch of sex workers (who then were murdered in turn, except for one), also involving necrophilia, and the one where Qin Su was Jin Guangyao’s sister, actually, and he knew it and still married her. Sect Leader Bad Takes says that’s probably why Jin Guangyao killed their kid, because children of incest inevitably have developmental problems? Yeah, sure, buddy.

Anyway, everyone starts shouting for Jin Guangyao’s head, which is very familiar to Wei Wuxian, who leaves in some disgust. While wandering with Lan Wangji, they wind up going to the family shrine (which is, to be clear, a pretty sacred place). Which is where Jiang Cheng finds them! And once again they have a reasonable and emotionally steady conversation.

Nope. Jiang Cheng talks shit trying to provoke a fight that Wei Wuxian won’t have. As he and Lan Wangji attempt to leave, Jiang Cheng pursues because he’s not done yelling dammit, lashing out with Zidian. Wei Wuxian faints, and Wen Ning arrives to stand in between him and Lan Wangji and Jiang Cheng, holding Wei Wuxian’s sheathed sword (remember, the one nobody other than Wei Wuxian can draw). Wen Ning proceeds to initiate one of the single best devastating beatdowns of the show without laying a hand on Jiang Cheng, specifically by shoving the sword at Jiang Cheng and telling him to draw it, because hey you can do that now! Wonder why that is? Wouldn’t you like to know what’s going on there, Jiang Wanyin?

Remember way back when Jiang Cheng lost his core and got it back because Wei Wuxian gave him his core? Yeah, this is when he finds out about that. Psych! Your brother loves you and also the only reason you got to be as strong as you are is because he sacrificed himself for you! Which is also the reason why he took up demonic cultivation in the first place! 

Seriously, it’s so good, I love this scene. Probably one of my favorites in the whole show.

Jiang Cheng runs away; Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian have a moment on a lake where Lan Wangji indulges Wei Wuxian by eating stolen lotuses with him. It’s sweeter than it sounds when I put it like that.

Guanyin Temple Arc

oh god, how do I. how do I describe Guanyin Temple. partially this is hard because by virtue of censorship about dead bodies, among probably other things, there are huge gaps that make portions of it make no sense so I’m gonna go ahead and...fill in some of those that are intelligible pretty much only with some knowledge of book plot, imo.

Wen Ning, Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian go to a place called Yunping because Jin Guangyao bought some land there for some reason. There they find a slightly suspicious temple (Guanyin Temple). They come back at night, leaving Wen Ning to stand guard, and spy on the courtyard, where a bunch of conspicuously armed monks are there, along with Lan Xichen aaaaand...Jin Guangyao. 

Jin Ling arrives! And decides it’s a good idea to climb over the wall. Wei Wuxian blocks someone from shooting him by using the bamboo flute he’s been using this whole time, so he now functionally has no weapon, and also he and Lan Wangji have been exposed, so now the two of them and also Jin Ling are in the courtyard. Lan Xichen admits he was tricked and doesn’t have any of his powers. Jin Guangyao threatens Lan Wangji into sealing his by threatening Wei Wuxian with a wire. It’s sexy.

Everybody goes inside the temple, where several monks are digging up something ??? under the floor. This is never explained and that is because it is supposed to be Jin Guangyao’s mother’s body, and there are very strict rules I understand about what can be done with dead bodies in dramas like this one. Anyway, Jin Guangyao loved his mom very much and built a temple where she was buried where the statue has her face. He is exhuming her so he can take her body with him when he flees the country, which is what he was planning here. Of course, now he has a bunch of unwanted hostages (and one wanted hostage), which was not actually part of the plan.

The next person to join the party is an unconscious Nie Huaisang, brought in by Su She, who basically says “I have no idea what he was doing here but...here he is” and Jin Guangyao is like. Well, guess he’s here now. 

Next to show up is Jiang Cheng! Making an excellent and extremely dramatic entrance. Unfortunately, he still gets injured and taken down as Jin Guangyao starts poking at his very obvious emotional weak spots, including revealing that Jiang Cheng knows about the golden core thing. Wei Wuxian, who did not know that secret came out because he was unconscious at the time, goes “wait, what?” and thus ensues the epic emotional catharsis crying and yelling conversation I was waiting for for 47 episodes. Seriously, it’s really good. They end up in a place where all is not solved but things are...maybe a little better? 

Of course, they’re still hostages. 

Meanwhile, back at the dig site, something gets unearthed that is not Jin Guangyao’s mother’s body but is in fact a coffin with Nie Mingjue’s body, now complete with head, in it. The reveal also drops here that Su She has the marks that indicate he cast the curse on Jin Zixun that Jin Zixun accused Wei Wuxian of casting.

A very ugly argument ensues where everyone is poking at everyone else’s things that they’re sensitive about, until finally Lan Xichen recovers his powers and turns the tables on Jin Guangyao by putting a sword to his neck. 

The next part is basically...explaining how all the bad things that happened were Jin Guangyao’s fault? Or at least that’s the explanation given. I find it personally very frustrating as a narrative choice and sort of unnecessary, but maybe that’s just me. Anyway, Jin Guangyao is pleading for mercy from Lan Xichen, saying he’ll leave and never return, the whole thing is very emotional. 

We also find out that Jin Guangshan kicked Jin Guangyao down the stairs. People really need to stop doing that.

And now Wen Ning arrives! Punting Lan Sizhui in ahead of him. He is possessed by a very angry sword spirit (namely, Baxia). Lan Wangji cuts off Jin Guangyao’s right arm, because Lan Wangji likes doing that, apparently. Baxia-possessed Wen Ning then targets Jin Ling because Jin Ling has Jin Guangyao’s blood on him - only for Wen Ning to stop the blade with his bare hand and save Jin Ling’s life, because Wen Ning is both a badass and very good. 

Jiang Cheng throws Wei Wuxian his old flute, which he apparently has just been keeping under his bed or something for sixteen years, which is a thing that I will always never be over, and Wei Wuxian flutes the very angry sword into the Nie Mingjue-holding coffin.

Which would be fine, only then Nie Huaisang starts yelling about how Su She totally stabbed him, no, really, look, he’s bleeding. Baxia kills Su She. Then Wei Wuxian manages to put the sword back in the coffin, as well as the Yin Tiger Seal, and locks both away.

Whew.

Everybody’s sitting down and recovering a little as Lan Xichen tends Jin Guangyao’s wounds. He turns around to get medicine from Nie Huaisang, who tells him to look out because Jin Guangyao is attacking you!!! 

Lan Xichen runs Jin Guangyao through. 

Oh boy.

Jin Guangyao is a little impressed about Nie Huaisang having been plotting this all along. Because he was. He absolutely was. He’s absolutely been planning this for years. Everybody needs a hobby.

But it’s Lan Xichen who he really addresses here, telling him that he’d never hurt him. The actual line really hurts but I’m trying to not reproduce lines here, except I am going to say that he drags Lan Xichen - still with a sword through him! - deeper into the temple and says “stay and die with me” as the temple starts to collapse. Lan Xichen, who was about to strike and presumably push himself away, lowers his hand, and Jin Guangyao abruptly pushes him away and out of the collapsing building.

Romance!

(No, but seriously, it’s a lot.)

Thus ends Jin Guangyao. 

Outside in the courtyard, everyone’s taking a breather. Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian stare longingly at each other across the room and say nothing. Jiang Cheng walks away and we learn that - surprise! - the reason Jiang Cheng was caught by the Wens way back when is because he was keeping the Wens from catching Wei Wuxian instead.

Everybody in this family in just a big circle of self sacrifice. In the words of Wen Qing:

(Who misses Wen Qing? I do!)

Anyway, Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian leave with each other, only to be caught on the road by Lan Sizhui and Wen Ning - Lan Sizhui, who has remembered that he was a-Yuan and finally someone tells Wei Wuxian this, and ahhhh, okay, I know what I said about limiting screencaps but I can’t not:

Now that’s what I call a hug!

They part ways again, Lan Sizhui leaving with Wen Ning for some family time and for Wen Ning to find his own way. Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian...seem like they’re going in different directions, but then they’re at Cloud Recesses together, playing music, hanging out, vibing. They talk to Nie Huaisang, but don’t directly confront him about his scheming. Mostly just making sure he’s not, you know, gonna do anything else.

Then Wei Wuxian leaves to go on a roadtrip to find himself. People really do not like this, but I personally really do like this, especially because the last shots of the show are Wei Wuxian playing his and Lan Wangji’s theme song (the one that Lan Wangji wrote, remember, from the cave? It’s come up a lot, I just haven’t mentioned it here), and when he finishes Lan Wangji’s voice says “Wei Ying” and he turns around and just like. Smiles. It’s scrunchy and happy and perfect.

Like this:

aaaaaaand scene! fifty episodes later your life has been ruined and you will never be the same.

and the thing is that this is leaving out, like. a lot, and probably is biased because I focus on different things than another person would, &c &c, but at least it might be a starting point for...the entire plot.

and also congratulations if you made it this far, I am impressed. have a screenshot of wei wuxian as a reward, whose mental breakdown does make him look sexy

you’re welcome.

[quazartranslates]

Welcome to the Nightmare Game II - CH48

**This is an edited machine translation. For more information, please [click here]**

[<<< Previous Chapter | Table of Contents | Next Chapter >>>]

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Chapter 48: Star Death Reality Show (XXXI) {cw: misgendering}

"Will Qi Leren be alright?" Dr. Lu, who had already run away, looked at Du Yue behind him in a panic and murmured in a low voice, "I have a bad feeling."

"Qianbei will be fine," Du Yue said confidently.

"No, let's go down and have a look. If he’s in trouble, we can help," Dr. Lu said.

"Okay, let's go." Du Yue was fine with it.

The two people studied the route to find the safest passage. Dr. Lu's sense of direction was bad, and Du Yue wasn’t much better. Two headless flies wandered around the institute and accidentally found intermittent blood on the ground.

The two walked along the blood trail, and finally found the injured Lara in a hidden room. Her injury wasn’t serious, but her spirit was not good. After seeing Du Yue and Dr. Lu, she was silent for a long time, and her voice was hoarse as she asked: "Have you seen Jing Siyu and Jing Sixue?"

The two shook their heads, and Lara sighed: "I'm afraid they’re in danger."

Lara told them what had happened after they ran away. Jing Siyu and Jing Sixue disappeared quickly, but Janet, Alex and Lara were together. They’d had an argument because Francis had been parasitized by an octopus. Janet strongly suspected that Lara was parasitized, and Lara would naturally not admit to such false accusations. During the argument, they met Leviathan, who had been thrown off by Qi Leren once before.

Janet, who was the closest to Leviathan, was the first to be killed. Alex tried to escape, but Leviathan jumped up again. Alex, who was eager to get rid of it, tried to push Lara out, and even stabbed Lara with a dagger. However, Lara had a strong will to survive. She took the dagger regardless of her injury and stabbed Alex’s vitals with a knife. She hid in a room, locked the door, and crawled away from the vents.

After that, Lara tenaciously fled the whole way, and finally came here and met Du Yue and Dr. Lu.

"We also met the monster, and Qi Leren led it away. Here's the thing..." Dr. Lu plainly told the story again, and finally asked, "We’re going to find Qi Leren. Would you like to join us?"

Lara touched the wound on her hand and nodded firmly: "Let's go."

This time, all three people were in a heavy mood. Especially after seeing the incomplete bodies of Jing Siyu and Jing Sixue, Lara cried sadly and asked aloud, "Are we the only ones left? Is Qi still alive?"

Janet and Alex had undoubtedly died by Leviathan's mouth, as well as Jing Siyu and Jing Siyue. Francis, Annie, Mark and Xue Jiahui were all parasitized. He Yi became Leviathan’s host. Only four of them had survived, and among them, Qi Leren’s life and death were still uncertain.

"Of course he’s still alive!" Dr. Lu said firmly. "He must still be alive!"

　　&&&

In the vast underground ice palace.

"Prophet, are you awake?" A blindfolded woman stood up from the chair of carved ice and respectfully saluted him. The ice and snow maids who were responsible for guarding the underground ice palace also bent over in salute.

"Soothsayer? Is it your rotation today?" asked the Prophet.

"It should have been the Iillusionist’s turn, but he had something to do, so we changed it," the Soothsayer replied.

"How is that boy recently?" When it came to the Illusionist, the Prophet's tone was clearly casual.

"Not bad, I heard that he made an interesting new friend, and he played tricks on others all day long." The Soothsayer smiled and asked again, "This time, you slept for a much shorter time than expected. Is something wrong?"

"It's not an accident." The Prophet frowned and looked up at the dome of ice and snow, but his line of sight seemed to pass through the thick layer of ice and look at the vast universe.

The blindfolded Soothsayer could not see his expression at the moment, but she could feel his inner unrest.

"Someone has discovered their original force, and that force is biased towards us," said the Prophet.

The Soothsayer breathed a sigh of relief, smiled, and said, "Isn't this a good thing? Although it’s only the first step, it’s always ahead of the other sentient beings on the starting line. Maybe it will eventually condense a half-field or even a field."

It was only the first step to discover one's original force, and it would take some difficult self-testing to condense a half-field, but this already meant that this person was about to embark on a road different from ordinary players. Any master at the field level started from this first step. Although most people would fall in the long road of experience, everyone who had reached the field level had terrible strength.

The Prophet sighed faintly: "It’s too early to talk about field condensation... Although I’m optimistic about him, I didn’t expect it to be so fast. This may not be a good thing for him. There are still too many problems in his body that have not been solved."

The Soothsayer asked curiously, "Do you know that man? What is his original force?"

The Prophet sensed the new force full of vigor and hope, and gently spoke the answer:

"Rebirth."

　　&&&

In the deep underground glacier wrapped in eternal cold, the temperature was 60 degrees below zero. When human beings were exposed to this environment, it only took a few minutes for the blood in the nose and ears to be unable to maintain circulation because of the cold, and the cells would quickly die.

This underground world without light seemed destined to be forgotten in the cold.

Crushed skull, whole body fracture, ruptured organs, internal and external bleeding... Worse than that, when falling from that height, the speed would return to zero at the moment of contact with the ground, and the body would be deformed instantly under the huge force of the impact. Even the space alien Leviathan, whose vitality was extremely terrible, was seriously injured after falling and fell into a deep sleep.

To say nothing of a human being.

Death was the only outcome.

But suddenly, something moved in the ruinous "tomb" created from broken ice.

And then moved again.

Qi Leren felt as if he was in an icy hell. Every time he breathed, thousands of ice needles punctured his internal organs crazily, which made him feel miserable. He couldn't even think of why he felt so painful and cold, or where he was.

Under this inhuman pain, he only felt that he didn't want to live any longer, but he couldn't even die.

Breathing returned, heartbeat returned, he still couldn't open his eyes, he could only move with all his might. The stones and ice blocks on his arms also moved and collapsed violently, and his sound echoed in the lifeless darkness.

Qi Leren's consciousness gradually returned, and he remembered who he was, but he still didn't realize where he was. He complained crazily in his mind that the air conditioner in his room was too cold, and that he had even accidentally fallen from the bed, and now he couldn't move.

But how could it hurt so much? It was like all his bones were broken.

Qi Leren's confused thinking leaped illogically. He saw many things, and the broken pictures rampaged in front of his eyes, but they just passed away. All he remembered was that he saw a pair of blue eyes.

Blue eyes.

Ning Zhou.

The name suddenly appeared in Qi Leren’s, which was like a spell to unlock the seal on his memories. Countless heavy memories were bearing down, which were more painful than the rose thorn stuck in his heart.

He was going to find Ning Zhou, and he was going to bring him back.

Qi Leren finally recalled his mission, and he began to struggle, struggling to get up from the tomb built from broken ice. Just turning over exhausted his strength, and he had to lie prone on the ground and breathe for a while, only to recover his strength slowly.

He noticed the time. It has been twenty hours since he’d fallen from the ice cliff. It was ten o'clock on the fifth night. The fifth day’s Best of the Day had already been announced, but he didn't know who it was. At the same time, his privacy time has been reset with the new day day, and he had another ten hours.

If you fell from such a high place, the tracking camera should be damaged. If not, the low temperature here should make it unable to work normally. But just to be on the safe side, turn it off.

"Turn off the camera." Qi Leren squeezed his voice out of his dry throat, and coughed wildly as soon as he finished speaking. His mouth was full of the fishy sweetness of blood, which made Qi Leren feel queasy.

Suddenly there was a light sound in the dark, as if a stone had been pushed down.

Qi Leren immediately took out a flashlight from the item bar and shone it in the direction of the sound.

Not far away, there is a mound of rocks and crushed ice, and a tentacle was slowly sticking out from the inside, which was extremely slow and seems to be seriously injured.

That thing wasn't dead yet? Or did it sense the breath of the living again and wake up from hibernation?

Qi Leren struggled from the ground. Although he was mysteriously resurrected, his left hand, which was bitten off by Leviathan, still didn't grow back. If he tried this again, he would only die.

But fortunately, he had a key item that had cooled down.

When the Prophet's Heart was used again, Qi Leren felt subtly different from the last time. The phantom angel falling from the sky came to him and took him away from the terrible world to the carefree Garden of Eden. Under the cover of God's grace, he didn't need to worry, and he didn't feel fear. The world was like sand in his hand, and he could easily knead it into the shape he wanted.

Heavy rocks and ice were pushed away with a flick, exposing Leviathan lying on the ground dying. This horrible monster had a red eye, and this huge eyeball was full of ferocious madness.

There was an invisible giant clock behind him, and the pointer walked quickly. As long as it finished three laps, the power he borrowed would be like the chime of midnight, dissipating all magic.

He had to hurry.

Qi Leren held out his hand and raised his palm in the void. Leviathan floated and began to roar and struggle, but this degree of resistance had no effect before the original force. Moving the palm of his hand slowly, Qi Leren felt that he could easily knead it into pieces, just like what he did to Mark's octopus.

But this was not the only way. Qi Leren felt the mystery of time and carefully explored its secret. A mysterious feeling emerged in his heart. He rubbed his fingers and the sands of time slowly flowed down in his hands.

Leviathan floating in the air as if it had been cast in magic. Its shell was rapidly aging, coated with a layer of rust, and finally it seems to be petrified. Its body was full of cracks, and finally it turned into powder like beach sand, which sprinkled to the ground slowly, leaving a golden treasure chest and a round sphere.

Qi Leren waved his hand, and these two things fell into his hands. The treasure chest was opened, which was an item.

[Lucky Revolver: There are six slots in this gun’s chamber, one of which is loaded with a bullet. Shooting at one's own temple can give one minute of absolute defense within a radius of 500 meters around the locked target, but the absolute defense is invalid for this bullet. Even if you are lucky, God will only give you five minutes. If you are not afraid of death, you can continue for another minute. Locked target: not set.]

Qi Leren immediately decided that this was of no use to him, because he would blow his head off with the first shot, and unless it was matched with S/L, it was a waste.

Disappointed, he looked at the other object, which was an eyeball as big as a bowl. The scarlet pupil seemed familiar. It was called [Leviathan's Eyeball].

What was this thing? There wasn’t even a brief introductory description, which reminded Qi Leren of another prop without a brief introduction, namely, the "Scepter of Hell", which Maria had entrusted him to give to the Prophet.

Time was running out, and the clock representing his time limit only had half a rotation left. The translucent wings behind the Qi Leren lifted him, flying over the deep underground glacier, crossing the collapsed ice tunnel, flying all the way along the coming road, and returning to the iron door at the entrance before time ran out.

"Qi Leren? You’re still alive? That’s great!" "Qianbei! Are you alright? Qianbei! How did you grow wings!" "Qi, are you alright?" The three people wandering around the door with flashlights rushed up in surprise at the sight of Qi Leren.

Prophet's Heart’s time was up, and Qi Leren landed on the ground. After the sacred power retreated, he sat down weakly and walked out of the underground ice cave with the help of the three panicking people.

"It's okay, it's all taken care of. Just in case, we should quickly leave here, seal the exits, and wait for rescue." Although Qi Leren was still in the aftershocks of coming back from the dead, his mind was clear, and he clearly commanded the three people. He was worried about whether there were any octopuses hatching in the research institute, but he was afraid to say it now, for fear that after his mouth moved, his good luck would run out.

Du Yue had great strength, and single handedly carried Qi Leren, who had lost his arm, on his back. He listened to the three people say what had happened after they’d split up, learning that after discovering that the other people had become Leviathan's food, the three people had come to the bottom of the institute to look for Qi Leren. They went in several times, but the temperature inside was horribly low. Unlike Qi Leren who had been blessed by the holy light, they finally had to retreat, worried that Qi Leren was dead.

Qi Leren didn't say that he and Leviathan had fallen off the ice cliff together, only that Leviathan had fallen off, and that he was injured and unconscious for a long time but didn't die. Finally, God blessed him and gave him strength to return to them.

Dr. Lu and Du Yue were very embarrassed, but Lara was very moved. She took Qi Leren's remaining right hand and sincerely said, "When we go back, introduce me to your teachings. I’m willing to be baptized."

Qi Leren, who had no intention of preaching at all, was in a distressing situation. One atheist has destroyed the worldviews of another atheist through acting skills and unscientific miracles—maybe more than one. Should he be sealed as a saint or something?

They left the underground research institute, blocked the exit, left the basement, and returned to the surface. The night was bright and the whole land was covered with white snow and ice. Lara, who was the first to leave the room, pointed to the sky in surprise and shouted: "Look, what is that!"

The three people raised their heads and looked at the approaching black spots.

"Is it... Is the rescue coming?" Dr. Lu was excited.

"Great." Qi Leren also breathed a sigh of relief. The copy was coming to an end, and they could return to the Nightmare World soon.

The spacecraft was getting closer and closer, and before long, they would be able to board the spacecraft safely and leave, but the spacecraft was slow to land. The four people waited anxiously, just like waiting for a late plane.

"It seems like something’s wrong." Lara stood up and looked at more and more spacecrafts that had no intention of landing. "What are they waiting for?"

A thought flashed through Qi Leren's mind: "Are they a civilian spacecrafts?"

"No, these are..." Lara said, her voice stopping abruptly.

A beam more dazzling than sunlight converged on the muzzle of the spacecraft, and the terrible energy was aimed at this planet!

Stunned, the four people watched the devastating attack on the plane beneath their feet, and they couldn't help feeling shocked. They had never thought that, after escaping death from a horrible space alien, they would finally die at the hands of their own people. In order to prevent the octopus from spreading, the army gave up the idea of a rescue landing and blasted the whole planet to pieces at a safe distance, where there was no risk of contact.

At the last second in this copy world, Qi Leren and the others were judged to have completed the task requirement of "surviving until the army arrived", and left the world in the light of the blast.

-----

Editor’s Notes: Obviously those items can only have positive results, right?

As a bonus for the end of this arc, BMBL wrote a collection of the program audience’s reactions on her Weibo. They’re posted as images so I can’t easily throw them into an mtl, but here’s the link for anyone who wants to take a stab at it: https://weibo.com/1741082525/F4b6D7Upr

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[tomorrowsdrama]

2020 Year in Thirst Pt. 2

Sometimes, I will watch a drama for the plot/premise/substance and be rewarded with a surprise hottie, and it’s the best feeling ever!  It’s like finding money in your pocket that you didn’t know about.  The following list of dramas can be described as:

Came for the plot, was rewarded with a surprising side of thirst

1. Flower of Evil

Brief Summary: Lee Jun Ki plays Baek Hee Sung and Moon Chae Won plays Cha Ji Won, his wife who is also a detective.  What Ji Won doesn’t know is that her husband, Hee Sung, is actually Hyun Soo, a man on the run from a murder that he did not commit and also a suspected accomplice to a series of murders committed by his father in the past.  Oh yeah, his dad secretly tried to groom him into being his protege/murder partner.  Because of how he was raised, HS believes that he has no emotions and is simply putting on an act as the perfect husband and father.  His “parents” are in on the ruse and are actually the ones who forced him into assuming their comatose son’s identity.  Anyway, of course things from the past start to catch up with HS and his wife is somehow assigned to investigating his old murder case.  She of course feels betrayed, but also conflicted as she discovers her husband is not who he said he was and a prime murder suspect.  Things get even more complicated as the real murderer re-appears with fabulous long hair and tries to frame HS for the murders.  In between all of this are delicious make outs between the couple and at least one instance where they banged so hard, HS was wiped out the next morning.

Surprise Thirst Factor: I checked out this drama fully expecting to drop it because the promos were so misleading and unappealing. But boy was I in for a pleasant surprise!  Not only was the drama super addicting, it also had some nice eye candy in the form of Lee Jun Ki being a completely unrealistic house husband who satisfies in the housework (The man cooks and does the laundry!), childcare, and bedroom and Kim Ji Hoon’s glorious mane of beauty making viewers have a moral crisis over lusting after a homicidal maniac (who turned out to be a real loser without murder daddy around to clean up his mess.  It’s ok, we’ll always have his hair).

Yes, work that hair honey.  It’s the only good thing you’ve got going on for you (the character, not Kim Ji Hoon)

The chemistry between Lee Jun Ki and Moon Chae Won was fire and the make out scenes were soo believable.  Like yes, these two beautiful people are really into being married to each other and understandably want to make out all the time. 

He’s the primary caretaker for their daughter and it’s just *swoons.*  Not all thirst traps come in the form of sexy abs (although I would not mind if he wanted to flash some).

2. Six Flying Dragons

Brief Summary: The story of young Yi Bang Won (who later becomes King Taejong) and the founding of the Joseon Dynasty.  As short as it sounds, that really is an accurate summary of the drama haha.

Surprise Thirst Factor: I started watching this drama because I heard it was a great sageuk and I’m a big fan of Yoo Ah In.  Even though I’m a fan of his acting, Yoo Ah In doesn’t necessarily get my hormones raging so I wasn’t expecting to be so thirsty while watching Six Flying Dragons.  But then.  BUT THEN.  Byun Yo Han showed up in all his scruffy tortured deadly killer glory and my hormones woke up and said hi, hello, who are you, what’s your name, what’s your sign, can I get your number?  The deadlier and more tortured his character got, the sexier he became to me.  Sorry Yoo Ah In, you’ll always be my acting boo, but Byun Yo Han’s got my thirst.  Byun Yo Han looks so good when he's sad and/or covered in blood, it makes me feel like a sadist for thinking that I wouldn’t mind if the drama made his character cry some more.

3. Ever Night S1

Brief Summary: As a child, Ning Que witnessed his entire household get massacred because of a prophecy that the child of Hades will be born from the house and bring about the Eternal Night.  Somehow, he managed to escape and was the lone survivor.  He finds a baby buried in a pile of dead bodies as he’s fleeing and names her Sang Sang.  The two orphans grow up inseparable from each other and do whatever it takes to survive in the harsh, cruel world.  Ning Que earns money by becoming a deadly mercenary and Sang Sang takes care of the household affairs.  At one point, Ning Que becomes a disciple of the powerful Fu Zi and somehow gets entangled in the struggles between the Holy Sect and Demon Sect.  A bunch of beautiful women fall for Ning Que, and the drama tries its hardest to convince us that he has chemistry with and reciprocates the feelings of one of them (i.e. Mo Shan Shan), but anybody who was even half paying attention knows that the only one for Ning Que is Sang Sang.  They are the OTP of all OTPs and take “ride or die” to a whole other level. Oh also, their height difference is the stuff manga dreams are made of. Ning Que is a “good guy” but also not a “good guy” in the sense that he is not above doing whatever it takes to seek revenge and is only out for himself and Sang Sang (and later, his older brothers and sisters from the academy).

Surprise Thirst Factor: Chen Feiyu is an attractive person but I could not in good conscience thirst after him because he was literally born in the year 2000.  It did not help that he was only 18 when he filmed Ever Night and looked every bit his age.  My thirst may have no shame, but it does have its own set of principles and one of those principles is thou shalt not lust after those born in the new millennium!  Luckily for me, Second Brother is played by Dylan Kuo who is a beautiful, elegant, tall man

and Brother Chao is exactly the type of rugged and manly that I am into.  

(you don’t have to be)

who looks better when wet

AHEM. Yeah.

Sixth Brother is also not so bad with his scanty pounding work attire,

4. Novoland: Eagle Flag

Brief Summary:  Asule is the prince of a tribe in the grasslands who is held as a royal guest (i.e. hostage) in the Eastland Empire.  There he meets his two future best friends, Yu Ran, a free spirited princess who is descended from a race of bird people, and Ji Ye, an emo neglected/shunned son of a concubine who is probably the best fighter in the empire.  Ji Ye loves Yu Ran who is a ball of sunshine to his Johnny Raincloud dark emo self.  Yu Ran loves Ji Ye back.  Asule loves both his friends and will do anything to protect them.  The world decides to fuck over best friends Asule, Ji Ye, and Yu Ran for no reason as they try their best to just live a peaceful life away from all the political scheming and fighting.

Surprise Thirst-worthiness: I was completely content with enjoying Eagle Flag purely for its story and substance.  It’s seriously a wonderful, yet heartbreaking drama and the scale of the production is amazing.  No cheap $10 costumes here.  Also, the direction is beautiful/artistic and not the run of mill “let’s shoot it and complete it as fast as we can.”  The two main actors were cute, but not really my type.  Then the drama decided to give Ji Ye the “Sexy Bloody Tormented Killer Makeover” and all of a sudden your girl was rushing to MDL to check Chen Ruo Xuan’s birthday and calculating his age.  I am simple, predictable, and consistent when it comes to my thirst and give a character some scruff, long hair, angst, and some bloodlust and I’m all yours.  I am literally:

Is it wrong that when Ji Ye showed up looking like this ready to kill his mother’s torturer

I thought, yes, can we have him kill another? 

5. Run On

Brief Summary: Im Siwan plays Ki Seon Geom, a national track runner from a rich family who is a bit of an oddball and marches to his own beat.  Although his words can sometimes be construed as rude since he has no filter, they are also completely honest and have no hidden meaning.  He also has his own personal code that he lives by and he will stick to it no matter how negatively it may impact himself.  He meets Oh Mi Joo, a translator with her own strange quirks and sparks fly as Mi Joo is assigned to be his interpreter.  

Surprise Thirst-worthiness: I kind of watched this drama by accident.  I had read about Im Siwan starring in a new drama but nothing I saw from the description or promos for Run On appealed to me.  Nor did it give me any information about what the drama would be about.  Then one day, I just happened to be browsing Netflix for something to play in the  background and decided on Run on since I thought I wouldn’t be that invested.  What a happy accident that turned out to be because I’m so in love with this drama right now.  This is a case where the thirst does not stem from the character’s physical appearance, but from the intensity/charisma the actor brings to the character and the character himself.  Ki Seon Geom is so odd, but so appealing at the same time and Im Siwan is so magnetic in the role.  Prior to Run On, Im Siwan wasn’t really my type physically.  In fact, I always scratched my head whenever people called him handsome in dramas (I know, I know, forgive me).  So color me shocked when I found myself swooning all over Im Siwan in the second episode of Run On.  Now, it’s like I have “Im Siwan is attractive” glasses on and he looks attractive in everything to me.  I want to gobble up all the dramas he’s been in.

[drivingsideways]

Episodes 7 & 8

Spoilers and yelling under the cut

Well, just a note that I really love the theme music, esp the bit they use as the love theme. 

-honestly I feel bad for Feng Hao. Like sure, he’s not the sharpest tool in the box, and frankly, he’s like..entitled and annoying until this part of the series, but the dude has a point about the whole “at least tell me the truth before i die!!!” thing. 

-Anyways, the Feng/Qiu family dynamic is also so interesting- Feng Zhiwei and Feng Hao are such different personalities! My guess is that Mingying both devoted a lot of her resources to making sure Feng Zhiwei would be “ready” when the time came, but also held her to impossibly high standards! Feng Zhiwei is scared of her mom in ways that Feng Hao is not! And perhaps Qiu Mingying compensated for (placing Feng Zhiwei first) with spoiling Feng Hao, so that he basically got away with being an idiot most of the time. 

-Prince of Chu literally jumping in between Feng Zhiwei and a sword *starry eyes *

-Hahaha, Feng Zhiwei being all like “you better fucking save my mother and brother, PRINCE” before she realizes he’s actually wounded. Also, the fact that she calls him Mr.Tailor before she calls him Prince of Chu (oh no oh no!)

I think Ning Yi never realized the depth of her devotion to Qiu Mingying and Feng Hao, though honestly, he should have- starting from when she’s willing to take her mother’s crime upon her? Somehow he doesn’t seem to grasp, later, how much their deaths devastated her, especially since she blames her own existence for that.  

-Oh no, Ning Yi trying to tease her because he doesn’t know how to deal with her distress! (also the soft lighting and the general intimacy of that scene, THANKS FOR NOTHING SHOW)

-Feng Zhiwei blaming herself for everything-pretty similar to how Ning Yi also internalizes blame and guilt-in some ways they are both so similar in this, that’s perhaps one of the reasons that they can’t talk through things, later. 

-Ning Yi has like 50 expressions in the space of 1 minute going from “oh no i need to comfort her which is awkward and weird and i’d best deflect her by teasing to oh fuck what am i doing”, the entire thing is delicious, YOU COMPLETE IDIOT NING YI. 

-OH NO NING YI’S TINY SMILE AT NING CHENG TO LET HIM KNOW HE’S MOSTLY OK while they stage a drama for Official Zhao. OH NO I AM HERE FOR THEIR FRIENDSHIP ALL THE TIME

-Chen Kun’s cheekbones should be declared illegal, that’s just a fact. 

-Ning Cheng is the best because he knows when he’d be An Intruder (the way he sneaks off while Feng Zhiwei is being nurse-maid to a sleeping Ning Yi is so cuuuuute) 

-I wish there were subs for the song that plays over this scene. 

-Poor Zhiwei- so conscious of the seriousness of her oath, which she doesn’t fully understand, and also this-something- she feels for Ning Yi, which she doesn’t quite understand, either. 

-Ning Yi watching her sleep, don’t be a creeper, Ning Yi, sorry, this whole trope was ruined for me with Twilight, and I can’t stand seeing it on screen anymore! 

-His exaggerating the pain to deflect- you’re such a loser, NY, omg. lol i love how she sees through him. That’s one of my favourite parts of this pairing at the start, how they intuit each other’s true feelings/intentions more often than not. But that can never be a substitute for actual talking???about things??? and you can see how they fail at the end. GOD I AM MAKING MYSELF SAD IN ADVANCE. 

-HOW HAD I FORGOTTEN THE HALF REVEAL OF A COLLAR BONE, THANK GOD FENG ZHIWEI STOPS HIM, I THINK WE WOULD HAVE ALL GONE UP IN SMOKE OTHERWISE. 

-LISTEN CHEN KUN’S CHEEKBONES ARE A HAZARD TO PUBLIC SAFETY

 * AMBULANCE SIRENS IN THE DISTANCE *

- Ning Yan, you’re like not even playing in the same league as your brothers, I’m so glad you died fast. Like honestly, Ning Chuan’s expression alone should have made you run for the hills, but you actually thought you were getting somewhere. 

-Note on the sets at Prince of Chu’s residence- I fucking love that room with the opera masks - need to find a BTS video subbed in English to figure out more about them, but 100% that was a great choice for Ning Yi’s personality, and we often see him framed against those, as I recall. 

-The repeated theme of “hiding” from Feng Zhiwei- the first time they meet, he’s literally hiding from her behind a screen at the House of Lanxiang, until he knocks it down because he’s curious about her-and now he’s hiding in a different way, because he doesn’t want to answer her questions-but she’s literally like “there’s no place to hide” and just *sigh * i love how that’s both literal and metaphorical in this story between them. Ning Yi has spent his life hiding-his feelings, his skills, his intelligence- and Feng Zhiwei forces all of that out into the sunlight, so to speak. *starry eyed about it *

-I love how Ning Cheng is all of us, if he had popcorn, you bet he’d be eating it right now. 

-XZ being all passive aggressive about Feng Zhiwei *cough cough *

-XZ has no second thoughts about sacrificing the entire Qiu family if it will eliminate Ning Chuan, although the earlier, the killing of the canal workers troubled him quite a bit. It’s Ning Yi who says “I don’t want my throne to be tainted with innocent blood”. Idk why XZ feels differently about the canal workers vs the Qiu family- perhaps, on some level, he can justify this by saying that they *were * after all, “enemy of the state”- and their fate would be the same whether it was the Emperor who dealt the killing blow or them- so in XZ’s scheme of things, it just makes sense to use it to their advantage, as the outcome would not have varied, in any case. Unlike the canal workers, who were entirely caught up in this by accident. 

-I like how Ning Yi says the line “I’m the only one who can protect her”, twice; the first time is a justification to XZ, the second is a justification to *himself *.  And XZ knows it too. 

-lol NY’s absolute fury at Feng Zhiwei being like “so long and thanks for all the fish” - god, he hates having his plans interfered with, and this woman just won’t listen, will she?

-Idk if this is a subbing issue, but occasionally, there are lines,esp idioms that seem completely out of place in the show. For eg “Each man for himself, the devil take the hindmost” is something both Gu Yan and Col Qiu say; and in this episode Col Qiu says “Man proposes, God disposes” which seems really weird. Anyways. 

-Oh Ning Yi, the relief he feels when he sees Feng Zhiwei safe-under his roof, thanks to Chief Gu-after that whole dialogue earlier to Col Qiu about “Wouldn’t it be better if a person didn’t have to care for other people” . *cackling * My poor prince, having to spend his life pretending he doesn’t care, when the problem is that he cares *too much * (about some people!)

-The scene between Gu Yan and Qiu Mingying is one of the best scenes in the show! For one, it features Qiu Mingying who gets tooo few scenes, gdi. Second, god I love how she uses her silence as a weapon here- in the Qiu household, she had to stay silent, swallowing every insult until it became truly dangerous to be silent, and she makes her thoughts known very strongly- but here she reduces Gu Yan to tears with her silence. If she had (justifiably) given  vent to her anger, I don’t think it would have been half as effective! The person who holds the power in that room is not the Chief of the Royal Guards, it is that unyielding woman and her silence. 

-Honestly, all the actors in this series are so GOOD, like Hai Yitian as Ning Chuan is just perfect as the paranoid, menacing and not very competent Crown Prince. 

And finally, gosh, I love our manipulative Prince of Chu literally setting a “little cat” among the pigeons.

[hamletteprinceofdenmark]

Lost Live-blogging - 1x09 - Solitary

-Sayid is such a lovely, lonely man

-oh my gosh are we getting a sayid centric episode???? Is it his time at last??!??

-Oh what that? A rope? A BOAT??!?!

-we’re following the rope chain, the rope chain, the rope chain, we’re following the rope chain, where ever it may go

-Looks like it’s going to be a musical episode folks

-Ah Jack, back at it again with that bedside manner

-Sawyer for the last time stop it with the casual racism I’ve had it up to here

-But yes continue to call Jack out on his bull, you’re the only one who does it consistently and for that I appreciate you

-THEY’RE IN FUCKING HIGHSCHOOL LOOK AT THAT SMUG LITTLE GRIN

-You ain’t got nothing to be proud of Sawyer, you coerced that makeout sesh and you know it

-IT WAS NOT AN ACCIDENT IT WAS A DELIBERATE CHOICE

-Coming out here saying “accident” how dare you

-Sayid offered and you accepted knowing full well what you were doing

-“accident” Jesus Christ are you a man or a shady government, Jack you’re the worst. And watch now as he still maintains his moral high horse, god damn he really is the Finn of Lost, at least Sayid admitted what he did and took moral responsibility you sanctimonious ass

-Folks I’ve realised I don’t like Jack very much

-Maybe you’ve noticed ...

-Remember how Jack was supposed to die in the first episode and Kate and Sayid were gonna be the leads? Yeah me too.

-SAYID NO

-Oh thank god for a minute I thought you were going to deliberately trip the wire

-SAYID NOOOOOOOO

-ouch fuck

-If this is another one of Locke’s damn traps I swear to god he will catch these hands

-I mean a smart and conscientious hunter tells their mates where the traps are so they can avoid them but somehow I don’t think Locke’s been doing that, living his Lord of the Flies fantasy

- tbh I don’t trust Locke with a 10 ft pole (he’d probably spear me with it!)

-THEY REALLY LEFT HIM OUT HERE TILL AFTER DARK LET ME AT EM

-Is my sweet baby meditating I love him so much

-New Jungle, Who Dis?

-IT WAS FUCKING LOCKE I’LL KILL HIM

-OoOo new character, what’s your name glasses?

-oh he’s so anxious I love him

-maybe you wouldn’t be so tired if you hadn’t Condoned Torture jack idk 🤷🏻‍♀️

-HURLEY I LOVE YOU

-Y’all need to organise a dance party or something, i nominate Hurley as The Man in Charge

-Lightbulb??? French??? I am Confusion

-WHO is Alex is the more pressing question surely?

-DON’T TORTURE MY BABY

-Flashback time

-Oh it’s the bae!

-Hello Ethan, you look like you’re going to be a Locke sycophant, lovely to meet you

-oh sweet baby no! Hurley’s a much better mentor, don’t go hunting at night

-listen to your daddy baby go back to bed

-like I’m not against you learning to hunt necessarily but start with a group in the daytime not at night with mr creepy Ei Yi Yi

-whatchu find bro?

-Stop it. Stop. STOP IT. LEAVE THAT MAN ALONE!!

-Oh shit French Lady you’re alive!

-they? Who?

-look at that dramatic ass lighting I love this show

-also apparently Rousseau can read Arabic, I feel like this is something to notice

-oh his voice is so soft when he says her name my heart is breaking

-Sup Sayid you ready to meet the love of your life

-OH SHIT THEY KNEW EACH OTHER AS KIDS IT’S A CHILDHOOD AU BROUGHT TO LIFE IMMA CRY

-you really gonna torture this woman? This neat neat lady?

-NOOO

-Hey Rousseau can you untie him please?

-Hurley are yOU ACTUALLY GONNA THROW A BEACH PARTY I’M SO EXCITED

-NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO NOT NADIA PLEASE NOT NADIA

-Rousseau you a mad lady

-I ask again can you untie him first??? Is this such a big ask? Let him move his arms? Sit up? He doesn’t have to be unrestrained just let him move a bit

-Michael you’re so smart I’m so proud of you

-HE BUILT A GOLF COURSE I’M SO PROUD

-“You didn’t hear about the polar bear?” I’m HOWLING

-also props to the writing team for keeping track of what everyone does and doesn’t know

-Mind AND BODY folks, Hurley’s onto it what a smart cookie

-So she can’t read Arabic? Or she can and she’s testing him? I’m so confused, why would his name not be written in Arabic, and if not why choose English letters

-WHAT’S IN THE NEEDLE YOU CRAZY LADY

-they’re so dramatic I love these sweet babies you are playing GOLF

-Hey Glasses how you doing?

-Yay, clubs for everyone!

-I mean thanks for untying him I guess

-Yay now SAYID gets answers

-Lovely parallel in an episode all about Sayid’s journey as a torturer, to get information by kindness and conversation. I love a good man

-Tahiti is a fair way from Fiji, where is this island?

-Oh she’s so cool I don’t want her to die! This is too tragic.

-I’m sobbing they’re so beautiful

-ugh blondie you are Such a Piece of WORK

-well at least Sawyer and Kate are getting along

-“Crowd’s not to hot on me, either,” SAWYER stop making me love your problematic ass

-Oh Sayid don’t betray her she’s so lonely and sad

-sounds more like a lion to me Danielle but that’s just me

-I’M CRYING

-HIS FACE

-THIS IS NOT OKAY HOW DARE THEY COME FOR MY LIFE LIKE THIS??

-NO THE PHOTOS DON’T LEAVE THE PHOTOS

-Dude Priorities, Son over Golf yeah?

-DECEPTION DISGRACE

-My heart’s beating that fast how dare they do that to me

-I. AM. WEEPING.

-Go back to your rounds general dickface this is none of your business let them be happy for once in their goddamn lives

-I AM SOBBING

-oh thank god she might still be alive, don’t scare me like that again Sayid

-was? Oh no

-why is everything so sad

-okay but where’s Walt? I am Concern

-yes barter betting I am HERE for THIS

-yay Sawyer’s arrived

-acceptance in the group acceptance in the group I am so happy

-the 100 parallels are unreal Jason really loved this show

-NO WALT STAY AWAY FROM THE CREEPY MAN

-the whispers are real oh noes

[katekyo-hitman-aus]

au where Skull, Fong, and Reborn know each other beforehand

It was a tiny little baby in Fong’s arms. It was cute. And it was a monster, Fong decided as he tossed the baby to it’s mother. A high pitched shriek sounded from all the surrounding females of his life. Fong realized women were the most dangerous and could probably kill him by accident.

He sweated when he felt his mother’s stare behind him, her naturally long nails almost clawing Fong’s neck. Where was his father????

Yi-Sheng clicked her teeth in disapproval at Fong’s actions. Fong received many fan smacks the moment the purple baby was here.

Hours later, Fong was stuck with Changying, a girl who was only 11 months old and somehow liked him unlike other people.

The boy was pretty sure Changying was mad at him-as mad as a purple baby could get. But then when she saw Fong play with the other cousins, she cooed and banged her arms on the high chair for Fong. She could barely say anything in chinese except for Fong and fried dumplings. But she grew to be even more adorable, much to Fong’s horror. He didn’t need his friends picking on his little sister! He and Changying were considered the closest pair of cousins and doted on each other.

For example, they’d fall asleep over stupid shows and try to explore the streets of the city only for Fong to get wrecked by his own father and Changying quickly wailed when Fong got a bashing or two from their family.

Fong has never been so thankful for Changying. She was the one who’d always cry over her big Brother aka him, it literally changed his life. Life in this shitty shack never seemed better. And he’d eventually got the chance to learn martial arts for his crybaby cousin. Changying cried even more and he panicked.

But turns out it was tears of joy because Changying could actually defend herself. She couldn’t really fight though aside from knocking people out in one blow so Fong got even more tough training.

As years passed by, Fong and Changying both grew more subdued as a result of all the politics surrounding their family and eventually separated. Both still managed to find each other without saying anything though. 10 years later, Changying is back home with a wilted look in her pink jade eyes and dark hair that is roughly cut up to her shoulder blades.

Fong is wincing from all the deep bruising he’s received from his masters. Fong is now 14 years old.

He doesn’t notice her due to all the stinging cuts on his hands until a broken cry screams in rage. Fong’s eyes widen and all is not okay. Fong slumps his way to hug Changying, his rage boiling as he realizes that she is even more malnourished than he was at the age of 10 and that was when he was surviving on scraps.

“Big Brother! Who did this to you?” She cries, her head still pounding from the Man.

Fong grimly smiles and gently rubs off the dirt of her hands. Changying looks at him with narrowed eyes, a bit puffy from all the crying in the rain she did.

“No one but me.” “Bu-but-” “No one.”

That was the most scary Fong has been. Changying sniffles and buries her face into his stomach. Her stomach growled as she looks away.

“You seem hungry. Sit down.” He smiles. She knows that was a command.

She looks at the table, trying not to frown but does it when Fong gives her a warm bowl of soup. She smiles weakly at Fong and Fong scolds her for eating too fast.

“All you do after that is throw it back up Ying. Your stomach isn’t that prepared to eat a lot of food like you used to.” Fong spoonfeeds her the herbal soup, hands shaking.

Absentmindedly, she knows this isn’t right– it’s all messed up, she nearly chokes on the soup. But the China she knew years ago is forever gone. Fong puts down the spoon in order to feed himself too. Both siblings are suffering and they each tell their tale.

Changying’s been sold by her school teacher in order to make dues to the Chinese trade of slaves. Her owner let her loose when she couldn’t do anything within the first month and beat her. She had a friend but he died and had been fed to the wolves. Changying watched in a gilded cage in horror, tryng to break free and save him.

Her fingers burned as the wolves ate their last dinner and got shot with a short pistol. Nothing went right until she freed herself due to newbie guards. One of them pitied her enough to have 5 minutes of freedom. She went back to her house but she couldn’t find anything. The new residents just glared at her in fury and scorn.

She lowered her head into her knees and listened to Fong. Fong didn’t know how to start it but eventually, he told her everything.

“Mom and dad were killed. And then I joined the Underworld.” Changying looked at him, mortified for Fong and clung on to him as he reapplied his wrappings on his knees and patted Changying on the head.

“Fong! What happened to them?” She couldn’t believe it.

“Ying, they were pulled into some mafioso territory and got shot to death. No one even attended their funeral thanks to some threats I heard on the streets. But then I got thrown out onto the streets and started working for some Triad member. He’s dead now…” His voice got slightly distant. “Now I’m up to par with the spoiled brats that have more muscle mass and food. Of course I can kick their ass, I’m the disciple of one of the strictest tutors and this is him going easy.”

Changying’s eyes widened but she still furrowed her brows. “But what if they make you do something dangerous??? Like a suicide mission.” Her heart skipped a beat when she imagined it.

No home. Cue her hyperventilation.

A few hours later, she peacefully slept on the dirty mattress as Fong put on his slightly damp clothes on with a pair of new shoes (3 months??? He cleaned it everyday) and new socks that help him feel warmer at the speed he usually goes at in order to attend each Trial.

“Good night, Ying.” He gently placed a western coat over her shoulders.

On this foggy night, Fong could see a bonfire and drugs placed everywhere. He blanched when one of the newbies showed up with a bunch of illegal firecrackers in his pants.

The man bursts into sparks, howling in joy from the adrenaline. Fong angrily curses him out and everyone stares at Fong in amazement until Fong gets his face all bloodied by knuckledusters.

The other cronies laugh in a hypocritical way, stepping away from the leader with rapid steps and almost pissing their pants in one way or another. Fong tries to retaliate and happens to catch both arms but then Changying’s name is shouted. He slowly turns back-

He’s taken off guard and his face is buried into the dirt with 3 pairs on hands on his shoulders and hands.

Fong grit his teeth to stop himself from lashing against Triad members who caught word of his cousin’s arrival.

They jeer at him til morning comes and he is so tired, his braid isn’t even held in place anymore and it’s the one thing he thought they couldn’t mess up.

Changying opens the door the next morning to goad Fong into sleeping as she roughly rubs off the dark spots of dirt off his face and chest.

Changying pauses to get a new towel when she looks closer near his collarbone and sees a branding.

The world shakes even more as she finds more markings. Not her big Brother. Her fingernails grow exponentially longer with a tint of purple in the roots of her fingers.

She’s gone in an instant, stomping all around town to find the nearest Triad newbies; they slunk towards her, smelling like her previous…owner. She quickly scratches their eyes out, smiling when they cry as soon as her claws reach their collarbones and sets their shirt on fire.

That’s not much. By the end of everything, they’re curled up on the ground in pain, some even slowly rotting and the leader of it all is just sobbing and she could see his snot as he begs for her to stop everything.

Changying stops and he cries gratefully, spitting at those dying. But then it’s too late to save him as she strangles him slowly and throws him into the lid of an abandoned trash can. Most of the survivors are in a mess of blood and hide as soon as Fong smiles at them coldly when they recover in the hospital.

The Triads are pissed and instantly confront Fong about this for a large amount of time. Each time Fong smiles and says no, something always tackling the main confronter, mainly a few girls that grew fond of Changying’s skittish behaviour but eager affection when caught off guard. The butchers on the corner spit on the Triad’s fancy coats and Fong all welcomes them with poison dripping needles. 

Fong instantly gains more power and Changying is thankful for all the towels and hygiene products they own and can trade with the other neighbourhoods for.

Changying eventually learns how to shop on her own when Fong is busy on a mission with the girls in a human trafficking ring. It’s a bit scary but the grumpy Italian man helps her. Her pink eyes flash a thank you in morse code.

He insists on showing her how to haggle with the perm haired ladies and balding grandfathers and shitty people. Changying grins and bows, her bag of goods in his hand.

“Want me to walk you home??”

Changying hopes Big Brother isn’t home yet and agrees. Ying doesn’t learn much besides he’s from South Italy but she barely knows where Italy is and just comments on how interesting he was. And she was telling the truth for once.

“It was nice meeting you, Renato!”

Renato tips his hat as a good bye and shoves the bags into her arms while he holds the rusty door open for her. “No problem little miss-” he dodges the incoming fist that is from a darkly smiling Fong.

“Renato.” “Fong.”

They both dance in the air, Renato cursing as he left all his weapons behind save for a smokescreen and Renato is backed into the corner but sweeps Fong’s knee with his right leg.

Fong is taken over for a few seconds and instantly stable once again when Changying screams bloody murder and throws the goddamn teacups at both males like she was a profession at shotput or something.

“Get in here.” She calmly smiles at the two. They both glance at each other, dubious. She glares once again.

They have no choice and they’re pushed into the tiny house. She inhales, smile twitching like her left eyebrow.

“Why the hell are YOU TWO FUCKING FIGHTING? FOR FUCKS SAKE FONG YOU JUST FOUGHT THE MAN THAT HELPED ME SHOP FOR OUR FOOD AND RENATO THATS MY COUSIN GOD DAMMIT. You’re all pissing me off.” Changying sighs and stabs her juice box so hard it nearly exploded.

…well then.

Fong and Renato both glance at each other, slightly disturbed by an angry Changying. Two bowls of fish land on their heads as she laughs her ass off.

“Considering I’m 14 and both of you are like what… 18-20?? Shouldn’t you guys be mature? You sound like you’ve met each other anyways. Tell me how you met.”

Renato and Fong never tell her that they were both assassinating a corrupt tea house lady that had a flesh eating chihuahua with 3 heads….

They hope Ying never finds out and 2 weeks later Renato visits yet again for the nth time.

Fong tries to shut him out but Ying’s broom gets in the way and she has a saucer of black coffee for him and white tea for her and Fong. Not much happens aside from jabs at each other and dark glares while Changying isn’t looking.

She usually gets used to it unless they ruin her books or any type of curtains. That shit is expensive my friend and she refuses to use Fong’s money. Changying is a bit stingy about that and insistent incase something bad happens in general and they needed the money.

Then it became worse when Renato started handing over wads of cash and Fong smirked at the exchange as Changying grew more done with her two big brother figures.

“Renato! Stop giving me money! I have enough so you should stop handing over your money or else you’ll go broke!”

“Darling, this is nothing compared to what my clients give me after my missions.”

“Missions?”

“Fong didn’t tell you?? I’m an independent hitman who has a decent footing with the people. I get brownie points too, you doof.”

Changying pouts but nods in agreement. “I’ve heard of the Triads doing that. Are you Mafia??”

“Si.”

“That’s yes right?”

“Yes, little one.” Reborn smiles in amusement before his phone goes off. He groans and kisses her on the forehead.

“Yes?” Reborn places his hand on his hip. Changying muffles her giggle into her mouth as Renato continues to sigh dramatically and swing his hips.

“Sorry little one, I gotta go thanks to a personal client.”

“Renato!” “Yeah?”

“You may be a killer, but at least you have more morals than some of the civilians I’ve met. Stay safe.. big brother!” She kisses his chin because she’s too short but still. It’s the thought that counts.

Renato walks out, inwardly realizing how adorable Changying is with her light pink eyes and a row of yellow or blue flowers in her purple flowy hair. And it’s natural.

Fong nods in understanding as Renato breaks down in the middle of the road, screaming obscurities to himself while everyone’s at the market. The locals at the shop laugh behind their backs, nodding in approval at Changying’s choices. The old ladies babble about how good of a boyfriend Renato would be. The old men grumble and pout as they scale the fish.

“We have to protect Changying….I understand why you ended up almost murdering me the first time I saw her. She’s a lot more innocent than most girls.”

Thus the protect Changying squad was formed.

Both of them were gone for a year. That was when Changying got into the most troublesome job, in Fong and Renato’s opinion.

Changying finished all her chores and hummed to herself, taking a decorative knife with her. She glanced at the mirror, covering it up with a striped piece of clothing. The house is so dark that you can barely spot the trap wires and she maneuvers herself around the colorful wires and jump over the round rug right below the ceiling.

“Morning Ying!” A boyish girl laughs at her as she squeals and the door shuts loudly. Changying glares at her.

“Jia!”

Jia laughed again, tightly gripping Changying’s bicep, successfully dragging her all the way in the middle of town. Changying sighed and took a seat next to an old lady. Pink eyes met playful dark blue eyes.

The brunette smiled at Changying, her slanted bangs covering one of her eyes, “Hey! Hey! Did you hear about the local Chinese folks tryna make a circus?”

Changying perks up at the unfamiliar word. Circus?

“Ehhhh?? Chanyi, you’ve never heard of a circus before??”

“Haha, no.” Changying blushes and smiles sheepishly. “I never really did anything really fun with people and I couldn’t do much by myself. I get lost easily haha.”

Jia frowns thoughtfully and decides, “I’m going to take you to it now! They’ve been practicing for a bit now. Maybe you can take some inspiration from it for your traps.”

Changying hums happily as she is once again, dragged for a while, mind racing to a certain time.

(Jia was her new friend she met by accident. She was Russian and Chinese, new in the town. Changying wouldn’t know what to do without Jia. Changying was a recluse after her brother figures left her. At first she refused but Jia dodged her traps. Now they work together to make things a lot harder for her asshole brother figures and thieves. Changying was so amazed by Jia’s enthusiam that they both did actual research on optical illusions and traps.)

Changying yelped as Jia hopped forward, lifting her legs up in a bridal style, dodging all the people screaming at them and 5 minutes later, she was able to focus on all the Chinese music bouncing off the streets and a red lantern floating over her. Children screaming around her ears,

Changying sighed and avoided all the people running all over the roads. Soon, an overwhelming sight greeted her as she pushed through the crowds of people and paper curtains everywhere. Her eyes widened when she saw the tent of circus performers. They looked so pretty!

Her eyes sparkled and Jia covered her eyes, trying not to get blinded.

A few days later; Changying slowly warmed up to the people, albeit shyly, and the others welcomed her.

A few weeks later, Changying was already part of the circus tent, slowly crawling onto a Liger. Her back arched slightly as she put the crown of bells on the Liger. She whimpered when the Liger growled, slightly shaking its body but Changying was immediately off the liger.

She smirked and took the sack of money from grumbling man in the back of the room. The liger didn’t care about them and just stared at Changying. She quickened her pace before anything else happene-

The door slammed, an angry dark skinned woman stomping her way over to the area, screaming for no reason and then the Liger ate her.

Everyone screamed bloody murder.

Well.

That was a thing, Changying smiled nervously. One of the acrobats patted her on the shoulder, replacing her blood stained sweater with a black and red cloak while smiling at her casually.

“Don’t worry about anything! Our animals eat a lot more flesh than normal people. But they recognize people’s behaviour and are designed to eat those who get in the way. We’re probably one of the most dangerous but safest in the area.”

Changying sighed, thinking to herself as they dressed her in accessories.

Of course Jia has to choose the most dangerous circus… I might as well join the chaos. Changying snapped back to reality and grinned with shark teeth.

Jia yelped, dropping her whip and red flats. She looked at the strange aura her friend emitted and tiptoed away with her belongs to the backstage.

“Jia~”

“YING WHAT THE FUC-” Jia got slapped

“Language!” Changying wagged her finger at Jia, who was fucking terrified. Who knew her best friend could travel 40 yards within the blink of an eye?

After Jia’s slight heart attack, they both got ready and Changying tightened her and Jia’s hairbuns and stuck in tiny pins.

Later that night, it was a successful show. Changying was a stunt performer who dabbled in fire acrobatics and Jia introduced everyone and was one of the many people who pulled out volunteers for several events.

“Ladies and gentlemen! Thank you for the show and we’d like to give out one more prize for 2 volunteers!” A huge amount of hands instantly waved to Jia, wanting something.

Jia grinned and yanked out an Italian man and the other man in a pure red chinese top. The Italian was fluent in Chinese and talked with the other man. Jia’s smile was a bit strained since they ignored her but then she yelped as Changying kicked her ribs softly.

“Changyi!!!” Jia whined, rubbing her sore stomach.

“Jiaaaaaa!” Changying giggled, secretly glaring at the two volunteers, as she hugged Jia. Jia blinked.

“You know them two?”

“Of course! They’re the big brother figures I talked about! The one in red is Fong and the one in black is Renato.”

Jia just gave the giant box of mooncakes and coin chocolate to both of them and announced the show’s end. Most people didn’t want to leave but then Jia swung her whip at the stubborn Triad members. Jia smirked as they squealed like babies.

“Jiaaa. Was it that neccessary?? Besides, I think they were flirting with the wrong girl.”

The brunette stared at her in disbelief, slowly twitching. “You’re the only girl who’s shorter than most people and you have purple hair and glow in the dark flower crowns….. I’m pretty sure they knew it waas you.”

Fong and Renato gave the trio of Triad members a death stare. They all shivered. Changying just smiled mysteriously.

“I’m sure there’s another girl!” She reasoned. “Maybe they thought I was new and wanted to help me…???”

“Just don’t.” Fong, Jia, and Renato’s voices deadpanned at Changying. When the brothers came home earlier, they were surprised by a bunch of pressure tile traps and etc. The whole house looked like a mess until Changying arrived and set the house on purple fire.

“How are you doing that??” Renato and Fong gaped.

“Oh uh…I may have almost died and apparently I have dying will flames…. Jia told me. She’s also part of the mafia like you two.”

Renato rolled his eyes and hugged Changying tightly. Fong waited for his turn.

They were all tired as fucK.

(notes: Skull is obviously Changying and she’s cousins with Fong. She’s an acrobat and that is a heart attack inducing occupation but as long as she’s happy and not dead, Renato and Fong are okay with it.Changying(skull)’s parents were dosed with mist flames when Changying got sold. They themselves have forgotten they had a family and the both split up, feeling distorted in their relationship. Renato is the 2nd heir to a mafioso family but ensures that he won’t become the head due to heavy security provided by his allies that he asked (blackmailed). He’s made it his goal to become a famous hitman. His old teacher used to be one of the best even if he was a spartan tutor. Renato has the personality of a brother who gives no shits about what he says in front of old ladies.Fong and Renato often meet each other by accident and they hate each other so much until Changying(skull) makes them get along due to existing :)Jia is just a random background character that’s a very sneaky lady. She’s slightly older than Changying and has an obsession for cute things. Changying doesn’t know this thankfully. Jia may or may not keep every article that Changying has given her throughout the year. Jia is a scholar and went here on a whim. She’s very rich but very cheap about many things excluding food or necessities.and Changying is very very innocent as stated in this au fic. Not much to say about the cinnamon roll except that she could kill people if she wanted to but she has too much self restraint and would have the strength of a marshmallow if not for her acrobatics regime along with helping everyone in her neighbourhood out. She stronk lmao. Only bends over for people she really likes. Knows like people who see her everyday and won’t remember the time she accidentally saved an important man’s life and got a bunch of raises in her old job. Has the best luck in the world when it comes to shoot outs in China. She nearly died thanks to a bullet and that’s how she ended up activating purple flames. thank you for readingggggggg :DDDDD)ps: idk why I do this lmaooo. Fem skull is one of my aesthetics :)

[quazartranslates]

Welcome to the Nightmare Game II - CH34

**This is an edited machine translation. For more information, please [click here]**

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Chapter 34: Star Death Reality Show (XVII)

In front of the laser corridor, the world in front of them was dark, and even the corridor’s emergency lights were not turned on. Standing here was like standing on a dark cliff, and taking one step forward would lead to falling into the abyss.

Qi Leren turned on the flashlight, its dazzling light reflecting off the metal wall.

He walked forward carefully, for fear that the power would suddenly come on, but he also knew that it was impossible, and that there was still ten minutes before the time he and He Yi had agreed upon. He could successfully reach the door and wait for the power to be restarted. The defense system in this corridor and the identification system on the door were started at the same time. In theory, there was enough time for him to brush open the door with his ID card and leave the underground research institute.

Even if there was an accident, such as an early recovery of the power supply, this time he had already made an escape plan, which wouldn't be as awkward as the last time—that is, if he had to use S/L again. Thinking of the Prophet's warning, Qi Leren felt somewhat guilty.

He solemnly apologized to the audience, saying that this adventure might scare everyone, and then turned off the camera. Without doing this, there was no way to not make the audience suspicious. If he really let them see the abnormal situation in the laser corridor, there was no way to explain it!

Once again, Qi Leren stood in front of the door. The electronic card reader for the ID card couldn’t work because there was no power, so Qi Leren could only wait silently.

Eight minutes to go.

Qi Leren was a bit absent-minded. He was eager to get out of here and return to the world on the surface. He would tell Dr. Lu and Du Yue what had happened inside, and then they would think about it together. Time was running out. They had to find the four contestants who had been infected as soon as possible, kill them, and isolate the suspects.

There was still much to be done.

If the situation got out of hand, Qi Leren intended to ignore He Yi's dissuasion and bring Dr. Lu and Du Yue into the underground research institute, which was probably the simplest clearance method for this copy, but by doing so, there will be very few rewards... A bit of a loss.

With a zi sound, the sensor lights lit up, first far away then nearing. Qi Leren were shocked and stared at the card reader, which showed words he couldn't understand and the patterns of fingerprints. Qi Leren was overjoyed and quickly raised the ID card.

At the moment when the ID card was about to touch the card reader, the card reader suddenly went white. After a few seconds, a pattern reappears on it—a circle that looked like a clock, and there were strange numbers blinking in the circle. The symbols changed as the dots appeared in the clockwise direction...

People who have restarted electronic devices must be familiar with this pattern, but the vicious timing of its appearance made Qi Leren stunned.

The alarm of didididididi— sounded in the channel behind him, stinging his eardrums, and the laser beams at the end of the channel appeared again!

He couldn't say if he was angry or relieved. Qi Leren felt at this moment that the boot had finally dropped. He even thought wryly that he was still suffering from bad luck. Fortunately, as long as he waited for another half minute, He Yi would cut off the power again… If he didn't make any mistakes there.

Qi Leren, who had confidence in this venture, suddenly became suspicious.

Would He Yi really turn off the power? Would he really do it? If he didn't turn on the power, and he waited stupidly at the door and missed the best time to escape...

No, he couldn't wait. Take a gamble! Believe He Yi or believe in himself?

Qi Leren took the initiative, swiftly jumped up, and rushed forward, making a leap and running again. He crossed two laser lines and the next three were skillfully crossed. However, when the laser net was formed, he still could not rush out of the corridor, because the first group of mesh laser networks was formed too early.

But if he saved once, it would be enough!

Qi Leren ran the whole way. At the moment when the first group of laser nets was about to touch him, he saved his position. The laser nets collided with his body and destroyed him in an instant. At the same time, the laser nets that had destroyed the intended target disappeared.

Qi Leren was resurrected in the same place, unable to hesitate, and rushed out of this death trap without looking back before the second laser net could form!

The agreed 40 seconds had already passed, and the power supply had not been cut off, but Qi Leren was relieved: Fortunately, he chose to believe in himself. Reality had taught him never to gamble on any luck.

He leaned against the wall and recalled the Novice Village from when he had just entered the game. He had met a murderer in the hospital. What were his choices at that time?

He chose to hide, wait, and pray. If it was him now... Qi Leren smiled silently. Now he would want to kill that chainsaw killer, so would he even need to use S/L? After all, it was just an ordinary weak human being.

It had only been two months, but he was totally different from before. This change was not only reflected in his combat effectiveness, but in his sense of fighting. He had somewhat gotten rid of an ordinary person’s mentality of wanting to hide and had begun to deal with the endless dangers in a more active way. It was thanks to Chen Baiqi—her demonic training methods had made Qi Leren realize that shrinking from fate was much worse than "just don’t act recklessly".

After recovering quickly, Qi Leren took his gun in hand and set off, walking towards the power room.

He Yi must have had an accident over there. Qi Leren didn't believe that He Yi deliberately sabotaged him. He Yi knew that he had survived going through the laser corridor once, so he wouldn't be sure that this method could kill him. If Qi Leren had a narrow escape, he would be in big trouble. If he really wanted to plot against him, He Yi could have shot him in the head when he wasn’t paying attention, there was no need to wait like this.

A pi sounded in silence, and Qi Leren suddenly stopped and looked back in confusion. This sound... It seemed that the door at the other end of the laser corridor had opened.

Did someone find an ID card and come in? Qi Leren ran back quickly with his gun. He saw that the door at the end had indeed opened, and there was a figure poking around.

"Qi Leren! You’re still alive!" From the end of the long corridor, Dr. Lu waved excitedly at him.

"Qianbei, qianbei, are you okay? We’re here to save you!" Du Yue emerged from behind Dr. Lu, and they were like two mice clinging to the door, eyeing the cheese in the mousetrap.

"Don't come in! There are lasers!" Qi Leren shouted frantically.

"Okay, Du Yue and I found another ID card and finally got the door open. What should we do now?" Dr. Lu asked.

"You just wait, don't close the door, I'll go to the power room and turn it off, then you can come in safely," Qi Leren said.

"Then hurry back," Dr. Lu said.

"We’re waiting for you!" Du Yue shouted.

Relieved, Qi Leren turned to leave, took two steps, and then stopped. After learning his lesson, he explained, "He Yi is here. We figured out that the glowing stone is a parasitic monster called amphioctopus. It will parasitize the human body and multiply rapidly to infect other people. At present, about four people have been infected. Mark and Xue Jiahui are almost certainly infected, and Annie is also very suspicious. I’m not sure about the other one. Don’t trust anyone and don’t wander around until I get back!"

"I understand." Dr. Lu waved him away.

This time Qi Leren really left and went to the power room.

It was quiet, quiet everywhere, a disturbing silence. Qi Leren moved very fast, but his steps were very light. How did he develop these cat-like steps? Qi Leren didn't really want to recall it. But thanks to Chen Baiqi's demonic training, he had learned how to do this in three days, which was more than enough to cope with the current situation.

Coming to the floor where the power room was located, Qi Leren held his gun and quietly moved closer to his destination. The power room door was open. There were bright lights inside and rows of tall machinery and equipment running with a buzzing sound, but no one there. He Yi was not there.

Qi Leren frowned. Where was He Yi? At this time, he couldn't run around by himself. His sudden disappearance seemed to tell him that there was a new danger here.

What could it be?

Qi Leren didn't know, and he couldn't search for it now.

Dr. Lu and Du Yue were still waiting for him at the door. Should he continue to delay here, or turn off the power and go out?

Qi Leren hesitated for a moment, then flipped the switch.

The old machines made a slow plaintive wail, and they stopped working altogether. After doing this for several more times, these machines that hadn’t been maintained would likely break down completely. Qi Leren felt that if they weren’t in a copy, but in the real world, it would be impossible to turn on the standby power that had been idle for hundreds of years.

The lights went out, and this underground research institute became a dark paradise.

Qi Leren's ability to see in the dark hadn’t improved after the shell was broken, so it was impossible to see his surroundings clearly without any light source. He had to turn on his flashlight and run along the emergency passage towards the top floor.

This time, Qi Leren ran very fast, as if some monster was chasing behind him, and he didn't have light footsteps. After all, for a man running in the dark with a flashlight, the weight of his footsteps was meaningless. He passed through the winding halls and returned to the front of the laser corridor smoothly with his excellent memory of the terrain—

It was as if he had a faint premonition in his heart.

The door was open, but Dr. Lu and Du Yue were gone.

In the boundless darkness, in the boundless silence, as if he was the only one left on this deserted planet, stationed in the long night, watching the awakening monsters open their jaws and come towards him.

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