#xi shiyong

[maggiecheungs]

xi shiyong….. born to be the protagonist of a magical girl anime, forced to go through living hell to attain an immortality he never wanted while watching everyone he ever loved pass on without him and witnessing the world he once shared with them vanish into the realm of myth—knowing that it all came about as a result of his own choices—knowing that if he had to do it all again he would still choose to doom himself to an eternity of solitude, to being the single stable lonely lynchpin around which the universe rearranges itself

[stellarish]

Papercraft Shiyong!!

[cinammonelles]

(guy who is normal about traveler abroad voice) hey man how's it going

[morethanwonderful]

I've seen these for other web novels and I wanna play this game. so:

Non Tai Sui readers please engage!! I'm dying to know how my boy Xi Shiyong comes across to y'all : ]

[saitama-vs]

Can Xi Ping/Xi Shiyong/Tai Sui from Tai Sui Defeat Saitama?

Rules: a character can only defeat Saitama if they

1: Can avoid getting punched, AND

2: It is funnier for them to win. Do not apply powerscaling logic to this poll.

Vote under the cut if you read the rules

[bubbledcoffee]

i can't stop drawing him...

[lenateliier]

He is absolutely talking out of his ass right now and the worst part is you 100% believe his nonsense

[grassbreads]

Saw this template and immediately dropped everything to fill one out for Shiyong

Art by @stellarish

[un-jaseur]

❄️

[pippuns]

his highness prince zhuang's guide to tai sui wrangling

[ririnpopo]

priest sure has her priorities straight

[morethanwonderful]

I'm guessing a lot of y'all probably aren't that familiar with Xi Ping and Tai Sui, so if that's the case, please let me tell you about him!

Xi Ping is the most annoying man in the entire world (affectionate). I realize that label is something you could apply to several other Priest characters, but Shiyong takes it to another level.

Xi Ping is the protagonist of Tai Sui—the wealthy son of a minor noble who is dragged into a cultivation world he has absolutely no interest in joining. He is chaos incarnate. He is a menace. He is absolutely heartbreaking.

Tai Sui opens with Xi Ping playing the qin in bad drag because his "courtesan" friend needed a musician to perform with her, and when he gets caught at the brothel by his father, he just sprints out the door and away to hide out with his cousin across the city. He once tries to shield himself in a dangerous situation by turning himself into a chunk of decorative floor tile. He needs to sneak a specific type of tree into someone's yard without their notice to spy on them once, so he painstakingly cuts every new leaf on the tree into a different shape for years so that his enemies won't notice the tree's species. He spends more money than most people make in years on an elaborate homemade fireworks show to wish his teacher happy New Year when he thinks he might be sad. He cons his best friend into thinking he's decades older than he is and makes her call him uncle.

Xi Ping wakes up every day and decides that he is going to cause problems.

And the thing is, it's all narratively justified problem-causing! Xi Ping's whole thing is that he follows "the ungovernable way." Even his cultivation power comes from refusing to be tied down and follow any one code of conduct or worldview. He has the power of "I can do whatever I want forever." He is the element of chaos introduced to topple an oppressive system. He learns about the injustice inherent in his society over the course novel's early arcs and weaponizes his problem-causing to right those wrongs.

Furthermore, Xi Ping is constantly trying to fight with people unfathomably more powerful than him. He's going up against centuries-old demigods on the regular, and in several story arcs, he doesn't even have a body to fight them with physically. All he ever has are his wits, his friends, a qin, and his talent for fucking with people, and he makes use of those things beautifully.

I can't even get into the more emotional or serious aspects of his character without giving major spoilers for Tai Sui, which I'm not going to do. (You should all read Tai Sui and experience that for yourselves). But just from the sheer chaos alone, Xi Ping is one of the characters of all time. He's annoying he's loving he's calculating he's impulsive he's losing his humanity and he's his murderous cousin's only anchor to the human world. He's the world's wisest dumbass. He's a mask of his own face. He's the love of my life. Read Tai Sui and he'll be the love of your life too.

Priest (Author) Character Upper Bracket

*Xi Ping fanart volunteered by @stellarish / used with permission

[“Anti-propaganda” is not allowed. Please only give reasons to vote FOR a character, and please be courteous in the notes.]

Han Yuan from Liu Yao

“Unlike us that had a vagrant life, domesticated kids are shy; I have to look after him in future.” - Han Yuan about Cheng Qian

Submission: Cringefail loser(most affectionate) dragon boi. Gone edgy but his family loves him anyway.

The “idiot” from the description - “A cultivation story about how a declining sect is restored by a narcissist, troublemaker, meanie, idiot, and wimpy kid.”

���our fav -1 braincell kiddo”

Xi Ping from Tai Sui

Submission:

He is literally everything to me. Pure chaos condensed into a single person. Everyone loves him, everyone hates him. He does his best, he doesn't try at all, he beats up monsters with a qin, he brought about the destruction of the entire cultivation world…

Han Muchun from Liu Yao

"Only I, your master, would not detest you, my dirty girl. If it were your first senior brother here, he would have stewed you." - Han Muchun to Shuikeng, Liu Yao: The Revitalization of Fuyao Sect, Chapter 29

[No propaganda submitted]

Took some disciples for his declining sect and unexpectedly became a father

(Sharing a picture with Tong Ru because zooming in any further makes it almost indistinguishable. Also, pain.)

[stellarish]

My favorite thing about xianxia is the non-diegetic bangs.

Closeups under the cut:

[cinammonelles]

making up for the lack of baby pingping and yingying art 👍

[morethanwonderful]

God the first chapter of Tai Sui is so silly, but it's also, like. Here's Xi Ping being ridiculous and causing a scene with some insane scheme, but he's doing it to help out a friend that was put in a tight spot. Here's Xi Ping as the mysterious masked musician behind the scenes, playing the music and controlling the scene while someone else sings in the spotlight.

Xi Ping starts and ends the novel with Jiangli. He's her accompaniment and she's his namesake hundreds of years after her death. And given his last scene in the final extra—the glimpse of that performance at the movie before he dies, Xi Ping starts and ends the novel as an enigmatic performer with no real name, followed by waves of gossip in his wake.

He's always just that odd person playing the qin, his identity disguised, both beginning and ending forever.

[evilvillainapologist]

Speaking of Lin Chi, he might have launched his three hundred complaints against Xi Ping, but also, Xi Ping single-handedly dragged him kicking and screaming out of his 800(?) year long depression by being, as always, an unignorable nuisance. 

Xi Ping going, "Hey, I need you to do shit for me that should logically take a couple of years to complete, but I need it, like, yesterday, or the world is going kaboom" forced Lin Chi to not only come out of seclusion, but also pick up his forging tools again, fire up that old flame, and get to inventing. And boy did he not disappoint! 

He goes back to doing the thing he used to be passionate about, he becomes better at it!, he challenges himself, even his friendship with Zhi Xiu and Wen Fei is basically a result of Xi Ping giving them a reason to start a "Xi Shiyong is a devil and a rat in a human body" knitting circle. 

And he needs it. 

The enough-to-last-for-ten-years fireworks? Inspired. 

The shapeshifting tool that gets Xi Ping turned into an actual rat? Probably the very last time Lin Chi invented a contraption without an idot-proof failsafe in place. 

Lin Chi might be perpetually pissed off about Xi Ping, but also, he is living again, meeting people, following his passion. He owes Xi Ping his life, even though it kills him in the end, and I am Emotional about that.