Probs So [someone] Knows Who To Sacrifice For Maximum Gain At [the Place Where People Are Sacrificed

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Hua Chengs Budaoweng Dolls

and their bitter irony..

How do ghosts get their powers? Some type of cultivation path. Like how Blackwater eats water ghosts and Qi Rong tries to copy this by eating people.

Hua Chengs cultivation path is Xie Lian. Everything he’s capable of is Xie Lian. The butterflies, the crimson rain, the luck. And yes, even the budaoweng dolls.

What is a budaoweng doll?

It’s a doll that is weighted so when knocked over it stands upright.

Impossible not to see the symbolic meaning there, am I right? Just in case: Xie Lian is a living budaoweng doll. He gets knocked down constantly and has no choice but to get right back up again.

Now for the dark irony of turning foes into budaoweng dolls..

It is both a tribute to Xie Lian, and punishment for its victims.

He is making them powerless, yet forcing them stand back up no matter how many times they’re knocked down. They can do nothing but get up.

He’s forcing resilience onto them while making them helpless. He’s mocking them. He’s making others feel a fraction of what Xie Lian felt.

“You pretend to be so righteous and upright? Well.. now you’re at least upright.”

It’s brilliant. It’s beautiful. It’s poetic justice. It’s little things like this that make me fall in love with tgcf over and over

😭😭😭😭 it was so sad that I couldn’t stop laughing. #JusticeForYizhen

It’s definitely a real possibility that Xie Lian’s first ascension wasn’t fully natural, and I’m not sold on either/or. The situation is muddy for a reason. Jun Wu had both the motive and the power to manipulate the outcome from the beginning. Xie Lian had the willpower and the talent to have ascended himself.

You’re also right that Jun Wu took an interest in Xie Lian early. One of his favorite tactics was humiliation, and what better way to humiliate someone than to make their subordinates surpass them? Putting Mu Qing and Feng Xin in positions Xie Lian once held, while keeping him ‘rolling in the mud’, is exactly the kind of longterm power play he specialized in.

We already know Mu Qing was assisted by Jun Wu, and Feng Xin’s ascension is hella murky but the bow Fengshen is an lol level clue. (but they’re not the strongest, they’re weakest of the named martial gods excluding Yin Yu and maybe Pei Xiu.. which is weird since they’re the oldest.. except Pei Ming but he ascended around the same time as them)

Editing to add in: just because they were assisted in ascension doesn’t mean they couldn’t have ascended themselves at some point and it doesn’t they’re bad people, it means Jun Wu is.

Why do so many fans think Jun Wu has no control over who ascends? Like, yes.. people ascend without his permission because there really is a cosmic order in this universe but he literally only needs to fill the slot to prevent randos from ascending.

And YES he CAN artificially ascend people and he DOES. I’m fr about to write up a whole essay on ascension this weekend istg.

The man literally says:

“Even fates can be swapped. Why not spiritual power?” Jun Wu said. “There are many things that are hardly as difficult as you assume. It is only a matter of a few words and a few brush strokes from a few great heavenly officials.”

Right after he sucks out one homies spiritual power and injects it into another.

And let’s be real.. Do y’all really think Jun Wu actually ascended a second time using his own power?

The dude who has the suffering souls of his first attempt at human sacrifice plastered on his own face and.. screaming?

Hell nah. This dude became the grandmaster of demonic cultivation. He experimented on fetus spirits like some mad scientist interested in unethical stem cell research. He probs invented the damn fate swapping ritual himself.

He has an entire fucking Burial Mound volcano where he vents his resentful energy. You think all that energy is accumulating just cus he’s mad? Or from just the three faces?

No way fam. This man is actively cultivating the dark arts and probs needs so many followers just to help balance the yang to his yin.

I mean.. c’mon. You fr think Feng Xin and Mu Qing ascended back to back naturally? And just after they left Xie Lian? There’s a whole damn arc about how unusual it is for two people so close to ascend so fast and so young

Jun Wu gifts Feng Xin a bow called Fengshen which is a homophone for the name of an entire Chinese myth about appointing mortals to godhood for political reasons.

Blows my mind to see that so many collectively deny the possibility when the narration is screaming clues from every digital and physical page.

Happy Pride Month!! Saw this and just had to reblog 😂

self-indulgent “Things to never say to someone who just came out” TGCF edition, happy pride month!

and spoilers for plot of tgcf:

OMG DAMN HANDSOME NEW OFFICIAL HUA CHENG ART BY GEAROUS FOR HUA CHENG’S BIRTHDAY!!!

Just thinkin’ bout how Xie Lian wasn’t even lent enough spiritual power to have a conversation through the spirit array until Hua Cheng came along.

The fact that Quan Yizhen regularly descended just to beat up his own worshippers, and this only resulted in gaining a larger following… is probably the most realistic thing in this whole high fantasy series.

I want to post a rant about Mei Nianqing but I’m holding myself back and I don’t know why. 🤔

Hello there!

I saw the thread about topics within the book and one I had to ask about is what is this spicy take on the black water arc? Like now, I'm super curious and have to follow up on this!🤣😅

Veering sideways about the one on if Jun Wu did it or not. Xie Lian's parents being either killed or manipulated by Jun Wu to do so would track with him. Have you determined which stuff was probably him and which wasn't? It's honestly really terrifying to think how long he was terrorizing and ruining their lives until things unraveled with Xie Lian's third ascension.

And the three clowns one - what's that referring to?

TIA!🌸

Some of this is going to be tough to answer without going into full dissertation mode but I’m going to try to keep it brief and platform appropriate. I’ll save Blackwater for last haha you're tryna get me blacklisted

The thing that sold me on Xie Lians parents was the fact that they used his white silk band to do it, which is hugely symbolic and basically screams “It’s your fault.” First read through, I thought they did it because they were feeling as if they were a burden to Xie Lian. Since then though? No. That silk band was used by Xie Lian every single day, and he had to search for it. His parents were not so cruel. Then there's the amount of trauma that band would have had to endure to become sentient. A quiet acceptance of death by suicide doesn't fit the bill. 

I actually want to keep on that to further compound my thoughts, but I'm wont, because the point is; in finding out what Jun Wu may or may not have done, looking at out-of-character actions and what doesn't add up is best. Like Xie Lians sleeve getting caught on a cloud during his descent. The Spirits at Mt. Taicang that attacked Honghong'er. Mu Qing just so happened to show up at the blessed mountain when Xie Lian finally thought he was catching a break. Who killed Ming Yi? The friggen drought.

And yes, the clowns. MQ/FX. This ties into the prior: Why are they so unbearably acidic towards Xie Lian? Some past grievances, yes. But they are hostile, they think he's an idiot, and they're never there when Xie Lian needs them yet fight over who's the worse friend- not who is the better friend. It's not a bitter past, its more like their flames were stoked beyond reason. Then, time and time again, they deny any association with him in public, leaving him hanging. Are they just afraid of rumors? Mu Qing, maybe. But the noble and just beacon of righteousness, Feng Xin? Would watch his friend and former liege be humiliated and not say anything? 

And could I, in all confidence, after reading multiple mxtx works say "It's just because that one event upset them,” and leave it at that? 

And no, I have not verified all. Some have backup, some are speculation. It’s something I’d like to work on the next time I return to tgcf though. 

The Blackwater arc.. woof. Ok, bracing myself for incoming projectiles. 

In a nutshell, it's that Shi Wudu stole Shi Qingxuans fate of wealth and that's how he gained the title God of Wealth, contrary to popular belief. I could go full blown dissertation.. and actually I might, but first I'll just start with where I started:

Shi Qinxuan had a fate of wealth that was verified to not have been touched by Blackwater, nor consumed by the Reverend of Empty Words. So why was he a destitute beggar at the end? Not poor, not struggling, but a crippled, starving beggar. 0 wealth. None. Not a single coin.

The wealth he has as god was showered on him by Shi Wudu and most Shi Qingxuans temples were shared. I actually dont recall it saying he had his own temples at all (doesn’t mean it didn’t happen)

Then I asked myself "Why was 'wealth' used so many times in this tangled arc? Qingxuans fate, Wudu's domain, He Xuans windfall.." 

"Who benefitted the most?"

Then questions like "What was Shi Wudu's overprotectiveness really about? Mostly optics, right?" 

Because... what if someone found out..? His overprotectiveness really only flares up once the spiritual power is gone.. you could say it's all about safety but.. 

And so I read through carefully to either confirm or deny the hypothesis and regardless of how much no one wants to hear about it I'm firmly in the camp that this isn't a head-canon but possibly an intention. The timelines of Shi Qingxuan and He Xuan dont back the idea that the fate swap only happened at the last moment before ascension. Shi Wudu moved them to a home less than an hour away from He Xuans hometown before he even ascended. The power of the RoEW was not insurmountable. And just because Shi Qinxuan wasn’t “fated” to ascend doesn’t mean he couldn’t have, but Shi Wudu sure wasn’t going to wait to find out. 

Maybe it was greed, maybe it was a necessity in order to preform the fate ritual idk. But Shi Qinxuans fate is gonezo and neither the RoEW nor Blackwater laid claim to it.