I Found It In An Afterword. I Don’t Think I’d Take What She Said As Bible, Since Prior And After

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

Ive said it before, Xie Lian as Heavenly Emperor isnt an idea im really excited about, but if he were to become heavenly emperor, i think he would be exactly like the stereotype of the chill boss that's never around and lets everyone do whatever they want on the condition that the work gets done in the end

Feng Xin and Mu Qing are fighting over who gets to kill monster of the week? Thats fine, as long as you kill it. Roll dice or smth idc just help the villagers.

You can have 34 girlfriends at the same time, I guess, Pei Ming, but make sure you deal with whatever has been causing unrest in your territory meanwhile.

Everyone leave Ling Wen alone. Just leave her be.

Rain Master is allowed to bring in her farm animals to the great hall if she wants to i guess

Yes you can play music in the heavens but keep it low during night time

If you have any complaints, too bad. If nobody is dead or dying, I don't need to know. If you do disturb me, you may have to deal with my husband so just figure it out.

I honestly pictured it as a more chaotic fandom of Yizhen Gege worshippers, meatheads who love fights and drama, all claiming to have “been there when he descended” and “seen it with their own eyes” telling stories about how “lit it was” when Yizhen Gege threw Paul Jr through the local tavern for calling Yin Yu a bxtch. (Since Paul Jr was annoying and had it coming) and they’re gunna go light some incense rn and ask Yizhen Gege to come beat up Big Bern too since he doesn’t keep his chickens in the coop and lets them poop all over Greta’s flower bed.

But I can also respect a much more distinguished vision of dedicated practitioners who live to learn and treat his violent visitations as an opportunity for growth. Love it.

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.

Weibaybay

Yes, thank you you beautiful beautiful person. I was fr torn between going offline or making myself not be lazy. I still chose the latter, but it was cus the task became less dauting haha so in the 7seas version it's the same except we seem to be interpreting it completely differently.

"This was the cruelest way gods declined because the process could not be reversed. A heavenly official in that situation was destined to watch their own decline until they disappeared entirely—unless they jumped down from the heavens, returned to being mortal, re-cultivated a new path, and then ascended once more as a brand-new god."

Vol. 5 Ch. 79 7s

This part in particular. "Could not be reversed," Returned to being mortal," and "Brand-new god." in particular.

This is not a supplementation, a continuation, or a top-up. It is starting fresh. from ground 0, with nothing. And if they don't, then they die.

So I'm gunna have to hard disagree with the idea that "gods are always gods" especially since that passage is pretty explicit with saying they are not gods anymore once they lose their followers.

If they ascended again it would be a 1st tribulation.

Since the shackles were man-made and not part of heaven.. then Xie Lian didn’t ascend 3 times, he went through 3 heavenly tribulations.

And he did the last one in his sleep and had the nerve to describe it as “having weird dreams.”

Legendary.

Expounding a little on why Jun Wu is obviously a demonic cultivator since my last post just dropped it in without backup and tgcf tap dances around what Jun Wu was doing with the kiln… It says it plainly without actually saying it.

Starting at the the low hanging fruit, Jun Wu’ first sacrifice:

“He set up a ritual site near the Kiln, and I accompanied him there every time, both of us enduring the curses and thrown rocks of the refugees as we conducted services to try to suppress the volcano’s fury.”

“Conducted services” lmao.. fancy way of saying “ritual sacrifice.” and “enduring the curses and thrown rocks” is nice way of saying “against their will”

“…but an infinite darkness is suppressed deep within his heart. Resentment, pain, anger, hatred…he must release those poisonous emotions to maintain his internal balance, lest he go berserk and slaughter everyone around him.”

Yeah um.. you say that like it’s a regular Tuesday therapy session, but it sounds a lot like ‘how to avoid yin-poisoning’

“He regularly releases his dark emotions into the Kiln, using the millions of Wuyong souls within as kindling to stoke the flames of hell and forge many malicious things..”

Oh ok. So he’s practicing his hand at twisting the souls of the dead. Nbd- wait. What?

“…Supremes came later, since he…changed the refining method…”

By.. “changed the refining method” you mean “perfected soul corruption”.. right? The way you say it is a bit umm-

“…In the early days, he’d have a session every few years, and each time the results would be different—endless batches of dark beings poured from its depths.”

✋ MNQ, please stop. That’s.. worse than demonic cultivation-

“Perhaps that had something to do with his unstable emotions-”

No. Shut up. This isn’t about Jun Wu’s feelings.

“…it produced nothing but monsters forged from his hatred and resentment. There are probably a few familiar names among them—”

It produced monsters because he was there to produce monsters. wtf are you on? I’m leaving.

And this is without getting into how he rearranged Heaven, the fact that the shackles aren’t a function of heaven but something dark and parasitic, what the heavenly capitol actually is etc etc etc.

This isn’t even a “theory” fam. This is the book.

Feng Xin.. is kind of an ass?

Rereading for the umpteenth time and wondering why no one ever talks about how Feng Xin was regularly spending money at a brothel to chill with his crush, but had the gall to shame Xie Lian for trying to steal money just to afford his dads medicine.

If I was going to make this analogy it’d probably be more like:

“imagine if you attended a car rally where you and hundreds of people murdered your brothers friends then started plans to hit your brother with a car and kill him (since he’s using diesel instead of gasoline.) But then your brother shows up with a bunch of remote control cars and it turns into some kind of deadly demolition derby. Metal flying everywhere, flaming tires arcing across the sky, the ground is littered with oil and glass.

Then your sister shows up with no car, barefoot, and she’s just running around in the chaos. She’s hit by one of your brothers car and your brother races to get her. She’s injured asf and needs immediate first aid. Then some asshole on your own side drifts in, tires screeching, and slams into her.

Raging mad, you murder him with your car.. only to find out years later that the car you killed him with.. was given to you by your brother. And you wouldn’t even have been able to attend the death derby from hell if it wasn’t for him.”

Imagine you're in a car with your brother and you keep telling him "slow down, you're going too fast" and he insists "I've got it under control!" And then he hits someone and you get out of the car and find out it's your sister. Your brother goes crazy from guilt and starts running over people left and right until you have to kill him to make sure no one else dies. Then years later he comes back to life and his boyfriend reveals oh guess what fuckhead. The reason he had to drive recklessly everywhere? Because he gave his legs to you in a secret operation you didnt know about. That's mdzs from Jiang Cheng's pov

I can’t stop watching this 😂😭💀

The TGCF Appendix is Bunk

If I’m going to look at an appendix, I want facts. Not conjecture, and definitely not someone injecting their own thoughts and feelings into someone else’s work and presenting it as fact.

Using Vol.8 seven seas since it’s complete, let’s take a brief look at some of the character descriptions I personally found the most galling:

Pei Xiu: “…His ascension to godhood occurred because he led the charge to slaughter the Kingdom of Banyue, and his exile from godhood occurred because of his morally dubious attempts to save his childhood friend Banyue from her fate of eternal punishment.” —Appendix: Characters. Vol.8

Morally dubious? Since when is slaughtering an immeasurable amount of innocents over the course of 150+ years considered “dubious” by moral standards? And that’s assuming that he was actually trying to “save his childhood friend”

Let’s look at the facts. Pei Xiu, although he cared for Ban Yue, sent her to infiltrate Banyue which directly caused her death.

After succeeding in his scheme, he ascended. But he had a mess of resentful ghosts that were unliving proof of his war crimes.

In order to maintain his squeaky clean image, he routinely fed living people to the ghosts in an attempt to disburse their resentment.. quietly.

Did this help Banyue? No. It actually did the opposite. She spent 200 years being hunted down and hung over the sinners pit in an endless cycle of pain and suffering. Not only that, but Pei Xiu used her snakes, which further dragged her name into the mud and (ironically) fueled the ghosts anger and hatred for her.

So how.. just how.. does the Official Appendix Character Description get away with saying “…because of his morally dubious attempts to save his childhood friend Banyue from her fate of eternal punishment.”??

[I didn’t use quotes from the story because it would make this post congested, but the details are in Vol.1 Ch.10 about 86%]

You know what? I was going to continue ranting, like how He Xuan has almost no factual content or backstory yet practically ships him with Shi Qingxuan like “maybe he likes her idk 🤷‍♀️” and his unknown relationship with Hua Cheng. Instead it could have said at least something about Scholar He..

It’s a reoccurring thing that sometimes comes off as absolute fanon and sometimes comes off like they’re trying spin a picture or soften a character to a more sympathetic light.

Just give me the facts.

That’s the only reason I’d ever look at an appendix, I’m not here to read your drivel!

\rant