我五行缺你 (My Five Elements Lack You) recap + notes (chapters 1-24)

This is now being fantranslated in Chrysanthemum Garden, and it seems like they update weekly! So I might actually reread everything in English to remember the past cases and use it to review the chapters I've read raw. \o/

Started reading this... two years ago... and I keep forgetting how difficult it is to pick up a book you dropped a while back. /o\ Trying to take more notes now, in case I drop it for another two years...

BASIC DESCRIPTION:
Modern-day supernatural novel with horror, folklore, and comedy elements, and centered around feng shui.

The main character is Zhou Jiayu, a civil servant who gets into a fatal accident and transmigrates into the body of a fraudulent and viciously criminal fengshui master, also named Zhou Jiayu. He is captured and then taken in as apprentice by Lin Zhushui, a blind fengshui master who is extremely renowned in the fengshui world for both his looks and his talent. Zhou Jiayu is then forced to help Lin Zhushui with his work and participate in a fengshui tournament where he shows unusual talent which may or may not help him save Lin Zhushui from his fate.

I'm only 24 chapters in and I don't particularly care for any of the characters or the romance, but I've been enjoying the tournament shenanigans and the cases of the week. I tend to lose interest in the chapters in between. ^^;

In terms of reading difficulty, this is SO MUCH more easier to read than the previous cnovels I've read (*cries in Little Mushroom*). It's written in a very plain and light webnovel style with episodic mysteries that have you learning things bit by bit instead of being loredumped for paragraphs at a time. Definitely very mobile-friendly! There is more slang than I remember, or maybe just more that I recognize now, but still a lot less than the other light modern-day novels I’ve tried, so I’m not really struggling on that front. The fengshui concepts that are relevant to the plot are typically explained after they're introduced, so knowledge isn't required to follow—though I sometimes do some very light Googling to supplement—and it's a learning experience for me.

CW: horror of all flavors (more creepy than scary, so it's tolerable for me), violence, gore (mostly offscreen, IIRC), child harm, sexual harassment by a fellow contestant (though by chapter 24 it dies down to shameless flirting and professions of love, and Zhou Jiayu gets fed up and bullies him back)

( recap + notes, for my own benefit )