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halfcactusThis 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)
Recaps taken from my own livetweets that I don't remember the context of:
CHAPTER 3
- Lin zhushui (ML) has made Zhou Jiayu (MC) lie down on the bed so he could carefully tattoo on ZJY’s tailbone a blue lotus surrounded by fish(???). At some point ZJY passes out from the cold and LZS, uncharacteristically tentative, drapes a blanket over him.
CHAPTER 6:
Ceiling babies, nightmare fuel, apparently.
CHAPTER 8:
The conclusion to ceiling shadow babies arc is actually sweet and wholesome??? Raised by siblings!!!
CHAPTER 14:
Loving the feel-good metaphors of fengshui tournament round 1: in which they basically have to go mining using their own tool and abilities. Everyone picks dainty rocks w/ telltale veins and the MC picks a wholeass plain boulder that’s been passed over for 8 years.
Impression of the past 5 chapters: very fun potato-chip reading, but i’d have done away with the chapter w/ mushrooms bc it felt extraneous. Surely you can engineer a delirious butt-grab WHILE advancing plot? XD
CHAPTER ??:
I’m just enjoying how Lin Zhushui keeps adorning Zhou Jiayu with high-quality fish tokens.....
DOLLHOUSE ARC:
Challenge: find 10 dolls. ZJY found the last one in the garden.
Mistress of the house dismembered her family when her Xiaodou doll got damaged, and was herself dismembered by a doll afterwards for harming the house and the family.
CHAPTER 21:
Xiaodou's backstory.
CHAPTER 22:
The Shijing passage + translation where Zhou Jiayu's name comes from:
http://wengu.tartarie.com/wg/wengu.php?1=Daodejing&l=Shijing&no=171
We find out that ZJY attracts spirits because he has extreme levels of yin energy
A demonic weasel temporarily moves in, feeding on the energy from ZJY as well as LZS’s arrays… and ZJY’s cooking
ZJY asking to be rewarded w/ internet access
CHAPTER 23:
SYQ smooching ZJY on the face, declaring to XWR that they have a 父子 relationship.
Next round to be held in a building with high yin qi concentration at the busier side of the city.
LZS has given ZJY a warming talisman, never to remove from his pocket.
All contestants gets an emergency talisman to tear up if something happens.
Semifinal begins! The challenge is to find the cause of a series of bad incidents in the building.
Incident 1: Jade shop clerk on night duty drowned herself in a half-filled bucket of water. Two mornings after, putrid black water gushed out of a different shop.
Incident 2: A customer vanished after going to the bathroom, and was found dead from asphyxiation in the underground parking lot. Silt and (water) weeds were found in his mouth.
Incident 3: Not long after the mall reopened, a security personnel was torn apart, as if by a wild animal.
All cases were said to have happened in or around jade stores; 从属性上来说，这两个属性都是阴，大部分的玉都是阴性，只有还没打磨成物件的玉，才会有一部分阳.
For safety reasons, they’re pairing up (Zhou Jiayu agrees to pair up with Xu Ruwang).
XRW notes that the mall was doing well in spite of the incidents.
Triangular fountain + square pond (bad fengshui; they are, respectively, fire and earth shapes) on the ground floor. The question of whether the building’s fountain and pond structures were designed that way out of ignorance or malice is raised.
ZJY and XRW agree to go further down to the parking basement to find the source of moisture seeping from the floors.
CHAPTER 24
New characters: Edmund (???) + Tan Yingxue, Chen Xiaoru’s apprentice.
The only way to access the underground parking level is to have one of the building “personnels” go down the elevator w/ them (otherwise they are blocked by a wall)
me when I speak Chinese
Luxury cars, showing that the shopping mall is doing well.
ZJY can smell and hear river water, and even feel it in his eyes, but there is no water to be found.
The characters note that this building has committed more big but basic taboos: 井字型 + 大門相對 (building across).
One of the water-damaged “walls” turned out to be iron gate leading to an ancient passageway that leads to a stairway going further down…
The passage leads to a natural grotto which leads to a dragon well, which, according to Google, tracks with the incidents we’ve seen.
Dragon well legend that is recapped in the novel:
https://inf.news/en/culture/7d10e8ff9e6525e446c3af574b2d4171.html
https://min.news/en/history/992f2e4787f9d4f0f081a1b50fd20b87.html
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)
Recaps taken from my own livetweets that I don't remember the context of:
CHAPTER 3
- Lin zhushui (ML) has made Zhou Jiayu (MC) lie down on the bed so he could carefully tattoo on ZJY’s tailbone a blue lotus surrounded by fish(???). At some point ZJY passes out from the cold and LZS, uncharacteristically tentative, drapes a blanket over him.
CHAPTER 6:
CHAPTER 8:
CHAPTER 14:
CHAPTER ??:
DOLLHOUSE ARC:
fengshui boyfriends - dollhouse arc/
— 🌟 (@halfcactus) November 4, 2021
xiao dou:
they used to call me 豆兒 (dou’r) but i didn’t like that name.
me, an intellectual:
door????? pic.twitter.com/GnRgRDN7Eu
CHAPTER 21:
CHAPTER 22:
http://wengu.tartarie.com/wg/wengu.php?1=Daodejing&l=Shijing&no=171
CHAPTER 23:
CHAPTER 24
https://inf.news/en/culture/7d10e8ff9e6525e446c3af574b2d4171.html
https://min.news/en/history/992f2e4787f9d4f0f081a1b50fd20b87.html
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Date: 2023-08-21 02:29 am (UTC)It's not spectacular, and IMO there are plot points that aren't necessary for the horror to be effective (ie. child harm + implied rape), but I'm otherwise vibing with it and rooting for this writer to get better! The chapters are, at least, getting meatier, and the side characters becoming less annoying. But I still have 80 chapters of book left, so who knows lol