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Reading on your phone on the beach is not ideal, but nonetheless I did in fact spend much of my time in Hawaii reading through the entirety of Heaven's Official Blessings, the third and longest web novel by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation fame.

This is definitely the most ambitious of the three books she's finished; on the one hand I don't entirely think it lives up to the scope of those ambitions, but on the other hand that's partly because my expectations were raised quite high by the ways in which it appeals directly to my interests.

On the first page we are introduced to our protagonist, Xie Lian, crown prince of Xian Le, who interrupts an important religious ceremony in order to rescue a small child falling off a building.

ADVISORS: You must show your repentance to the gods!
XIE LIAN: Saving people isn’t something bad. How could the gods fault me because I did the right thing?
ADVISORS: And if the gods do decide to blame you?
XIE LIAN: Then the Heavens would be the ones who are wrong. Why should the people who are right apologize to the ones who are wrong?
ME: oh no ... defiance of the heavens via Extreme Ethics is my greatest narrative weakness .... and I love him .....

FAST FORWARD EIGHT HUNDRED YEARS

Xie Lian, Theological Prodigy, has now ascended to godhood, descended in unbelievably tragic circumstances, ascended, descended, spent several centuries as a trash collector, re-ascended, and is now an absolute divine embarrassment. He has no spiritual power or money. When he enters the divine groupchat (of course the gods have a groupchat) he texts like a grandpa. He is almost completely beyond being embarrassed by anything in this world and spends a lot of his time encouraging everyone around him to just chill out; he's spent eight hundred years collecting trash, we can all have a little perspective and understanding!

ME: oh no ... I love him even more now ....

Shortly after his third ascension, Xie Lan meets San Lang, a mysterious and mysteriously powerful young man who - it turns out, in short order - is also Hua Cheng, the world's most prominent demonic ghost, who - it is revealed to the reader, in relatively short order - was one of Xie Lan's worshippers during his first bout of godhood eight hundred years ago. The rest of the gods are, naturally, concerned that the king of Hell City appears to be stalking Xie Lan. Xie Lan is just happy to have made a new friend! San Lang may be a sinister ghost but he's always been very helpful to him, so why should he judge? It's very awkward when Heaven sends him to break a prisoner out of Hua Cheng's dungeon, he really feels bad about it, of course he's going to do his duty but it's an unfortunately rude way to treat a friend and he hopes his pal will forgive him!

(The romance in this one is fascinating because on Xie Lan's side it's a pleasant low-key friends-to-lovers, while on Hua Cheng's side it is passionate religious fervor of 800 years' standing; the weird and intense line between worship and love is not a direct line to my id but I feel fairly sure it is a direct line to someone's!)

Other important characters include (but are not limited to):
- Shi Qing Xuan, a cheerful, generous, gender-shifting wind god, whose good luck is about to run out
- Ling Wen, the heaven's most important female god, a hyper-competent bureaucrat with a permanent stress headache
- Mu Qing, Xie Lan's former manservant, now a divine general with a chip on his shoulder, who (as Xie Lan earnestly explains) might spit in someone's drink but probably wouldn't poison it
- Feng Xin, Xie Lan's other former assistant, an earnest and forthright soul with a bad guilt complex who can't go ten words without dropping an F-bomb
- Quan Yi Zhen, essentially Fei Lu from Nirvana in Fire if someone had had the bad judgment to make him divine
- Ban Yue, an unfortunate ghost whom Xie Lan used to babysit when she was a little girl; spends much of the book in a pickle jar
- Qi Rong, who combines all the worst qualities of a mass-murdering demon and your incredibly embarrassing little cousin
- several small children whom Xie Lan does his best to care for over the course of the novel, except when plot interrupts and he forgets for a little bit.

(alias_sqbr has a much more thorough cast list as well as content warnings and extensive and enjoyable recaps. I will note that a.) there are probably about twice the characters as in Grandmaster, but b.) like three times the female characters! and not only is the ratio better but they pretty much all make it to the end of the story! ... admittedly some of them are already dead at the time the story begins but they're not going to let that stop them, ask me about my favorite angry prostitute ghost and her terrible demon baby.)

Over the course of the next many chapters, the head god, Jun Wu, asks Xie Lan to investigate a series of unfortunate-for-the-heavens events; somehow, Xie Lan's investigations always end up exposing embarrassing behavior from the other powerful gods, each new incident more dramatic and ethically complicated than the last. From the beginning, the narrative is concerned with questions of ethics, divinity, violence and necessity: in a situation where the survival of one party seems to require violence to another, is a third solution possible, or will attempting to save everyone just end up harming everyone? What is the responsibility of a god to their people, or of people to their god? Is there any inherent justice to the divine cosmology, or is the entire system fundamentally flawed?

These are obviously difficult questions to answer! ( I have some spoilery thoughts about the way in which the book doesn't answer them! )