skygiants

I really enjoyed the transmigration cnovel this is ridiculous -- extremely funny starting premise that gradually gets more serious and more interested into digging Thematically into The Problem of Transmigration.

The story kicks off, of course, with our genre-savvy, pragmatic office-worker transmigrating into the mediocre book she was reading on the subway. The book is, itself, a transmigration novel in which a plucky modern heroine transmigrates into the villainess of a court drama, defeats the original heroine, wins the love of the heroic prince, helps him overthrow the evil tyrant emperor, etc.

Now our heroine has transmigrated back into the original heroine of the book-within-the-novel, who is, of course, the villainess of the transmigration novel. She promptly gets summoned to spend an evening with the evil tyrant emperor, notices that he's acting weird, and immediately susses him out as another transmigrator who readily confesses that he's a modern CEO who transmigrated after starting to read the same mediocre transmigration novel that she did. Knowing that they're both doomed by the narrative, they immediately start scheming: can they recruit the transmigrator heroine of the transmigration novel to their team, or is she just a bit too fictional to deviate from the plot? Is it possible that the heroic prince who's destined to overthrow and murder the evil tyrant emperor is also a transmigrator -- and if so, is he on their level, or is he even one more meta level up from them, and are they just characters in his bad transmigration novel? If they get really lucky, instead of competing to the death in palace drama they can all hang out and play cards and eat hotpot? And if not, can they both possibly keep a straight face when the fictional transmigrator heroine whips out her oh-I-just-invented-this-instrument-called-a-guitar and plays her oh-I-just-composed-this-little-Bach-cantata at the big festival?

So far, so good; the office worker is Not Particularly Enjoying being in historical court drama land but it would be so much worse without a normal pal to hang out with in the evenings and trade jokes about how absurd this all is and occasionally do some moderate normal person flirting. However! There is something weird about her new bud! He's definitely from the future, but he does not really give off CEO energy, and something about his backstory does not add up ...

( spoilers! )

Obviously I am an easy sell on layered meta jokes and identity confusion, I enjoyed the romance, and I thought the plot's gradual shift from shenanigans to serious stakes and tension was well paced and satisfying. But mostly I am just genuinely a big fan of our incredibly pragmatic normal person office worker -- compared to the female protagonists she read about, her romantic inclinations were only a third as strong, and her courage was only a twentieth -- and I was rooting all the way through for her to get to clock out, go home, and have some modern hot pot.

My e-reader died on me three days into my time in Vermont, after I had carefully and lovingly loaded it up with good vacation reads; in response I sulkily refused to pick up a physical book for most of the rest of my time there and instead spent the next few days reading through Devil Venerable Also Wants To Know on my phone.

The titular Devil Venerable Wenren È, the feared leader of a demonic cultivator sect, who, at the beginning of the novel, receives from a mysterious source a copy of Abusive Romance: You Are The Unchanging One In My Heart. This tome chronicles the adventures of a virtuous young lady cultivator who undergoes various trials as a result of her love for her beloved but apparently deeply unreliable sect brother:

An overview of the specifics would be false accusations, misunderstandings, Baili Qingmiao being imprisoned, being abused, being poisoned, being hunted down, Hè Wenzhao marrying someone else, several important supporting male characters being wholeheartedly devoted to Baili Qingmiao, protecting and cherishing her, but Baili Qingmiao only loving Hè Wenzhao, ignoring everyone else’s goodwill, insistent on finding Hè Wenzhao and marrying him, then after being hurt by her enemies or fellow disciples, another male character would save her, and after recovering she would run off to be abused again.

In the novel, Wenren È shows up as one of the secondary leads, who falls in love with Baili Qingmiao, sacrifices his life for her, and uses his final words to command his second-in-command Yin Hanjiang to protect her, after which Yin Hanjiang promptly undergoes qi deviation and becomes the story's major antagonist.

Wenren È, the reader, finds all of this both concerning and confusing: he does not understand anyone's behavior in this book, certainly not his own or Yin Hanjiang's and definitely not Baili Qingmiao's? The book seems to present her as intelligent and talented, so why would she not simply dump Hè Wenzhao's ass? Therefore, he embarks upon a quest to a.) rework the story so that neither he nor Yin Hanjiang need to meet tragic ends but b.) and perhaps more importantly, attempt to understand the perplexing behavior chronicled within. Surely if he just investigates and asks some straightforward questions of the key players involved, some logical explanations will be revealed!

The most endearing part of this book, to me, is the resultant series of weird mentorships that results as Wenren È commits to Project Get Baili Qingmiao To Forget About Romance And Realize Her Full Potential On The Path Of Indifference Already. Other major characters who get roped into this project and become reluctantly invested in Baili Qingmiao's journey:

- Shu Yanyan, a succubus and also the smartest person on Wenren È's team, who puts in a lot of hard work seducing Hè Wenzhao despite finding him very boring and for what! well, for schemes, mostly
- Qui Congxue, an evil but charmingly straightforward demonic cultivator who gets accidentally saved and de-skeletonized by Baili Qingmaio and is absolutely furious to learn that all her hard work following the hungry ghost path has been undone now that her flesh has grown back over her lovingly cultivated skeleton corpse
- Zhongli Qian, the third lead of Abusive Romance and the smartest person in the entire story, a noble scholar whom Wenren È optimistically kidnaps in hopes of throwing him at Baili Qingmiao in order to distract her from Hè Wenzhao; IMO this is the funniest subplot in the book, I'm longing to describe Wenren È's Attempts to Create Romance From First Principles so if anyone would like more details I will gladly put them in rot13 in a comment

Obviously of course Wenren È also along the way discovers that Yin Hanjiang is in love with him and they eventually have a touching romance. The romance is fine. I'm much more interested and invested in Wenren È than I am in Yan Hanjiang; also, I personally prefer the early parts of the romance, where Wenren È's Investigations into Human Nature cause him to have revelations like 'oh possibly I should encourage my second-in-command to have 'hobbies' that aren't 'standing grimly outside my tent at all times'?', to the later journeys through the Most Tormented And Obsessive Parts of Yan Hanjiang's Soul, but this is of course a personal preference and I'm sure many people will enjoy that the most.

I also do find very interesting the version of cultivator cosmology presented in this book, where both the 'righteous' and demonic sects are engaged in stealing power from the heavens, and every so often they have to engage in a big battle of opposing forces just to whittle down each other's numbers so ordinary people get a chance to thrive. Baili Qingmiao herself is the reincarnation of the goddess of destruction, who creates plagues/earthquakes/fire/etc so new growth can begin, and the book very much operates on a theme of balance and necessary disaster; I love where Baili Qingmiao's journey ends up in context of this and found the ending really satisfying.

I just finished zooming my way through the cnovel New Times, New Hell after seeing this recommendation from

littlerhymes.

The premise: promising developer Yu Zhengdu gets hired at a new company two months before graduating, where he immediately demands to sign the one-year contract right away to ensure his benefits come through, despite the HR manager's attempts to convince him that he should maybe give the company a test run first.

Ten minutes later it is revealed that the company he has just contracted to work for is a.) Hell (in charge of human reincarnation); b.) totally lacking in other human employees, everyone else is ghosts; c.) deeply underfunded with almost no development budget; d.) run by a ghost king named Shang Que who is very handsome but also does not fully understand that the new developer is not here to fix his personal computer when it freezes up from running ten video games at once

YU ZHENGDU: okay well thank you for the opportunity but I think I might like to quit, actually, I prefer a working environment where my colleagues don't habitually pop their ghostly eyes out of their head
HR MANAGER: well ... the thing about hell contracts is .... you can't really break them without severe repercussions? We're VERY sorry we DID try to warn you!

So, with no other choice, Yu Zhengdu rolls up his sleeves and sets about a mission to singlehandedly revamp the company's technological setup, get all his new ghost coworkers off Excel and working in a functional application, and set up a reliable income stream so they can get some working servers and hire a project manager.

Fortunately, ghost king Shang Que is perfectly willing to let his hot new employee convince him of the value of modern technology and the importance of reliable development funding; as the novel goes on, he reluctantly puts himself on a video game budget, starts taking MBA classes in order to become better at corporate management, and becomes an ardent tech evangelist. Growth!

The novel is much more episodic than most of the other cnovels I've read; there's a bit of an overarching plot, but mostly it's bouncing from ghost problem to ghost problem which our protagonists resolve with a little bit of Shang Que's terrifying ghost king reputation and a lot of Yu Zhengdu's cheerful Big Tech optimism. Let's disrupt the Daoist cultivation industry! Everything can be solved with an algorithm and universal WiFi! It's very charming and very funny and often very relatable and also about every other chapter I found myself mentally screaming they needed to hire an ethicist immediately, had anyone in the cast ever taken a training on replication of inherent bias?

I'm also not in any way qualified to talk about the way that the book deals with the the conflicts between contemporary socialism and traditional beliefs -- the central premise for why Hell is broke and needs a developer to begin with is that the traditional heaven/hell system and all the gods collapsed during the Cultural Revolution. ( Some mildly spoilery thoughts that I'm not qualified to have! )

That said, every instance of ghosts and little gods gleefully adapting to the internet age, demanding that the devs add a social messaging function to their shiny new reincarnation app, proudly advertising ghost company benefits, accidentally becoming social media stars beloved by young and old alike ("They are very Buddhist, but also very rock!"), is consistently a delight and I think at least once a chapter I would turn and force Beth to listen to me read an exceptionally entertaining sentence out loud.

The romance is also very funny, low-key and low-angst; Yu Zhengdu is so chill and generally entertained by Shang Que's whole vibe that moments that could be embarrassing or lead to conflict just kind of bounce off him. ( mild relationship arc spoilers )

Also, it is impossible not to love Peppa, the adorable ghost child they end up adopting who eventually reincarnates as a much-beloved, deeply horrible, superintelligent goose. Shang Que is a very responsible parent! Before she hatches, he makes sure to play her Mozart for fifteen minutes a day so she can reach her full potential!

Anyway: absolutely recommended, I enjoyed it very much, please come back and talk to me about the ethical issues of removing people's memories of their past lives by automatically setting a tracker to find and delete a line of code on the back end!

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Entries tagged with cnovel

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

Profile

May 2025

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags