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There’s Something Wrong with the Chief: Du Zhu You Bing (Novel) #2
There's Something Wrong with the Chief: Du Zhu You Bing (Novel) Vol. 2
TWIN PATHS OF POWER AND PERILReeling from the devastating loss of someone close to him, young assassin Xiahou Lian sets off on a perilous journey to find his long-lost brother, who's hidden away on a remote and forbidding mountain. But what Xiahou Lian encounters at the summit isn't the reunion he imagined. Instead, he's thrust into a web of secrets and betrayals more harrowing than anything he's faced in Qiye Garden.
Within the palace walls, Shen Jue moves like a shadow. Though he wears a mask of obedience while serving as his ruthless godfather's loyal pawn, Shen Jue is executing a dangerous long game. Discovery could shatter his schemes, however...
When Xiahou Lian and Shen Jue cross paths once more, it's no longer as allies. Each is navigating deadly enemies--and Xiahou Lian believes those foes might even include Shen Jue.
Within the palace walls, Shen Jue moves like a shadow. Though he wears a mask of obedience while serving as his ruthless godfather's loyal pawn, Shen Jue is executing a dangerous long game. Discovery could shatter his schemes, however...
When Xiahou Lian and Shen Jue cross paths once more, it's no longer as allies. Each is navigating deadly enemies--and Xiahou Lian believes those foes might even include Shen Jue.
405 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 13, 2026
17 people are currently reading
234 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
January 24, 2026
People who stopped reading because they think Xiahou Lian’s an idiot clearly don’t understand his character. He’s just some poor guy that got traumatised to hell and back and basically forced into a life of bloodshed. Give him a break
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January 13, 2026DNF
I was really excited to continue this series, but I was a bit confused starting this book as I assumed it would begin with a decently big time jump. When it didn't, I decided to do some googling and found out that this story is 75% them as children. I am just personally not someone who is interested in reading a story set up like this - especially considering book 1 (which was when they were children the entire time) felt like it could have been a maybe 10 page flashback, hearing it would be TWO more volumes of their past???? no, i'm okay.
I've never been a fan of kid arcs in danmei (looking at you TGCF and Erha... (even though I love them)) and I actively avoid and do not read YA books as I don't enjoy reading about younger characters. I'm sure this might have some good parts later on, but unfortunately I just do not care to read any more.
I was really excited to continue this series, but I was a bit confused starting this book as I assumed it would begin with a decently big time jump. When it didn't, I decided to do some googling and found out that this story is 75% them as children. I am just personally not someone who is interested in reading a story set up like this - especially considering book 1 (which was when they were children the entire time) felt like it could have been a maybe 10 page flashback, hearing it would be TWO more volumes of their past???? no, i'm okay.
I've never been a fan of kid arcs in danmei (looking at you TGCF and Erha... (even though I love them)) and I actively avoid and do not read YA books as I don't enjoy reading about younger characters. I'm sure this might have some good parts later on, but unfortunately I just do not care to read any more.
February 13, 2026
“Sometimes a mistake is just a mistake Xiao-Lian. No matter how much you struggle or suffer, you can’t undo it.”
Reading this left me with a constant ache that never really loosened its grip. The pain settles in quietly and stays there, building page by page until it feels heavy in your chest. By the end, I felt emotionally worn down and strangely muted. The tragedy is deliberate and sustained, with very little space to breathe. I kept going because the emotional pull was strong, not because the experience felt soothing. It demands attention and patience, and it rarely gives comfort in return. Finishing it felt like closing a door gently after something difficult, knowing the weight would linger.
A lot of my frustration came from how much of the story depends on misunderstanding and withheld recognition. I could always follow the emotional logic. These characters come from systems that punish openness and reward silence. Xiahou Lian feels shaped by cruelty, loss, and years of violence he never fully chose, carrying a belief that survival requires self erasure. Shen Jue expresses care through control, restraint, and sacrifice, even when those choices cause harm. Their connection lives in loyalty carried quietly and affection expressed through protection that arrives in damaging ways. That dynamic is emotionally honest, but watching the distance persist for so long wore me down. Even when the behavior made sense, it still hurt to sit with.
The political environment is harsh and suffocating. Authority feels unstable, protection feels conditional, and survival always carries visible cost. Imprisonment, punishment, and endurance take up real space, and the aftermath of violence never fades once a scene ends. I appreciated how seriously the story treats consequence and damage. Nothing feels brushed aside or softened. At the same time, the tone stays relentlessly heavy. Comfort appears rarely. Humor barely exists. Emotional recovery unfolds slowly and with difficulty. I finished feeling respect for the discipline and emotional precision, mixed with exhaustion and lingering frustration. It stayed with me after I closed the book, not as warmth or satisfaction, but as a quiet weight that was hard to shake.
Date Read: 2026.02.07
Reading this left me with a constant ache that never really loosened its grip. The pain settles in quietly and stays there, building page by page until it feels heavy in your chest. By the end, I felt emotionally worn down and strangely muted. The tragedy is deliberate and sustained, with very little space to breathe. I kept going because the emotional pull was strong, not because the experience felt soothing. It demands attention and patience, and it rarely gives comfort in return. Finishing it felt like closing a door gently after something difficult, knowing the weight would linger.
A lot of my frustration came from how much of the story depends on misunderstanding and withheld recognition. I could always follow the emotional logic. These characters come from systems that punish openness and reward silence. Xiahou Lian feels shaped by cruelty, loss, and years of violence he never fully chose, carrying a belief that survival requires self erasure. Shen Jue expresses care through control, restraint, and sacrifice, even when those choices cause harm. Their connection lives in loyalty carried quietly and affection expressed through protection that arrives in damaging ways. That dynamic is emotionally honest, but watching the distance persist for so long wore me down. Even when the behavior made sense, it still hurt to sit with.
The political environment is harsh and suffocating. Authority feels unstable, protection feels conditional, and survival always carries visible cost. Imprisonment, punishment, and endurance take up real space, and the aftermath of violence never fades once a scene ends. I appreciated how seriously the story treats consequence and damage. Nothing feels brushed aside or softened. At the same time, the tone stays relentlessly heavy. Comfort appears rarely. Humor barely exists. Emotional recovery unfolds slowly and with difficulty. I finished feeling respect for the discipline and emotional precision, mixed with exhaustion and lingering frustration. It stayed with me after I closed the book, not as warmth or satisfaction, but as a quiet weight that was hard to shake.
Date Read: 2026.02.07
February 1, 2026
I think I'll write a proper review for this someday because I keep reading idiotic takes here and misinformations spread everywhere and I am so fucking tired of reading bullshits for a novel that doesn't deserve it in the slightest.
February 1, 2026
Dropping the series here, unless I decide to eventually pick up more from the library. That feels unlikely, based on how rough the writing got in this one, and what I've heard about how it progresses once the mains finally get together. Spoiler: So my interest has waned quite a bit.
The plot is just incredibly messy. It feels very much like an amateur's attempt to tackle danmei; everything gets thrown into the kitchen sink, and so much of it makes no sense. The elements I'd liked from the first book - the character development, the complicated relationships, the brutality mixed with kindness and friendship and self-sacrifice - was all missing in this volume. It's a time-jumping disaster with even more absurd elements thrown into the mix, since the human-skin masks weren't ridiculous enough.
I will say that Shen Jue's sections were, for the most part, pretty interesting. From a narrative standpoint, that is: as a character, I've grown to actively dislike him.
While I was initially intrigued by his one-sided devotion to Xiahou Lian and his soulless, ruthless abandonment of everyone else in his path, he developed into a true villain. The vast majority of what he did throughout this book was unforgivable. Xiahou Lian spends so much of the book whining about how being an assassin has left him bathed in blood and deserving death, while Shen Jue is off in the capital killing off and torturing hundreds of people, including a massive amount of Xiahou Lian's fellow assassins, and a horde of innocents who happen to get in his way.
And that's part of what makes the plot so messy and incoherent. This volume in particular tries to carry on two completely separate narratives and utterly fails at both. Xiahou Lian's storyline is a much bigger flop, but Shen Jue's suffers because of all the time jumps required to age them up and reunite them, and the vague attempts to align his story with the disasters Xiahou Lian is always getting himself into.
Let's start with Shen Jue. As the only (and unknown) survivor of the Xie family, he's successfully infiltrated the palace and earned the trust of the head eunuch, Wei De, the man who pulls the emperor's strings and who had orchestrated and paid for his entire family's death. Shen Jue...kind of doesn't seem to care about this, at least not from a personal revenge standpoint. After all, he didn't give a fig about his family, who'd largely abandoned him anyway.
He has two main plans: keep a prominent rank and eventually take over Wei De's role, while building his own personal task force to research the drug that kills the Garden's assassins if they don't take a pill every year. He succeeds at both in this volume; his researcher successfully duplicates the pill, after which Shen Jue murders him (and his whole family I think?), and Wei De specifically tells Shen Jue that he will be his successor.
And yet! In an entirely offscreen turn of events, Shen Jue somehow splits from Wei De, becomes an assassination target, and flees from the capital with his strongest and most loyal men.
How is this not something the story actually showed?????????? This was an incredibly important event, particularly since we got a whole chapter showing Wei De distrusting Shen Jue after his secret plan to save Xiahou Lian's life and wipe out the super powerful man who'd killed Xiahou Lian's mother...and Shen Jue manipulating Wei De into fully believing in him again. Then we time jump to none of that having mattered at all because for mumblemumble unknown reasons handwave whatever, now they're at odds.
After Shen Jue successfully got his hands on the pill, he started sweeping the streets to pick up any assassins - no longer needing them as research subjects, so instead of capturing them, he just has them all killed. Since it can be hard to identify them, his agents take any undocumented people, anyone without proper paperwork, into custody and treat them like criminals - killing them or sending them to work camps.
Yeah, so. Is Shen Jue supposed to be the good guy here? Plus a lot of the time when his men barge into an inn or whatever, they kill anyone who happens to be around the actual target. Even Xiahou Lian, a full on assassin, is horrified by Shen Jue's brutality and the way he tortures men beyond any real necessity.
Shen Jue's chapters are much more readable because he's intelligent and calculating and there's generally a sense of actual plot - which is why it's so infuriating that we just skipped over a majorly important piece. Xiahou Lian's are...bad. Like, genuinely pretty terrible a lot of the time.
We begin this volume with Xiahou Lian's mother being killed during her final mission, when a mixture of betrayal and old wounds (a whipping taken on her son's behalf, for saving Shen Jue's life) leaves her too weakened to fight off essentially an entire army of martial artists. Xiahou Lian discovers her rotting corpse and spends the next four years finally learning how to be a proper assassin, so he can take revenge.
This is not what his mother had wanted for him...but his father - the Garden's leader - and his loyal right-hand man had orchestrated the whole thing to make Xiahou Lian man up, basically. Mostly because of some mysterious event from decades earlier where the abbott had failed in some big mission in the north and had gotten all the other head assassins killed. After he returned, he stole one of his sons, Xiahou Lian's twin, and stopped interacting with Xiahou Lian and his mother. It's genuinely pretty annoying that there are absolutely no hints about what this whole thing was about, but I assume it'll become a big plot thread later on?
Despite years of training, Xiahou Lian continues to "not be very good with the sword," which varies on paper. Most of the time, he is shown to indeed be incredibly capable with the blade, but every once in a while the story will remember he's meant to be weaker than his mother and father and brother (although he fought the martial arts master who'd killed his mother to a standstill). To cover for this, he, uh...rediscovers some other sect's art of using meteor thread to control mechanical things like puppets and wings.
This is the element that's as wildly stupid as the wax masks from the first book. Xiahou Lian carries out a lot of his assassins by standing far away from the target and manipulating nearly invisible strings that control an assassin robot with blade-arms. This doesn't make sense from so many logistical standpoints, including: hordes of martial artists running into or getting tangled in the strings while surrounding the target, or simply cutting the strings and rendering it immobile. Until he coincidentally finds the meteorite that he can use to forge the blade-cutting strings, he's using ones that he literally says will only cut through a block of tofu.
Plus, the string-robot-girl completely disappears from the story after a while, and he doesn't bother to rebuild her. Eventually, he just makes a net out of the strings to kill his father.
The idea is supposed to be that he's thinking outside of the box and being creative and clever, etc, but he's honestly just...not, most of the time. He's always blundering into situations that he really only escapes because other people sweep in to rescue him. Then after he killed his father, he was really to just lie down on the ground and bleed out from his wounds, but we time jump another three years to find that he woke up feeling fine and in fact didn't even need the pills every year.
Which means Shen Jue's years of research were completely pointless. Because of magical handwavey reasons that may or may not eventually be explained? Genuinely, what on earth.
Are all the other Garden assassins dead at this point? Who knows. Xiahou Lian's mentor died pretty much out of nowhere, just to Add To His Tragedy, as he later relates it to Shen Jue, and he gains a couple followers who also disappear from the story as soon as the author lost interest in them. Again: what was the point of that whole bit with the courtesan? Or his other "friend" who wore a wax mask to pretend to be him for like, a full year, and spent a bunch of his money and ruined his reputation, and didn't bother to remember simple messages like Xiahou Lian's brother's parting words.
The side characters were a big annoyance for me from Shen Jue's side, too. Situ Jin was a really intriguing character from the end of the first book, and he returned as one of Shen Jue's captains this time around - in part to thank Shen Jue for saving his fiancee from a random evil man who'd happened to kidnap her two hours before (a) Shen Jue randomly showed up to dine at his house and (b) Situ Jin also returned to check on his fiancee.
And then...that entire love story gets entirely forgotten. What happened to Situ Jin's wife when he left the city with Shen Jue, who is now a criminal, being hunted down by Wei De? She literally doesn't get mentioned again after her weeping rescue.
Other things that annoyed me about the sloppy writing...
- When Xiahou Lian is somehow able to watch through a window as dogs eat his mother's body, remaining completely undiscovered by his Super Clever Enemy, who was specifically said to be checking door to door of every house in the city to find him. I...guess he didn't bother checking the house that was literally facing the street where he was standing.
- The assassins' blades being more important than the assassins themselves, to the point where only the blades are named on the plaques in the Garden. However, Hengbo, Xiahou Lian's mother's sword, is NOT picked up as proof of the greatest assassin's death (since she disfigured her own face to prevent being paraded around like that). Instead, it's just left lying around for Xiahou Lian to eventually start using it himself. Then, it gets knocked out of his hand in another battle with his sworn enemy, and AGAIN a random person manages to pick it up and get it back to him. (And then he loses it a third time in a pirate battle but this time Shen Jue is able to buy it at an auction and refuses to return it. Honestly, at this point, he shouldn't.)
- How Xiahou Lian went to a plastic surgeon to have his face permanently changed, but somehow even though he was literally able to look like a totally different person, the scar above his eye couldn't be fixed. I assume this will eventually serve as some proof of his identity or something, but?? Logic??
- Xiahou Lian was able to impersonate some random dead guard using courtesan makeup (which conveniently doesn't wash off in the rain) and without ever having heard the man's voice to properly imitate him.
The worst part, though, was just how bullheaded and honestly selfish Xiahou Lian was. He spent all these years trying to avenge his mother's death, while completely neglecting the brother he'd found in the process - a brother who loved him enough to lie to his own father, the man who'd raised and trained him and in whom he'd always believed. (The brother who, unlike everyone else, including all these other highly trained assassins, points out that it's completely obvious when someone is merely wearing a mask of Xiahou Lian's face.)
This was honestly just a badly written book.
Oh, and a final note: I was initially swayed into preordering this series because of the pretty art on the covers. Two books in, I can't figure out why Shen Jue is portrayed with silver/white hair. He...has ink-black hair, very specifically described in both books, and extremely important to the plot in the first book. Why white hair??? Is it relevant later on in the series somehow? Even so, it makes all the illustrations deeply inaccurate up through this much of the story.
The plot is just incredibly messy. It feels very much like an amateur's attempt to tackle danmei; everything gets thrown into the kitchen sink, and so much of it makes no sense. The elements I'd liked from the first book - the character development, the complicated relationships, the brutality mixed with kindness and friendship and self-sacrifice - was all missing in this volume. It's a time-jumping disaster with even more absurd elements thrown into the mix, since the human-skin masks weren't ridiculous enough.
I will say that Shen Jue's sections were, for the most part, pretty interesting. From a narrative standpoint, that is: as a character, I've grown to actively dislike him.
While I was initially intrigued by his one-sided devotion to Xiahou Lian and his soulless, ruthless abandonment of everyone else in his path, he developed into a true villain. The vast majority of what he did throughout this book was unforgivable. Xiahou Lian spends so much of the book whining about how being an assassin has left him bathed in blood and deserving death, while Shen Jue is off in the capital killing off and torturing hundreds of people, including a massive amount of Xiahou Lian's fellow assassins, and a horde of innocents who happen to get in his way.
And that's part of what makes the plot so messy and incoherent. This volume in particular tries to carry on two completely separate narratives and utterly fails at both. Xiahou Lian's storyline is a much bigger flop, but Shen Jue's suffers because of all the time jumps required to age them up and reunite them, and the vague attempts to align his story with the disasters Xiahou Lian is always getting himself into.
Let's start with Shen Jue. As the only (and unknown) survivor of the Xie family, he's successfully infiltrated the palace and earned the trust of the head eunuch, Wei De, the man who pulls the emperor's strings and who had orchestrated and paid for his entire family's death. Shen Jue...kind of doesn't seem to care about this, at least not from a personal revenge standpoint. After all, he didn't give a fig about his family, who'd largely abandoned him anyway.
He has two main plans: keep a prominent rank and eventually take over Wei De's role, while building his own personal task force to research the drug that kills the Garden's assassins if they don't take a pill every year. He succeeds at both in this volume; his researcher successfully duplicates the pill, after which Shen Jue murders him (and his whole family I think?), and Wei De specifically tells Shen Jue that he will be his successor.
And yet! In an entirely offscreen turn of events, Shen Jue somehow splits from Wei De, becomes an assassination target, and flees from the capital with his strongest and most loyal men.
How is this not something the story actually showed?????????? This was an incredibly important event, particularly since we got a whole chapter showing Wei De distrusting Shen Jue after his secret plan to save Xiahou Lian's life and wipe out the super powerful man who'd killed Xiahou Lian's mother...and Shen Jue manipulating Wei De into fully believing in him again. Then we time jump to none of that having mattered at all because for mumblemumble unknown reasons handwave whatever, now they're at odds.
After Shen Jue successfully got his hands on the pill, he started sweeping the streets to pick up any assassins - no longer needing them as research subjects, so instead of capturing them, he just has them all killed. Since it can be hard to identify them, his agents take any undocumented people, anyone without proper paperwork, into custody and treat them like criminals - killing them or sending them to work camps.
Yeah, so. Is Shen Jue supposed to be the good guy here? Plus a lot of the time when his men barge into an inn or whatever, they kill anyone who happens to be around the actual target. Even Xiahou Lian, a full on assassin, is horrified by Shen Jue's brutality and the way he tortures men beyond any real necessity.
Shen Jue's chapters are much more readable because he's intelligent and calculating and there's generally a sense of actual plot - which is why it's so infuriating that we just skipped over a majorly important piece. Xiahou Lian's are...bad. Like, genuinely pretty terrible a lot of the time.
We begin this volume with Xiahou Lian's mother being killed during her final mission, when a mixture of betrayal and old wounds (a whipping taken on her son's behalf, for saving Shen Jue's life) leaves her too weakened to fight off essentially an entire army of martial artists. Xiahou Lian discovers her rotting corpse and spends the next four years finally learning how to be a proper assassin, so he can take revenge.
This is not what his mother had wanted for him...but his father - the Garden's leader - and his loyal right-hand man had orchestrated the whole thing to make Xiahou Lian man up, basically. Mostly because of some mysterious event from decades earlier where the abbott had failed in some big mission in the north and had gotten all the other head assassins killed. After he returned, he stole one of his sons, Xiahou Lian's twin, and stopped interacting with Xiahou Lian and his mother. It's genuinely pretty annoying that there are absolutely no hints about what this whole thing was about, but I assume it'll become a big plot thread later on?
Despite years of training, Xiahou Lian continues to "not be very good with the sword," which varies on paper. Most of the time, he is shown to indeed be incredibly capable with the blade, but every once in a while the story will remember he's meant to be weaker than his mother and father and brother (although he fought the martial arts master who'd killed his mother to a standstill). To cover for this, he, uh...rediscovers some other sect's art of using meteor thread to control mechanical things like puppets and wings.
This is the element that's as wildly stupid as the wax masks from the first book. Xiahou Lian carries out a lot of his assassins by standing far away from the target and manipulating nearly invisible strings that control an assassin robot with blade-arms. This doesn't make sense from so many logistical standpoints, including: hordes of martial artists running into or getting tangled in the strings while surrounding the target, or simply cutting the strings and rendering it immobile. Until he coincidentally finds the meteorite that he can use to forge the blade-cutting strings, he's using ones that he literally says will only cut through a block of tofu.
Plus, the string-robot-girl completely disappears from the story after a while, and he doesn't bother to rebuild her. Eventually, he just makes a net out of the strings to kill his father.
The idea is supposed to be that he's thinking outside of the box and being creative and clever, etc, but he's honestly just...not, most of the time. He's always blundering into situations that he really only escapes because other people sweep in to rescue him. Then after he killed his father, he was really to just lie down on the ground and bleed out from his wounds, but we time jump another three years to find that he woke up feeling fine and in fact didn't even need the pills every year.
Which means Shen Jue's years of research were completely pointless. Because of magical handwavey reasons that may or may not eventually be explained? Genuinely, what on earth.
Are all the other Garden assassins dead at this point? Who knows. Xiahou Lian's mentor died pretty much out of nowhere, just to Add To His Tragedy, as he later relates it to Shen Jue, and he gains a couple followers who also disappear from the story as soon as the author lost interest in them. Again: what was the point of that whole bit with the courtesan? Or his other "friend" who wore a wax mask to pretend to be him for like, a full year, and spent a bunch of his money and ruined his reputation, and didn't bother to remember simple messages like Xiahou Lian's brother's parting words.
The side characters were a big annoyance for me from Shen Jue's side, too. Situ Jin was a really intriguing character from the end of the first book, and he returned as one of Shen Jue's captains this time around - in part to thank Shen Jue for saving his fiancee from a random evil man who'd happened to kidnap her two hours before (a) Shen Jue randomly showed up to dine at his house and (b) Situ Jin also returned to check on his fiancee.
And then...that entire love story gets entirely forgotten. What happened to Situ Jin's wife when he left the city with Shen Jue, who is now a criminal, being hunted down by Wei De? She literally doesn't get mentioned again after her weeping rescue.
Other things that annoyed me about the sloppy writing...
- When Xiahou Lian is somehow able to watch through a window as dogs eat his mother's body, remaining completely undiscovered by his Super Clever Enemy, who was specifically said to be checking door to door of every house in the city to find him. I...guess he didn't bother checking the house that was literally facing the street where he was standing.
- The assassins' blades being more important than the assassins themselves, to the point where only the blades are named on the plaques in the Garden. However, Hengbo, Xiahou Lian's mother's sword, is NOT picked up as proof of the greatest assassin's death (since she disfigured her own face to prevent being paraded around like that). Instead, it's just left lying around for Xiahou Lian to eventually start using it himself. Then, it gets knocked out of his hand in another battle with his sworn enemy, and AGAIN a random person manages to pick it up and get it back to him. (And then he loses it a third time in a pirate battle but this time Shen Jue is able to buy it at an auction and refuses to return it. Honestly, at this point, he shouldn't.)
- How Xiahou Lian went to a plastic surgeon to have his face permanently changed, but somehow even though he was literally able to look like a totally different person, the scar above his eye couldn't be fixed. I assume this will eventually serve as some proof of his identity or something, but?? Logic??
- Xiahou Lian was able to impersonate some random dead guard using courtesan makeup (which conveniently doesn't wash off in the rain) and without ever having heard the man's voice to properly imitate him.
The worst part, though, was just how bullheaded and honestly selfish Xiahou Lian was. He spent all these years trying to avenge his mother's death, while completely neglecting the brother he'd found in the process - a brother who loved him enough to lie to his own father, the man who'd raised and trained him and in whom he'd always believed. (The brother who, unlike everyone else, including all these other highly trained assassins, points out that it's completely obvious when someone is merely wearing a mask of Xiahou Lian's face.)
This was honestly just a badly written book.
Oh, and a final note: I was initially swayed into preordering this series because of the pretty art on the covers. Two books in, I can't figure out why Shen Jue is portrayed with silver/white hair. He...has ink-black hair, very specifically described in both books, and extremely important to the plot in the first book. Why white hair??? Is it relevant later on in the series somehow? Even so, it makes all the illustrations deeply inaccurate up through this much of the story.
February 8, 2026
3,5 STARS
I think I liked it more than book 1. I'm hoping book 3 will finally have more of Xiahou Lian and Shen Jue together.
I think I liked it more than book 1. I'm hoping book 3 will finally have more of Xiahou Lian and Shen Jue together.
February 7, 2026
dnfed page 150 might come back to it, definitely wouldve been more enjoyable if it has been written from shen jue’s pov
February 3, 2026
Angst, edging, AND misunderstanding... triple homicide
January 16, 2026
Unfortunately, I DNF'd this close to the end of the first arc (at p. 275). If the story had followed Shen Jue more then I probably would have pushed through, but the story follows Xiahou Lian almost exclusively for the entire rest of the first arc in this volume. And Xiahou Lian is an idiot. It's not like I dislike him or anything, but none of the sympathy the author seems to be trying to dredge up for him is possible when he never learns from his mistakes and every disaster he faces is one of his own making because he doesn't use his brain. And it usually ends with someone else getting hurt or killed on his behalf. He shows no growth whatsoever. That recklessness and thoughtlessness is one thing when he's 12, but at 21? In the end, I just got bored of Xiahou Lian and found his storyline tiresome. The few times that Shen Jue shows up on the page is a breath of fresh air.
January 21, 2026
🩸4.9/5🩸
The amount of angst in this volume! Ugh, it was amazing!
I feel like some people aren't fully grasping what’s going on, especially with Xiahou Lian. I've seen some reviews calling him an idiot... which I find harsh. What I read was a character going through immense pain to achieve his goals, but because he was so blinded by those goals, he made some unforeseen mistakes that were out of his control. "Assassins never grow old"—keep that in mind. I love him so much, and I hope others can understand his character more. I can't wait to see what happens!
Shen Jue, my boy, has his own sins and tribulations he needs to face. I do think Xiahou Lian will help, even though he's also on a different path.
I did find the beginning very confusing. It wasn't what I was expecting, as it kept jumping back and forth between the two. I plan to re-read this novel at some point and hope a second pass will make it easier to understand everything. I really enjoyed this! I can't wait to see what’s up ahead for these two!
Happy reading! 🥰
DON'T SPOIL FUTURE VOLUMES IN MY COMMENTS = IMMEDIATE BLOCK
🩸 Spoiler ahead! 🩸
Where do I even begin? The deaths in this volume are what lead to the decisions for revenge.
The amount of tears I shed when Xiahou Pei died! Ugh, my heart! Her character is so complex. One minute she’s telling Xiahou Lian that she regrets him, and the next she’s willing to die if he dies. I truly believe she loved him so, so much, and acted the way she did just so he wouldn't miss her as much when she passed.
Chiyan is MISSING AND LOST!? I don't believe it!! I will not accept this! He deserves so much happiness. It warms my heart that Xiahou Lian gave him those happy experiences outside of the Garden.
I'm so curious as to how Xiahou Lian never died from the Seven-Fifteen! They never revealed it in this volume!! Like, what happened?? Was it the tea he drank with his father before he killed him? I need answers!
Shen Jue broke his promise to Xiahou Pei. He never gave Xiahou Lian the antidote for Seven-Fifteen, but it looks like Xiahou Lian never even needed it!
After killing his father, Xiahou Lian permanently changed his face and has been reunited with Shen Jue. I wish he had told Shen Jue who he really was when his disguise was discovered! Shen Jue still believes he’s dead!
January 16, 2026
This volume doesn't start with a time jump, but Shen Jue and Xiahou Lian are about 21 within the first 1/3 of the book I think. There are two time jumps of a few years eachc, so I think they're about 26 by the end of the volume. The macro plot feels like it progresses at breakneck speed, but the two MC are following separate stories for this volume, which was a little frustrating. I'd be immersed in Shen Jue's story and the POV would jump back to Xiaohou Lian. It disrupted the flow a bit for me. I do like the writing and the story, but the pacing could be a little better.
February 15, 2026
Okay, the beginning of this volume had me doing a double take. I genuinely thought I might drop it… but I ended up picking it back up, and I’m so glad I did.
I absolutely loved the political intrigue and the leads. I know a lot of people have been complaining about the time jumps, but honestly, I think they worked really well. Vol. 1 had me feeling uneasy since the leads were only 11–12 at the beginning, so I was relieved that by the end of Vol. 2 they were around 25–26.
Now I’m really curious to see where this goes in Vol. 3.
I absolutely loved the political intrigue and the leads. I know a lot of people have been complaining about the time jumps, but honestly, I think they worked really well. Vol. 1 had me feeling uneasy since the leads were only 11–12 at the beginning, so I was relieved that by the end of Vol. 2 they were around 25–26.
Now I’m really curious to see where this goes in Vol. 3.
January 29, 2026
Once again I am thinking that the next book will definitely be better. Don't take me wrong: the plot of this part was not bad, however there was a whole lot of build-up for the protagonists to meet and now everything is coming together. This is what all of the murder and tragedy was for.
March 2, 2026
Ahhhhhhh I really need volume 3 ASAP!!! Although there were only a few instances that they were together in this volume, this was a five star for me. Shen Jue.....Shen Jue......my beautiful boy you are one of my faves right now. This volume sealed it for me.
January 29, 2026
4.0 🌟/ 5.0 🌟
February 14, 2026
bro.what.
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