Some people transmigrate into Emperors, others become wangye.
They live in luxury; their hands covering the Heavens.
Some people transmigrate into shizuns, or sect leaders.
They would have the respect of all, their powers supernatural.
Some unlucky souls become villains, but even with their terrible reputations they would still have enough power to summon rain from the sky, maybe even manage to kill off the protagonist.
But Li Changtian, a stand up young man from a good family, who died on the battlefield protecting someone, widened his eyes.
He! Transmigrated!
Into a person everyone wanted dead, with an unabsolvable crime!
Li Changtian: “??? Wait wait, did something go wrong somewhere?”
The magistrate of the Imperial Justice Bureau, Yan Shu, who hated injustice more than anything in the world had just stepped onto his head and said in an ice cold voice: “A life for a life.”
It's one of those cases where you can quite accurately predict the plot just from the title.
Look at the name - it's going to be a transmigration novel where th MC will be reborn into a prisoner. Probably a wrongly accused prisoner - or there would be no conflict in the story. And there probably would be a sexy guard somewhere nearby - it's a BL novel after all. So, the romance would blossom between the prisoner MC and the guard ML while they would be trying to clear the prisoner's name and eradicate the world's injustice.
You can get a lot from just a title.
The only question is - is the execution any good? Do the characters make sense? Is the story believable?
Yes. Yes. Yes.
It is almost concerning how much sense the characters and the plot make. Each character has their own clear motivation, values, opinions etc. All their interactions are a bliss to read. The dialogues are written with all the possible variables in mind - the characters perception of themselves and of each other, their motivation, their backstory, their mood and so on. I felt that each and every word in any given dialogue was in its own place and couldn't possibly be replaced with any other word.
MC and ML have an actual reason to fall for each other. Li Changtian feels lost after transmigrating and doesn't know where he belongs in his new reality, so he sticks around Yan Shu - the first person he meets and the only person who gives him a feeling of familiarity. Yan Shu, on the other hand, due to his past has hard time believing that someone would want to hang out with him, and when Li Changtian does he naturally starts perceiving him as someone special.
There's really no antogonist in the story, and the characters who seem evil at first become much more multidimensional as new info is introduced. As the story progresses, we get a clearer picture of how all the storylines are entangled with each other, and by a certain point evetything becomes a complete mess of interwind threads with no beginnings, ends or obvious solutions seen.
As the author's second transmigration novel - the first one being How to survive as a villain (another self-describing title!) - it doesn't deals with the transmission aspect a whole lot. It does, however, improve on certain things which felt lazy in How to survive as a villain. The doppelganger storyline, for example. It's hard to do this transmigration genre staple creatively, and the author in their previous book indeed does it in the most predictable way possible. In this novel, however, the doppelganger storyline turns out to be really creative, meaningful, and fitting into the larger mess of the story.
So, basically, it's easily a five-star book for me.
Không đề cử. Nhân vật chính dù cường x cường nhưng tác giả viết rất chán, tình tiết dễ đoán, âm mưu quá nông cạn, cách jump tuyến thời gian rất ngộ (câu đầu 1 năm trước-không hề có ngăn cách hay thông báo gì hết-câu sau 1 năm sau) khiến đọc bị lộn mạch và thiếu liên kết cực kì. Phần ngược cuối truyện đúng là như 1 trò đùa, mình đọc mà bản thân mình phải nhíu mày vì nó tào lao chứ k thấy đau lòng xíu nào. Cho 2 sao là vì xây dựng tính cách công thụ khá được, vậy thôi.
Falling in love part from Yan Shu is a little bit too fast, but everything afterwards is pretty good. This has some similarities to "How to Survive As A Villain", which I belatedly realized they are by the same author.
It's HE, with a few knives in between. Okay, who am I kidding... let me repeat that. It's HE, with quite a lot of knives in between. However, it made the sweet moments worth it.
I read the book by paying for audio book from Mao-er FM (missevan). The lead actors are very good in that, I strongly recommend it if you can understand Chinese language. But it is not an audio drama, so please don't expect too much effects or that level of production.
Fue bonito leerlos, Li Changtian sufrió todas, pobre tipo no había capítulo donde no tuviera heridas nuevas, siempre hecho mierda. La verdad me hizo muy bien que se protejan mutuamente y que Yanshu crea en Changtian bajo cualquier circunstancia. El 80% de esta novela fue leída en los trayectos del colectivo y lloré, me reí, y me daba verguenza también, pero lo super disfruté asi que siento que los voy a recordar por buen tiempo.
Me encanta esta autora por lo que mi calificación puede estar algo basada pero igualmente considero que esta novela es bastante buena, la trama es muy sencilla realmente no ofrece nada nuevo hasta casi los últimos arcos la trama se vuelve un poco más compleja. El punto fuerte de la novela es la manera en que maneja a los personajes y sus emociones, para mí el desarrollar a los personajes es muy importante al momento de contar una historia ya que puedes tener una trama muy interesante y detallada pero si tus personajes son planos la lectura se vuelve muy tediosa, en cambio si tienes buenos personajes querrás leer sobre ellos aún en las situaciones más cotidianas es por eso el que le doy una calificación de 4.5