The most poignant takeaway from this book is fully explained by the phrase 冤冤相报何时了. After Liu Fo Ling's death in book 2 - as I said in my review for book 1, the author seems to really like cliffhangers - a series of events started happening. Given the open-mindedness of Yun Ge's mother, Jin Yu in 大漠谣, you would think that she should also be that kind of person, but nope, she was fixated on his death and never seemed to snap out of it.
In the beginning, she was delusional and refused to accept his death, and appeared to be just accepting her abuse silently. And then after she was rescued by Meng Jue she put all her brains and schemes into torturing Meng Jue mentally and physically, while leaving her actual abuser, Huo Cheng Jun and Huo Guang relatively safe, other than the part where she caused her infertility. Quite the scheme to demostrate the logic of "tit-for-tat", except that she forgot to gloat. Where's the joy when you had your revenge and your enemy is unaware of it?
And after it was revealed that Yun Ge is Huo Qu Bing's daughter, Huo Guang just brought her home and expected her to be nice and compliant because of their blood relations? So Yun Ge was just biding her time and trying to put her schemes in place, and know that she can't trust Huo Guang, but Huo Guang did not do anything to apologise or anything. So everyone moved on as though they didn't just imprisoned Yun Ge, whipped her, caused her miscarriage and declared that she's to be executed. Oh and she returned to her life in the capital with nobody wondering how come she's still alive and kicking and having an affair with the new king after her supposed execution.
And Meng Jue, whose character was meant to be the most scheming person in the first and second book, such that nobody dared to infuriate and both camps are fighting to have on their team so that they can get the Emperor's throne, supposedly put in place plots to take revenge on everyone that harmed Yun Ge. (Oh but after the great revelation, Meng Jue sadly lost his most scheming title to Liu Bing Yi) But he didn't bothered telling her what is happening, so that just when you thought Yun Ge and Meng Jue is finally going to get together (after seeing Jin Yu & Meng Jiu's lack of fate you will think their descendants have more luck, but nope, the author loves to cheat the reader's feelings), Yun Ge discovered some of Meng Jue's old scheme and decided to take her revenge then. Why so active when she seemed to have given up on her other revenges huh.
So after all that, you would think that I really disliked the book, so why the 5 stars. Reasons for the 5 stars is because: 1. The plot is really intense. You can't put down the book once you start reading, because the plot is so captivating 2. The book is totally not predictable. I was hoping and hoping that there will be a happy ending, but seems like happy endings are no longer the standard in new novels. 3. Somehow this book reminds me of A Song of Ice and Fire. Where every book ends with your favourite character dying/maimed and nobody has the "main character halo"
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.