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I don't know if this will be interesting for anyone, I get quite wordy, just need a place to go "AHHHHH" and to resist rambling in a spoilery way atmoonvoice.
So! Heavens Official Blessings/Tiān Guān Cì Fú is a Chinese m/m novel by Mò Xiāng Tóngxiù/MXTX, author of The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation and Scum Villain's Self Saving System. It's her most recent work, and the main things I knew going in were that there's no explicit sex, and that it's much angstier than the other two.
I was putting off reading it until I felt up to some angst. "On the upside," I thought, "While Chinese government censorship is appalling, and MXTX is allowed to have her kinks I find triggery, at least these won't be so much of them in this story."
I vastly underestimated the determination of a Chinese smut writer in the face of censorship lol.
I really enjoyed Book 1 but am having complicated feelings about Book 2, thus the need for a place to go AHHH. I started writing this at about chapter 80, near the end of Book 2, but am going to divide these posts by Book, to help others avoid spoilers.
And under the cut: SPOILERS for Book 1, chapters 1-57
EDIT: I've gone through after finishing the book adding/fixing details that later ended up being important, but this post is still not entirely accurate. There were a lot of names to keep track of and I did a very bad job of doing so >.>
So, the official summary is:
One reason I didn't read the book for ages is that I got the (correct) impression from this and fannish osmosis that Xie Lian is idealistic and cheerful. What I didn't get is that after 800 years of failed ideals he's cheerfully fatalistic, with a wry, passive aggressive sense of humour and a deep awareness of the ridiculousness of his own life. I thought he sounded kind of boring, but he's actually delightful.
(and yes, I constantly get Xie Lian and Xian Le mixed up, though luckily it's generally easy to tell if someone's talking about a country or a person)
This is a very humanist book: the gods are petty bureaucrats concerned with status and gossip, and both Xie Lian and the narrative tend to consider their low opinion of him a sign he's doing something right. Humans ascend to godhood due to Amazing Works, but this generally involves some massacres etc that other gods politely avoid mentioning.
To begin with we get only hints of how Xie Lian's first godhood went so wrong, or how he got a second and third chance at it. But we know he tried to save the people of his kingdom from war, and that the kingdom still fell. We also know he has a tendency to throw himself 100% into saving any innocents he sees under threat, regardless of the consequences, and that this has repeatedly fucked him over. And that he spent most of the last 800 years as a beggar, gathering and recycling rubbish.
Even now he's a god again, with a palace in Heaven, he make himself a shitty shrine in a tiny village, and considers that his home. He used to be a prince, and then a martial god with thousands of temples, filled with followers and gold. But his people are dead, his wars lost, and his name a laughing stock, so the tumble-down shack will do.
Xie Lian has basically no concern for his own dignity at this point, like his default response to women hitting on him is to tell them he's impotent, since it saves time and hurt feelings. (His cultivation style requires celibacy, which MXTX is absolutely going to, uh, have fun with)
He tries sending little bits of poetry to the other gods as a way to say hello, and it's all 800 years out of fashion. "Ha, fair enough," he thinks to himself, like a resigned old man who doesn't get the current memes.
Which makes me a bit BE THAT WAY THEN XIE LIAN about him getting a bit weird about the idea of crossdressing, though he's admittedly a lot more unfazed about it than everyone else...except That One God, Shi Quing Xuan, who is amab but likes to shapeshift into a woman, and sits in that grey area between trans woman, bigender, and Very Femme Guy.
I really like Shi Quing Xuan, and Xie Lian and the narrative like them too, but they're rather Sassy Gay Friend. Which is not the worst thing to be, but don't expect Nuanced Queer Representation.
Apparently Shi Quing Xuan is not the only God whose presentation doesn't match their assigned gender: over time followers can just decide to change the gender of gods, and it's a lot easier for the gods to go along with these expectations than deal with followers complaining that their numinous vision was the wrong gender etc. Shi Quing Xuan is just the only god shown to like it. There's a female literature god who everyone assumes is a man because Everyone Knows Women Can't Write, who mostly hangs out in the background being long sufferingly competent.
Anyway. Time for my very fuzzily remembered thoughts...
The book starts with Xie Lian being sent on errands by the Head God Jun Wu, with two under-gods (EDIT: Fu Yao and Nan Feng) who feel very hard done by being stuck with this loser weirdo. I HAVE MY DOUBTS about the Head God's motives. Xie Lian kind of sees him as a distant and intimidating but well intentioned father figure, though there's some quiet resentment mixed in there.
Despite being a dork with appalling luck, Xie Lian shows himself to be very intelligent, principled, and skilled, and earns the under-gods' grudging respect. He doesn't use weapons, but has an enchanted bandage he uses to restrain people. He's still a massive sword nerd any time a nice sword shows up.
At one point he dresses up as a bride to lure out a bride-killing ghost (the under-gods are very uncomfortable with how hot he looks lol), but finds himself surrounded by monsters. A mysterious man dressed in red (eg the colours of a groom) appears and leads him to safety, taking out an umbrella to shield them from rain and scaring off the monsters around them with a single glance. And then the man vanishes into a cloud of silver butterflies. Xie Lian was unable to see the man's face because of his bridal veil.
(EDIT: it turns out that the brides were being murdered by the ghost Xuan Ji, the jilted ex of the womanising martial god Pei Ming. Which doesn't really matter right now, I'm mainly noting it for anyone who, as I did, later looks back wondering "Who was Xuan Ji again?")
Later, Xie Lian discovers that the "rain" was blood from a forest of bodies, created by the Green Goblin, a gross demon even other ghosts and demons despise. We find out that ghosts and demons are like gods: humans who died and gained power, and have their own hierarchy. And the man who rescued Xie Lian matches the description of one of the most powerful demons, the one-eyed demon king Hua Cheng. Everyone in heaven is terrified of this guy: he's murdered lot of people and controls legions of ghosts etc etc, but most importantly he beat a bunch of gods in a fight and really embarrassed them.
And then a while later a tall, handsome 17ish year old boy shows up near Xie Lian's shrine, calling himself San Lang. The two hang out and quickly settle into a cheerful friendship. The boy "ends up" tagging along on the next errand, so Xie Lian goes to great lengths to keep him safe, while the under-gods go to increasingly unsubtle lengths to prove he's some sort of monster. Even Xie Lian has to admit that the boy is remarkably well informed and capable for a random human, but he passes every test: either he is a human, or he's a ridiculously powerful monster. (Guess which ;))
The boy responds to this with the same sort of passive aggressive good cheer Xie Lian uses when people are jerks to him, but there's undertones of a much darker, crueler, angrier nature under the surface, especially whenever Xie Lian is in danger. (Gods can't easily die, but they can feel pain)
At about this point I said tomoonvoice that I'd expected the WHOLE STORY to be angsty, but that so far it was pretty light, in a wryly bittersweet way. But I'd heard there was a Long Angsty Flashback, and trepidatiously waited for it to show up.
One of MXTX's gifts as a writer is creating engaging, intense side stories that fit together into the greater narrative, so all sorts of cool horror fantasy stuff is happening during these errands. Lots of situations where everyone had understandable motives but ended up creating awful tragedies.
Anyway. Xie Lian, the boy, and a bunch of humans face a pit full of monsters. The boy smiles and tells Xie Lian not to worry, then jumps in. Xie Lian also offers himself up to try and stop any more humans dying. But when he falls he ends up...in the arms of the boy, who says the ground is dirty. Which is to say, littered with the corpses of the monsters. It's too dark to see but he seems taller than before...
(EDIT: This happens in the country of Ban Yue, and involves Pei Ming's descendant Pei Su, which will come up again way later. YOU SEE WHY I STARTED WRITING A GUIDE. Also I realised later that this section is super duper Islamophobic :/)
Afterwards, when the two of them are alone at the shrine, Xie Lian says he doesn't care if the boy isn't human: what matters is that they like each other. In a rare display of self consciousness, he boy asks if Xie Lian would still like him if he was ugly, and Xie Lian says that doesn't matter either.
In Heaven, Xie Lian is sent on another errand with the ambiguously gendered Wind God Shi Quing Xuan, and a dumbass god, Lang Qian Qui, who I shall refer to as Leeroy Jenkins. They are to investigate a god's distress signal from the Ghost City, an infamously debauched demon metropolis controlled by...Hua Cheng.
The Ghost City is vividly described and sounds like a Chinese Bosch painting.
Leeroy Jenkins rushes in and causes trouble to try and save a guy about to bet his daughter's life at a gambling table. There's a ridiculously tropey sequence where Hua Cheng is all mysterious and smug Demon King Ruling His Demonic Gambling Den from behind a screen, and invites Xie Lian to his private alcove. And of course...it's the boy, now looking about 19, and with an eye patch (and super hot, though since Xie Lian has spent the 800 years since his mid-teens repressing all his sexual thoughts with sutras he doesn't recognise sexual attraction for what it is and just keeps wondering why his heart rate has sped up)
When Xie Lian questions Hua Cheng running a city where people eat human flesh and gamble with lives, he says someone has to run it, an argument I do not find entirely convincing.
Xie Lian finds and cares for a young boy with a bandaged face who turns out to somehow have Disfiguring Face Disease, which cursed Xie Lian's kingdom hundreds of years ago but hasn't been seen since. Hua Cheng takes the boy in on Xie Lian's behalf. (EDIT: It's mentioned that this disease died out centuries ago, yet somehow I missed the implication that the boy, Lang Ying, is thus ACTUALLY A GHOST. Instead I spent the next several hundred chapters waiting for a Big Reveal about how the disease had returned in the modern day to infect this perfectly ordinary teenage boy. So bear that in mind when I talk about him going forward >.>)
I can't remember if Xie Lian has figured it out at this point, but it's certainly obvious to the reader that Xie Lian met Hua Cheng at some time in the past, and did something kind that left Hua Cheng feeling like he owes a deep debt of loyalty.
Here's some cute art of the two of them. This pic of Hua Cheng is nicer but I keep getting captivated by the mouse thing.
Hua Cheng pulls out all the "demon king trying to impress the boy he likes" stops, showing off his palace and his armoury and his oddly cute sentient silver sabre, and is about two steps from COME MOVE IN WITH ME FOREVER, though he makes a subtle face when Xie Lian mentions being celibate, lol.
But while he feels like a jerk for doing it, Xie Lian continues with his mission to find the missing god, who it turns out is a spy Hua Cheng was torturing in his RIDICULOUSLY OVER ENGINEERED dungeon (At various points Xie Lian and Shi Quing Xuan encounter trapdoors, giant earthworms, hungry cannibals, and various doors that can only opened by rolling the right numbers on dice. Even while he's nearly being eaten by cannibals Xie Lian finds it endearingly mischievous, lol)
Thanks to Xie Lian's terrible luck and Lang Qian Qui's Leeroy Jenkin-ness, they...accidentally end up setting the palace on fire and running away. Oops.
Xie Lian seems to see Lang Qian Qui as a more oblivious version of his younger self, though he's darkly amused that Lang Qian Qui hasn't noticed that Xi Lian is the old god of the people that the Lang family conquered.
But then Lang Qian Qui finally recognises Xie Lian: as the murderer of Lang Qian Qui's father, King Lang, last seen surrounded by the dead bodies of the rest of the Lang royal family. Xie Lian was Lang Qian Qui's sword instructor, back when Leeroy was a human boy a few generations into his family's rule of Xie Lian's old kingdom.
Xie Lian denies nothing, but refuses to duel Lang Qian Qui. It becomes clear that Xie Lian doesn't use swords these days because he's so good with them that he just ends up killing people, and he doesn't want to do that any more. He is, after all, a martial god, though he hasn't been the general of anything in centuries.
Appearing in Heaven as a swarm of butterflies, Hua Cheng steals Xie Lian and Lang Qian Qui (who he has turned into a stuffed doll to stop him causing trouble) and brings them to the lair of the gross whiny Green Goblin...who Xie Lian realises is his gross whiny cousin from back when he was human. This cousin hero-worshipped Xie Lian...until Xie Lian's fall from grace, at which point he went around smashing all of Xie Lian's temples.
Hua Cheng viciously beats the Green Goblin until he admits the truth: HE was the one who caused the deaths of the Lang family, as a ghost, in a conspiracy with Lang Qian Qui's best friend, the last living royal of Xie Lian and the Green Goblin's line.
Xie Lian knew this, and had wanted to shield Lang Qian Qui from the truth, because of complicated things to do with loyalty and old wounds between warring peoples. But Xie Lian really was the one who killed King Lang. He was also the one who killed the best friend, the last living member of his own royal family. He'd hoped that by doing so he could prevent further retaliation and war.
Lang Qian Qui runs off, unable to deal with all this. Hua Cheng boils the Green Goblin alive (which doesn't kill him, but doesn't feel great) Xie Lian tends to have a "I wouldn't do that but you do you" attitude to Hua Cheng's ultra-violence.
Feeling melancholy, Xie Lian returns to his old kingdom, and his parents tomb, once a beautiful park but now overgrown and abandoned.
And that's about to the end of book one! And then, hoo boy, Book 2...
EDIT: First I'm going to summarise the history between Xie Lian and Lang Qian Qui a little more because it becomes important later.
So!
Several hundred years ago, Xie Lian showed up in YongAn as "the Guoshi Fang Xin", to train the then young prince Lang Qian Qui, as Xie Lian's Guoshi once trained him. Also, Fang Xin is the name of Xie Lian's mysterious black sword that came up a whole bunch in the story and I didn't realise was important until like halfway through Book 4, oops. (And yes, it is very similar to the name "Feng Xin", there's no significance to that afaict but it's very confusing)
When Lang Qian Qui was 12 he nearly got murdered, only to be saved by a masked street performer armed only with a tree branch: Xie Lian.
Guoshi Fang Xin was mysterious and cold, and always wore a white and gold mask, which is why Lang Qian Qui didn't recognise him until now.
After Fang Xin supposedly murdered the Lang royal family, Lang Qian Qui killed him with his own hands and put him into a three layered coffin. (And it's revealed in an extra that nails were driven into his body, just to be extra sure)
I don't know if this will be interesting for anyone, I get quite wordy, just need a place to go "AHHHHH" and to resist rambling in a spoilery way at
moonvoice.So! Heavens Official Blessings/Tiān Guān Cì Fú is a Chinese m/m novel by Mò Xiāng Tóngxiù/MXTX, author of The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation and Scum Villain's Self Saving System. It's her most recent work, and the main things I knew going in were that there's no explicit sex, and that it's much angstier than the other two.
I was putting off reading it until I felt up to some angst. "On the upside," I thought, "While Chinese government censorship is appalling, and MXTX is allowed to have her kinks I find triggery, at least these won't be so much of them in this story."
I vastly underestimated the determination of a Chinese smut writer in the face of censorship lol.
I really enjoyed Book 1 but am having complicated feelings about Book 2, thus the need for a place to go AHHH. I started writing this at about chapter 80, near the end of Book 2, but am going to divide these posts by Book, to help others avoid spoilers.
And under the cut: SPOILERS for Book 1, chapters 1-57
EDIT: I've gone through after finishing the book adding/fixing details that later ended up being important, but this post is still not entirely accurate. There were a lot of names to keep track of and I did a very bad job of doing so >.>
So, the official summary is:
Eight hundred years ago, Xie Lian was the Crown Prince of the Xian Le kingdom; one who was beloved by his citizens and the darling of the world. Unsurprisingly, he ascended to the Heavens at a very young age. Now, eight hundred years later, Xie Lian ascends to the Heavens for the third time as the laughing stock of all three realms. On his first task as a god, he meets a mysterious demon who rules the ghosts and terrifies the Heavens……yet unbeknownst to Xie Lian, this demon king has been paying attention to him for a very, very long time.
One reason I didn't read the book for ages is that I got the (correct) impression from this and fannish osmosis that Xie Lian is idealistic and cheerful. What I didn't get is that after 800 years of failed ideals he's cheerfully fatalistic, with a wry, passive aggressive sense of humour and a deep awareness of the ridiculousness of his own life. I thought he sounded kind of boring, but he's actually delightful.
(and yes, I constantly get Xie Lian and Xian Le mixed up, though luckily it's generally easy to tell if someone's talking about a country or a person)
This is a very humanist book: the gods are petty bureaucrats concerned with status and gossip, and both Xie Lian and the narrative tend to consider their low opinion of him a sign he's doing something right. Humans ascend to godhood due to Amazing Works, but this generally involves some massacres etc that other gods politely avoid mentioning.
To begin with we get only hints of how Xie Lian's first godhood went so wrong, or how he got a second and third chance at it. But we know he tried to save the people of his kingdom from war, and that the kingdom still fell. We also know he has a tendency to throw himself 100% into saving any innocents he sees under threat, regardless of the consequences, and that this has repeatedly fucked him over. And that he spent most of the last 800 years as a beggar, gathering and recycling rubbish.
Even now he's a god again, with a palace in Heaven, he make himself a shitty shrine in a tiny village, and considers that his home. He used to be a prince, and then a martial god with thousands of temples, filled with followers and gold. But his people are dead, his wars lost, and his name a laughing stock, so the tumble-down shack will do.
Xie Lian has basically no concern for his own dignity at this point, like his default response to women hitting on him is to tell them he's impotent, since it saves time and hurt feelings. (His cultivation style requires celibacy, which MXTX is absolutely going to, uh, have fun with)
He tries sending little bits of poetry to the other gods as a way to say hello, and it's all 800 years out of fashion. "Ha, fair enough," he thinks to himself, like a resigned old man who doesn't get the current memes.
Which makes me a bit BE THAT WAY THEN XIE LIAN about him getting a bit weird about the idea of crossdressing, though he's admittedly a lot more unfazed about it than everyone else...except That One God, Shi Quing Xuan, who is amab but likes to shapeshift into a woman, and sits in that grey area between trans woman, bigender, and Very Femme Guy.
I really like Shi Quing Xuan, and Xie Lian and the narrative like them too, but they're rather Sassy Gay Friend. Which is not the worst thing to be, but don't expect Nuanced Queer Representation.
Apparently Shi Quing Xuan is not the only God whose presentation doesn't match their assigned gender: over time followers can just decide to change the gender of gods, and it's a lot easier for the gods to go along with these expectations than deal with followers complaining that their numinous vision was the wrong gender etc. Shi Quing Xuan is just the only god shown to like it. There's a female literature god who everyone assumes is a man because Everyone Knows Women Can't Write, who mostly hangs out in the background being long sufferingly competent.
Anyway. Time for my very fuzzily remembered thoughts...
The book starts with Xie Lian being sent on errands by the Head God Jun Wu, with two under-gods (EDIT: Fu Yao and Nan Feng) who feel very hard done by being stuck with this loser weirdo. I HAVE MY DOUBTS about the Head God's motives. Xie Lian kind of sees him as a distant and intimidating but well intentioned father figure, though there's some quiet resentment mixed in there.
Despite being a dork with appalling luck, Xie Lian shows himself to be very intelligent, principled, and skilled, and earns the under-gods' grudging respect. He doesn't use weapons, but has an enchanted bandage he uses to restrain people. He's still a massive sword nerd any time a nice sword shows up.
At one point he dresses up as a bride to lure out a bride-killing ghost (the under-gods are very uncomfortable with how hot he looks lol), but finds himself surrounded by monsters. A mysterious man dressed in red (eg the colours of a groom) appears and leads him to safety, taking out an umbrella to shield them from rain and scaring off the monsters around them with a single glance. And then the man vanishes into a cloud of silver butterflies. Xie Lian was unable to see the man's face because of his bridal veil.
(EDIT: it turns out that the brides were being murdered by the ghost Xuan Ji, the jilted ex of the womanising martial god Pei Ming. Which doesn't really matter right now, I'm mainly noting it for anyone who, as I did, later looks back wondering "Who was Xuan Ji again?")
Later, Xie Lian discovers that the "rain" was blood from a forest of bodies, created by the Green Goblin, a gross demon even other ghosts and demons despise. We find out that ghosts and demons are like gods: humans who died and gained power, and have their own hierarchy. And the man who rescued Xie Lian matches the description of one of the most powerful demons, the one-eyed demon king Hua Cheng. Everyone in heaven is terrified of this guy: he's murdered lot of people and controls legions of ghosts etc etc, but most importantly he beat a bunch of gods in a fight and really embarrassed them.
And then a while later a tall, handsome 17ish year old boy shows up near Xie Lian's shrine, calling himself San Lang. The two hang out and quickly settle into a cheerful friendship. The boy "ends up" tagging along on the next errand, so Xie Lian goes to great lengths to keep him safe, while the under-gods go to increasingly unsubtle lengths to prove he's some sort of monster. Even Xie Lian has to admit that the boy is remarkably well informed and capable for a random human, but he passes every test: either he is a human, or he's a ridiculously powerful monster. (Guess which ;))
The boy responds to this with the same sort of passive aggressive good cheer Xie Lian uses when people are jerks to him, but there's undertones of a much darker, crueler, angrier nature under the surface, especially whenever Xie Lian is in danger. (Gods can't easily die, but they can feel pain)
At about this point I said to
moonvoice that I'd expected the WHOLE STORY to be angsty, but that so far it was pretty light, in a wryly bittersweet way. But I'd heard there was a Long Angsty Flashback, and trepidatiously waited for it to show up.One of MXTX's gifts as a writer is creating engaging, intense side stories that fit together into the greater narrative, so all sorts of cool horror fantasy stuff is happening during these errands. Lots of situations where everyone had understandable motives but ended up creating awful tragedies.
Anyway. Xie Lian, the boy, and a bunch of humans face a pit full of monsters. The boy smiles and tells Xie Lian not to worry, then jumps in. Xie Lian also offers himself up to try and stop any more humans dying. But when he falls he ends up...in the arms of the boy, who says the ground is dirty. Which is to say, littered with the corpses of the monsters. It's too dark to see but he seems taller than before...
(EDIT: This happens in the country of Ban Yue, and involves Pei Ming's descendant Pei Su, which will come up again way later. YOU SEE WHY I STARTED WRITING A GUIDE. Also I realised later that this section is super duper Islamophobic :/)
Afterwards, when the two of them are alone at the shrine, Xie Lian says he doesn't care if the boy isn't human: what matters is that they like each other. In a rare display of self consciousness, he boy asks if Xie Lian would still like him if he was ugly, and Xie Lian says that doesn't matter either.
In Heaven, Xie Lian is sent on another errand with the ambiguously gendered Wind God Shi Quing Xuan, and a dumbass god, Lang Qian Qui, who I shall refer to as Leeroy Jenkins. They are to investigate a god's distress signal from the Ghost City, an infamously debauched demon metropolis controlled by...Hua Cheng.
The Ghost City is vividly described and sounds like a Chinese Bosch painting.
Leeroy Jenkins rushes in and causes trouble to try and save a guy about to bet his daughter's life at a gambling table. There's a ridiculously tropey sequence where Hua Cheng is all mysterious and smug Demon King Ruling His Demonic Gambling Den from behind a screen, and invites Xie Lian to his private alcove. And of course...it's the boy, now looking about 19, and with an eye patch (and super hot, though since Xie Lian has spent the 800 years since his mid-teens repressing all his sexual thoughts with sutras he doesn't recognise sexual attraction for what it is and just keeps wondering why his heart rate has sped up)
When Xie Lian questions Hua Cheng running a city where people eat human flesh and gamble with lives, he says someone has to run it, an argument I do not find entirely convincing.
Xie Lian finds and cares for a young boy with a bandaged face who turns out to somehow have Disfiguring Face Disease, which cursed Xie Lian's kingdom hundreds of years ago but hasn't been seen since. Hua Cheng takes the boy in on Xie Lian's behalf. (EDIT: It's mentioned that this disease died out centuries ago, yet somehow I missed the implication that the boy, Lang Ying, is thus ACTUALLY A GHOST. Instead I spent the next several hundred chapters waiting for a Big Reveal about how the disease had returned in the modern day to infect this perfectly ordinary teenage boy. So bear that in mind when I talk about him going forward >.>)
I can't remember if Xie Lian has figured it out at this point, but it's certainly obvious to the reader that Xie Lian met Hua Cheng at some time in the past, and did something kind that left Hua Cheng feeling like he owes a deep debt of loyalty.
Here's some cute art of the two of them. This pic of Hua Cheng is nicer but I keep getting captivated by the mouse thing.
Hua Cheng pulls out all the "demon king trying to impress the boy he likes" stops, showing off his palace and his armoury and his oddly cute sentient silver sabre, and is about two steps from COME MOVE IN WITH ME FOREVER, though he makes a subtle face when Xie Lian mentions being celibate, lol.
But while he feels like a jerk for doing it, Xie Lian continues with his mission to find the missing god, who it turns out is a spy Hua Cheng was torturing in his RIDICULOUSLY OVER ENGINEERED dungeon (At various points Xie Lian and Shi Quing Xuan encounter trapdoors, giant earthworms, hungry cannibals, and various doors that can only opened by rolling the right numbers on dice. Even while he's nearly being eaten by cannibals Xie Lian finds it endearingly mischievous, lol)
Thanks to Xie Lian's terrible luck and Lang Qian Qui's Leeroy Jenkin-ness, they...accidentally end up setting the palace on fire and running away. Oops.
Xie Lian seems to see Lang Qian Qui as a more oblivious version of his younger self, though he's darkly amused that Lang Qian Qui hasn't noticed that Xi Lian is the old god of the people that the Lang family conquered.
But then Lang Qian Qui finally recognises Xie Lian: as the murderer of Lang Qian Qui's father, King Lang, last seen surrounded by the dead bodies of the rest of the Lang royal family. Xie Lian was Lang Qian Qui's sword instructor, back when Leeroy was a human boy a few generations into his family's rule of Xie Lian's old kingdom.
Xie Lian denies nothing, but refuses to duel Lang Qian Qui. It becomes clear that Xie Lian doesn't use swords these days because he's so good with them that he just ends up killing people, and he doesn't want to do that any more. He is, after all, a martial god, though he hasn't been the general of anything in centuries.
Appearing in Heaven as a swarm of butterflies, Hua Cheng steals Xie Lian and Lang Qian Qui (who he has turned into a stuffed doll to stop him causing trouble) and brings them to the lair of the gross whiny Green Goblin...who Xie Lian realises is his gross whiny cousin from back when he was human. This cousin hero-worshipped Xie Lian...until Xie Lian's fall from grace, at which point he went around smashing all of Xie Lian's temples.
Hua Cheng viciously beats the Green Goblin until he admits the truth: HE was the one who caused the deaths of the Lang family, as a ghost, in a conspiracy with Lang Qian Qui's best friend, the last living royal of Xie Lian and the Green Goblin's line.
Xie Lian knew this, and had wanted to shield Lang Qian Qui from the truth, because of complicated things to do with loyalty and old wounds between warring peoples. But Xie Lian really was the one who killed King Lang. He was also the one who killed the best friend, the last living member of his own royal family. He'd hoped that by doing so he could prevent further retaliation and war.
Lang Qian Qui runs off, unable to deal with all this. Hua Cheng boils the Green Goblin alive (which doesn't kill him, but doesn't feel great) Xie Lian tends to have a "I wouldn't do that but you do you" attitude to Hua Cheng's ultra-violence.
Feeling melancholy, Xie Lian returns to his old kingdom, and his parents tomb, once a beautiful park but now overgrown and abandoned.
And that's about to the end of book one! And then, hoo boy, Book 2...
EDIT: First I'm going to summarise the history between Xie Lian and Lang Qian Qui a little more because it becomes important later.
So!
Several hundred years ago, Xie Lian showed up in YongAn as "the Guoshi Fang Xin", to train the then young prince Lang Qian Qui, as Xie Lian's Guoshi once trained him. Also, Fang Xin is the name of Xie Lian's mysterious black sword that came up a whole bunch in the story and I didn't realise was important until like halfway through Book 4, oops. (And yes, it is very similar to the name "Feng Xin", there's no significance to that afaict but it's very confusing)
When Lang Qian Qui was 12 he nearly got murdered, only to be saved by a masked street performer armed only with a tree branch: Xie Lian.
Guoshi Fang Xin was mysterious and cold, and always wore a white and gold mask, which is why Lang Qian Qui didn't recognise him until now.
After Fang Xin supposedly murdered the Lang royal family, Lang Qian Qui killed him with his own hands and put him into a three layered coffin. (And it's revealed in an extra that nails were driven into his body, just to be extra sure)
