Review:
Fu Wanqing is both a great beauty and a formidable fighter. Although she is considered the heir of the House of Valor, she causes nothing but trouble for her father and behaves as if nothing in the world has anything to do with her. There is only one person she considers her true rival: Yu Shengyan, the cold and indifferent high priestess of the demonic Jadewater Guild, which opposes the House of Valor and other members of the Lightpath Alliance.
Seemingly, all Fu Wanqing wants is to challenge Yu Shengyan to a duel, but for some reason Yu Shengyan refuses to even draw her blade, despite the fact that Fu Wanqing crippled her shijie. Fu Wanqing does at least extract a promise from Yu Shengyan to stay by her side for three months, giving her more opportunities to get her to agree to a duel, in exchange for a rare medicine that will allow Yu Shengyan's shijie to walk again.
It's a risky agreement for the both of them, with the Jadewater Guild and the House of Valor so at odds, but neither of them cares. As they spend more time with each other, their rivalry begins to morph into something more, but Fu Wanqing still has her own secret goals to accomplish.
Oof, this was messy. It's more of a revenge story with some occasional steamy flirtatious moments between Fu Wanqing and Yu Shengyan than it is a romance, although it takes ages for the revenge aspects, including the motivations behind them, to start to come together. Until that point, this mostly reads like a story about the men in the Lightpath Alliance fretting over a missing statue/map while Fu Wanqing giggles and drapes herself across Yu Shengyan's lap.
If you've read MXTX's Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, it's difficult not to compare Fu Wanqing and Yu Shengyan to Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji. Unfortunately, Fu Wanqing doesn't have Wei Wuxian's charm, and Yu Shengyan doesn't get anywhere near Lan Wangji's level of development. I was especially disappointed about Yu Shengyan - it felt like the author had barely scratched the surface of her character by the end of the book. We got a few details about how she was raised, and endless mentions of how icy and emotionless she was, and that was about it. I couldn't even tell you for sure what it was about Fu Wanqing that eventually won her over.
Fu Wanqing was a frustrating character. She came across as a chaotic villain who got away with causing trouble, sowing discord, and literally just flat-out killing people who annoyed her because she was pretty. Like, one guy literally forgot for a bit that he hated her and wanted to kill her because she was so gorgeous.
It turned out that there was actually a reason why she behaved the way she did, beyond just "she's a spoiled rotten little monster," but it took way too long for those reasons to be revealed. Some sort of glimpses at how character relationships had developed and degraded would have been nice. Instead, the author kept introducing dozens of guys whose brains were mostly located in their pants. Fu Wanqing and Yu Shengyan's spicy flirtatious moments were well-written, but everything else was pretty weak.
There was a somewhat intriguing secondary romance, but it never got the page-time necessary to become truly good.
All in all, this was disappointing.
Extras:
A couple full-color illustrations, black-and-white illustrations throughout, and a character guide and glossary. The character guide was nowhere near detailed enough to be helpful.
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