Time to Read:
With the Lunar New Year around the corner, people are suddenly collapsing and then writhing in pain at the hospital. Not understanding what sort of poison is causing this, SID is brought in to investigate. It’s not long before Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei find themselves in the middle of conspiracies and battles of wits.
Stone that is aged but not yet old; water that is frozen but not yet cold; body that is dead but not yet born; soul that is melted but not yet burned…
Thoughts
I’ll be honest, I had really low expectations after Guardian Vol. 1. I clearly was not a fan. It wasn’t bad, just not good. I also do have this really weird relationship with priest being one of my most disliked authors and one of my favourite authors simultaneously. It’s just complicated with priest.
My first impression of the book is that it’s really funny how every arc starts with Guo Changcheng. I’m not complaining. He’s my favourite character by far. He’s just a hilarious character, and he’s such a good kid (and I have this vague feeling I might regret saying that someday, oh well). He’s just such a sweetheart, and that’s how he comes off in the beginning of the third arc as well.
My second impression was less an impression but plain confusion. I tried to mentally get the timeline to make sense in my head, yet I couldn’t. At first, I considered just trying to skim through volume 1, but I gave up that idea immediately. There’s no way I’m picking that book up again. So I just let it go. I’m still confused about the timeline, though. I feel like I missed something in the first book to make it make sense.
In very little time I managed to have a good impression and a bad impression, very much in line with my experience of the first volume, I think. However, when I got to the first illustration, I actually stopped for a moment. I squinted. I stared. I have this extremely distinct feeling this was not the artist from the last book. I checked the illustrators and then thought I’d look up later who did the internal illustrations before. It was just a vague feeling, to be honest, and perhaps I would have been absolutely certain had I actually been able to visualise images. It’s not a massive difference, but it’s definitely visible, at least to an artist.
I know I wasn’t too fond of the illustrations in the first volume, but I liked this one’s. Perhaps it was a good thing that the feeling was so vague that I thought that maybe I just liked the way the first illustration in volume 2 was made, and so I figured that perhaps it was the same artist and I was being weird. But throughout the entire book, I looked forward to seeing the next illustration. I felt the illustrations by Ying were dynamic and had movement and life in a way that the illustrations by Marmaladica in the previous volume were missing a little bit.
Naturally, there’s nothing wrong with one or the other, or to like one or the other, and I’m just biassed toward the latter, and that’s fine. I still liked the cover image by Marmaladica just as much as the previous one. Both volumes and the third one are really good, and I love the cohesiveness and progression you see throughout the covers. This makes absolutely no sense to a lot of people, I’m sure., but I’m basically saying that I love the three covers together as a sequence, and they fit each other really, really well.
In short: Man, do I love the art in this volume so much, both the cover and the internal art!
When Chu Shuzhi let go, the man instantly resumed his desperate screaming, rolling around on the bed. Chu Shuzhi ignored him, turned to Guo Changcheng, and snapped his fingers. “We’re done here. Let’s go. We’ve gotta get back and write a report.”
Guo Changcheng gaped. Done? How could this count as being done? What had even happened, exactly?
What about the book then? The actual story and writing?
Well… it was… fine. *shrugs*
As I mentioned previously, I got a very mixed combination of early impressions of the book, and that and my experience with volume 1 certainly coloured that. However, there were several places where I laughed a lot (my husband can attest to this), and those places were really good. I loved the humour.
The story as a whole, I think, picked up a bit, so it was a little better than the previous book. And yet I can’t say I liked it. It was… just fine. Better, but not improving enough for me to like the series itself. The pacing is still really strange, and the timeline thing I couldn’t wrap my head around definitely didn’t help in the least to make me feel less averse to the book.
However, I definitely didn’t suffer the same problem as I had in Peach Blossom Debt with not being able to pick up the story when I put it down. I didn’t necessarily want to read it that much, but I still picked it up and would read a little bit here and there. Maybe a chapter, maybe half, maybe three. The sessions were seldom long but frequent, and after Peach Blossom Debt, I’ll give it a thumbs up for that alone.
Since this is a supernatural mystery novel, I think that is what will speak to people the most. It has a lot of Chinese folklore and mythological references, and a fair amount of real text is mentioned. I enjoy folklore, folk religion, and mythology, so these aspects were really interesting. So if these aspects are intriguing and you like gay fiction, this series might be for you, even if it’s not for me.
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