When last we left our problematic secondary characters, they were wandering around a creepy valley with seemingly no goal.
A goal appears!
It’s the beggar girl that in theory they wanted to save. Sheng zaps her. Oops.
She and Cui Cui aren’t affected by the Inner Demon curse because they’re too young. Sheng tells her her Dad’s dead. Miao Miao tells him to stop. Beggar girl asks Sheng about his Dad. Miao Miao tells her to stop.
After all that, Sheng takes the beggar girl’s wrist to find her Dad so she doesn’t keep searching. Miao Miao feels she’s only now getting to know him, and he’s nice.
Sheng explodes the water spheres and wow, the people inside really are dead. That’s great. The show isn’t dark enough to kill the beggar girl’s Dad, since he’s the most recent victim they revive them. Sheng expends considerable energy healing him.
Which is unfortunate, because here’s the Water Demon Queen.
Miao Miao tries to get Cui Cui to lead the others out, but Sheng wants her to leave too and Cui Cui pulls her away. Sheng fights the water demon but he’s weak. She traps him and drains his blood.
Miao Miao doesn’t want to leave Sheng, but Cui Cui warns that the water demon queen is a level 7 demon.
Outside of the creepy valley, we get a long story from Guo
Mu Yao drags Fu Yi to the village, only to get knocked out. In a beautiful clearing somewhere, she wakes up to see Guo, Fu Yi is still unconscious.
Guo starts his story with his student years but we don’t need to. Essentially, during his demon catcher career he caught the eye of Empress Zhao and became one of her trusted confidants. Despite being a bad demon catcher, he was sent as part of a secret group to hunt demons and given a special talisman that can flatten mountains.
He found the two water demons in this valley, but couldn’t use the talisman because a lake would flood the city. No one in the village listened to his evacuation warnings. Instead, he got his old sect to help. They were all killed before his master set up a confinement zone, then died.
The zone confines demons but not people, so Guo has been trying to keep people from entering. He uses the money he makes to bribe people to lie to the Empress about what’s going on.
But the demons trapped inside have grown strong enough to break free. The villagers now listen to Guo though, and he told them to evacuate. He can safely use the talisman to flatten the mountain.
But Sheng and Miao Miao are still in the valley. Guo uses Worry Free on Mu Yao to get her to chill.
Sheng is still dealing with the water demon problem
Miao Miao returns and hides behind a rock, sending little sparks at the Water Demon Queen. This doesn’t do much, but when the water demon blasts her, Sheng is enraged and pulls off his hair ribbon.
Demon Sheng is here! With rock music! He goes after the Water Demon Queen. When she flees, Miao Miao stops him to keep him from leaving the valley and revealing himself. She ties his ribbon back on for him.
Back in his human form, he looks tired and overwhelmed. She hugs him and tells him it’s okay and I swoon a little. He hates that he was a scary monster. She tells him he wasn’t. Agreed, he was a very attractive monster.
She mentions the ribbon didn’t react when he touched it. He says it protects him but he doesn’t know where it comes from. There’s an earthquake, and they start running.
Meanwhile, Fu Yi wakes up and knocks Guo Back
But now that the mountain flattening spell has been started it can’t be stopped. Guo only cares that the townspeople will be fine.
They aren’t. The male water demon who attacked Sheng earlier is back, and he’s trapped the townspeople. He’s the Water Demon King and was separated from his queen by the confinement spell. He’s been luring people into the valley to help her cultivation rise to level 7 so she can escape.
Mu Yao calls the demon evil, but he says that he and his queen lived in a mountain and had nothing to do with humans. Until a demon catcher destroyed their home, chased them, and trapped them.
Fu Yi uses his magic to hold up the mountain temporarily so people can escape. Cui Cui, the beggar girl, and her dad come out. Cui Cui can’t pass through the confinement spell because he’s a demon. He runs back to help Sheng and Miao Miao.
Rocks fall on Miao Miao and Sheng
We’ll get back to them later.
The wounded queen water demon arrives at the edge of the barrier. She creates a demon core, offering to stop the mountain collapse if they spare her husband. Without her core, she’ll die. Her husband rushes in to stop her. They have a moment where he wishes he’d been with her this whole time, it would have been fine being isolated if they were together.
Fu Yi offers to sacrifice his life and Mu Yao offers to sacrifice her morals to save everyone. For once Guo is helpful. Water demons can be resurrected if they return to where they came from. If they let him go, her husband can revive her.
Guo convinces the water demon to trust them to give his wife’s demon core, then does some cool-looking magic. Inside the mountain, Sheng blasts away the rocks and Miao Miao, Cui Cui, and him escape.
The queen turns into a little water sphere and the king leaves with her, vowing revenge if they cheated him. Sheng wonders if they can let him go.
Fu Yi believes that in traveling back to their home, the demons will have their karma purified. Plus, his Demon Trap Tower has recorded his aura to keep an eye on him.
Mu Yao wants to know how Sheng fought a tier 7 demon. Miao Miao literally jumps in to claim she saved Sheng. Fu Yi chimes in that it was also from being in the water formation. Sheng gives Miao Miao a hard time for her poor lie, but it worked. Maybe.
Fu Yi gives Sheng a LOOK
Later, Fu Yi somehow uses magic to see Sheng in his demon form. Fu Yi looks conflicted.
The town is in bad shape post-earthquakes. Guo has a talisman to repair buildings but is afraid villagers hate him now. They don’t, and a heartwarming scene ensues where they thank him.
They use the talisman to fix the village. It’s like Lin Yu’s father’s poverty, here today, gone in minutes. Miao Miao, seeing the innkeeper remembering his deceased wife, feels even more attached to this world. Even these more minor characters feel real to her.
Then she sneezes, faints, and has a fever.
The villagers haven’t been able to get medicinal plants with the mountain off-limits for so long. But Sheng finds plant demons trying to steal food. They’ve been trapped on that mountain too and want to celebrate being free.
Sheng wants to cut pieces of their hair off to heal Miao Miao and the demons aren’t into it. Cui Cui wakes Miao Miao up so she can stop Sheng from terrorizing them. She does and makes some sweets to trade. She says demons are not very different from humans, stunning Sheng.
The cute plant demons get food for their celebration. Miao Miao gets medicine. Everyone wins. Miao Miao shoves a sweet Sheng doesn’t want in his mouth and he refuses to talk to her.
But his favorability rises to 55%
Demons are people too
Yup, that was the message of these episodes. We started the show with the idea that demons were evil. Then we find out dust demons are the most adorable things ever. Then we learn that Sheng is part demon. Cui Cui is also a demon.
Now it seems maybe, some demons only attack humans because they were attacked first. And Empress Zhao may end up being behind everything.
Poor Sheng, he’s got internalized self-hatred thanks to the Mu family. Miao Miao is good for him.
I’m confused by Mu Yao and Fu Yi’s take on everything. A few episodes ago, they sounded ready to kill all the demons. But Fu Yi seems more interested in rehabilitation and his demon tower is not for killing. Mu Yao seemed ready to make deals with a demon. I’m guessing we’re going for prejudiced by the past but Learning To Be Better People.
But what will Fu Yi do now that he knows Sheng’s part demon? I would love for that to be revealed soon but I’m not expecting it.
The show does feel like two things that aren’t always blended well. We started with the gamified show, forcing Miao Miao into her current situation. Now the only game part is Sheng’s favorability, and the classic fantasy show has taken over. But I like the high drama of the fantasy stuff. Guo’s character was interesting and the dead people in the water were creepy, so this is fine.
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