When last we left our problematic secondary characters, they were about to go up against the final boss.
They seem to be in hell, Mu Yao is hanging from chains
But she’s not Mu Yao, she’s the Resentful Woman. Miao Miao has convinced Sheng to give up on the self-sacrifice thing and work together to “change the end”. Not that she explains what that means.
They work magic together, but Mei’s heart shatters. The Resentful Woman says that Mei’s love weakened her, but she draws strength from the hatred between humans and demons. She does something that causes all the demons in the tower to kneel, including Cui Cui.
Sheng has been her pawn this entire time. She lured him to the Mu’s, and he’s protected her from Mu Yao for the last 7 years.
The end has been written, and all of them will die. With that, she sends flaming chains everywhere.
And now, everyone is dying
Mu Yao is gone. Fu Yi is killed. Bamboo Grandpa uses the last of his strength to give Wen Xin another chance to help everyone. He collapses and dissolves.
Sad about Bamboo Grandpa, Wen Xin stabilizes the tower. Miao Miao remembers that when the Resentful Woman massacred the Mu’s, she wasn’t able to take over Sheng’s body because of his hairband.
But Sheng is under the Resentful Woman’s control, and strangles Miao Miao. He regains enough control to remind her that demons are people too. He protects Miao Miao from the Resentful Woman, taking a big hit. Instead of dying, he gets stronger. He attacks the Resentful Woman with Crescent and turns into Demon Sheng.
Miao Miao helpfully explains that his inner core and demon core have merged. He’s now a Tier 9 demon, with the Heavenly Demon Catcher’s Power. Sheng reminds us he’s half human, half demon, with pure Yin blood. Right.
Sheng attacks! And everything explodes into white. Outside, Wen Xin smiles.
But everyone else is dead
Including Sheng. Miao Miao sobs her heart out. The game congratulates her: Sheng’s favorability towards her increased to 100%. She conquered him. Mission complete. There’s a little “return” button to send her home.
We FINALLY get a flashback showing that when she got the Apocal Power and lost her memory, the system warned that it threatened her ability to complete the task. This seems unimportant now since she completed the task.
So, she remembers everything, but doesn’t want this to be the end. The system says only the Apocal power can bring them back. The system warns that she’s giving up all her memory and the real world for characters in a story.
But Miao Miao says that Sheng is real, they are all real.
And now they all come back to life
Sheng immediately recognizes she’s not Miao Miao, she’s Lin Yu. He transports himself to Lanyin Illusion Space. The Miao-Miao-looking-Mu Ancestor is there, but she’s not Miao Miao either.
But she has a message from Miao Miao, who wanted a happy ending for the story where no one dies for anyone else. I always want that from dramas. Miao Miao knew Sheng would always bring her back because he made that promise in the Illusion Forest.
She looks like the Mu Ancestor because Miao Miao saved Sheng and his world once, years ago. And chose to do the same thing this time. And would do it a million times.
Sheng says confusing things about being the only one who remembers Miao Miao. Are chunks of the story missing? The Mu Ancestor gives him a scroll that blasts him back to Miao Miao. They’re returning to the beginning, and she won’t have to deal with everything alone.
They don’t go back to the beginning of the drama, just the Hell Dimension in the Demon Trap Tower. How is that the beginning? Somehow, they work together better against the Resentful Woman this time, bringing Mei back. She dissolves, and Sheng is sad, but Mu Yao is alive. The tower collapses.
They reunite outside the tower, except for Bamboo Grandpa. They didn’t save him. Also, the sky turns red.
The ending cannot be changed
The catastrophe of heaven is still going to kill everyone. Miao Miao blames Fu Zhou, the author who created this world. She realizes this isn’t his latest novel, but his first. Wen Xin randomly nearly falls over, which is never explained.
Miao Miao says only the child can stop the catastrophe of heaven. What child? Sheng has remembered that he’s Fu Zhou.
Everyone combines their powers, including Cui Cui, the Marquis, the Astronomical Bureau, and even the Dust Demons. They create a set of steps for Sheng and Miao Miao to reach the sky.
And this time Sheng enters the system
There’s a wardrobe where a very young Fu Zhou hid while his parents fought, and he’s there now. As a kid, Fu Zhou was diagnosed with Moyamoya, a rare illness that isolated him from others. Kid Fu Zhou explains that some people’s ends are written from birth. They are side characters who struggle but don’t get to decide on the ending. They can only struggle.
The kid’s attitude matches Drama-Beginning-Sheng’s attitude, but now he disagrees. The ending can be changed. He becomes the protagonist in his own world when he believes in love.
Kid Fu Zhou bleeds from his nose as he writes. I have a friend with Moyamoya, that’s… not a Moyamoya thing. It’s a Chinese Fantasy thing. Oh! Crescent was a huge, fancy pen! I like that. Sheng encourages the younger him.
Miao Miao was a childhood classmate of Fu Zhou’s whom he admired. That’s why she already existed in the fantasy world as the Mu Ancestor and how she saved him once before. The swing was from their schoolyard.
He opens the wardrobe and sees his super young self sitting in there. He coaxes him out by telling him how strong and brave he is. Both younger hims want older him to save them.
They dissolve, and Sheng is back in the fantasy world
He explains to Miao Miao that he is Fu Zhou, and wasn’t a good person when he wrote this book. Every novel he wrote was for her. We see IRL Fu Zhou reading comments online by IRL Miao Miao about his books. So he kept track of her.
Then he had to get an operation for his Moyamoya, putting him back in a dark mood. As he went under, he made three wishes.
That the story he first wrote could be rewritten into a beautiful ending.
The girl he likes could see his hidden true feelings.
As we see him in the surgery. The System warns that the catastrophe of heaven is coming. He tells her to leave, but she wants to stay and help him save the world. And we get a sweet, gentle forehead kiss.
The world falls apart. The dust devils say 100%. And then he falls backwards from the clouds.
The third wish is to survive and tell her what she means to him. As he falls, he says Miao Miao helped him find himself again, and now he needs to walk on his own. And he blasts off.
And we’re back in the real world
Miao Miao thinks it was all a dream. She lights incense for her Dad and tells him she dreamed about him. Work still sucks.
She goes to a signing for a reissue of the book that started this all. People there talk about how satisfying the new ending is. Bamboo Grandpa and Cui Cui are serving ice cream. Miao Miao stares at them.
Someone calls her name, and cameras snap, because Fu Zhou is walking towards her, though we don’t see him.
The book opens with a statement about how loving someone 100% can only happen when you love yourself. And the story is dedicated to a girl who saved his world twice.
I like this end
All the pieces, how the story was childish because a child wrote it, how Miao Miao unknowingly knew the author, so they had that connection, which explains why the Mu Ancestor looked like her, and why Sheng was so bitter, all came together well for me.
I always love it when characters reject self-sacrifice and bad endings and are determined to get their happy ending.
That said, I didn’t love the execution. The confusing rush of activity in these last two episodes should have been an arc of 3-4 episodes.
Meanwhile, other things less connected to the IRL Sheng could have been cut down or better tied together. I know childhood Sheng wrote it, but whatever, people from his later life could be brought into it. Mu Yao could have been Fu Zhou’s editor, who acted like a big sister. Fu Yi could have been another author. The Marquis could have represented a real family member.
All the backstory about Fu Zhou’s childhood and relationship to Miao Miao could have been slowly discovered over the show’s second half. Learning about Fu Zhou via his story would have given Miao Miao more to do, which she needed.
So the show isn’t S-Tier for me, but it’s still solid. Demon Sheng was awesome. Sheng and Miao Miao were a lovable couple, I liked the side characters and the adventures they went on. Even though it would have been nice to see them together IRL, with everything they went through together in the fantasy world, I feel confident about their real-world selves living happily ever after. That’s what’s most important to me.
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