TL;DR - A C-drama where the plot was overshadowed by the adorably sincere romance between our leads. Beware of character lobotomy from our FL in the latter third of the drama.

I started watching this after watching a previous drama with Rosy Zhao, and I watched it not expecting that I would like her pairing here better than in her other drama.

I feel like as a drama reviewer, there comes a point where your logical and emotional opinions collide; do you rate a drama because it makes logical sense and is innovative, in a sea of irrational, poorly-written dramas? Or do you rate base on the feels it gives you and how well you can relate to its characters? Ultimately, it depends on what you think is more important, and this is why there's a such wide variety of opinions on the same drama because people's preferences are different.

I'm only bringing this up because overall, I think the story line of her other drama was better developed and had better flow, but this drama gave me more feels and I was more emotionally invested into this drama than the other one.

Previous reviews will tell you that they watched this for the main couple and I'm no exception - they were easily the best part of this show. That's not to say that the story was bad, but rather it was overshadowed by the romance. I actually think the set-up of this drama was unique from the get go, like having our male lead as a villain and having our female lead first fall in love with the second male lead. As it continued to progress, I actually think there was a decent story being unfolded and you really see the character developments in the majority of the cast. I especially enjoyed watching Chunhua develop from this love-sick, foolish girl to a more mature, cautious person who's more careful with her heart. It actually explores an interesting topic of what we consider good or bad; is a person bad for committing crimes to survive in a dog-eat-dog world? Or is a person good for thinking of the greater good at the expense of the people he loves? You will see different characters that have different views on what's important and there's truly never a "bad person" in this drama.

This dichotomy of good vs evil is effectively demonstrated in our male leads; Qiu Yue would literally destroy the world to protect Chunhua and to him, nothing else matters other than being with her. Xiao Bai does love Chunhua, but her needs are an afterthought to upholding justice and keeping the peace of the world. I loved how much Qiu Yue cared for Chunhua even when she was being unreasonable to him, and how he was the overall master manipulator behind all the events that happened (I also really liked their brother-sister dynamic - usually this sort of set-up makes me cringe but here it worked. And no, they're not real siblings lol).

Now on to some reasons why I didn't rank this higher. The biggest reason is that they took way too long to find the bad guy and the stuff revealed at the end just felt anti-climatic. I also felt that for how much they hyped up the longevity nut and how it essentially causes chaos and death everywhere, the story-line for that ended on a whimper too. The story doesn't have good flow and doesn't really start until episode 8. I also didn't appreciate the way the writers made Chunhua leave QY - I think it was granted, given how he manipulated her in the beginning, but to do so at the words of the guy who legit tried to kill QY doesn't make sense.

Overall, I really didn't expect to love the romance here the way I did, but it really grew on me and the actors were able to pull it off very well. Music was played appropriately here and I really like the theme song sung by the male lead. I will certainly re-watch for the Chunhua x Gege scenes and would recommend you check this out if you have the time.