Okay, so let me paint you a picture of the most absurd romantic backstory in the history of fantasy storytelling. You've got Bai Fengjiu, a princess from Qingqiu, who gets attacked by a genuinely horrifying monster — we're talking nightmare fuel, the kind of creature that makes you reconsider every life choice that led you to that particular forest. And who swoops in to save her? Emperor Dong Hua, a being so powerful and ancient that he's been fighting evil for roughly a hundred thousand years. That's not a typo. A hundred. Thousand. Years. This man has been punching monsters since before human civilization figured out how to make bread.
Naturally, Fengjiu is overwhelmed with gratitude. She decides the only proper response is to follow him around on his evil-eliminating adventures and repay the life debt through devoted service. Makes sense, right? Very honorable, very traditional. Except somewhere between all the monster-slaying and world-saving, her feelings of thank-you-for-saving-my-life start morphing into something a lot more along the lines of I-want-to-spend-forever-with-you. Classic case of gratitude-to-romance pipeline, and it happens faster than you'd expect when you're constantly watching someone be impossibly heroic.
But here's the problem — Dong Hua has been at this hero gig for so long that he's completely forgotten what love even means. The concept has been filed away in some dusty corner of his ancient brain, buried under eons of battle strategies and monster classifications. He doesn't even recognize what's happening between them. And when he finally does realize he might actually care about Fengjiu in a way that goes beyond casual protection, his response is to send her away to keep her safe — which inadvertently leads to the death of her friend. Oops. Now Fengjiu has to dive into the dream of someone named Ah Lan Ruo to find a magical fruit that can bring her friend back, gets trapped inside, and Dong Hua has to come rescue her. And somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, this incredibly old, emotionally out-of-touch warrior finally — finally — realizes he's fallen in love. A hundred thousand years is a long time to wait for a feelings check, but better late than never, I suppose.
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