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参商 [Shenshang]

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他有四个不孝徒弟,如今个个功成名就,开宗立派。
尴尬的是,这四人以前都是被他逐出师门才自立门户的。
某日,他遭逢意外,修为尽失,朝不保夕,流落到三徒弟的地盘上。
怎么办?急,在线等。

山海可平,昼夜可泯。
惟你,不可多得,不愿舍弃。

1300 pages, ebook

15 people are currently reading
138 people want to read

About the author

Meng Xi Shi

83 books459 followers
Associated Names:
* Meng Xi Shi (English)
* 梦溪石 (Chinese)
* เมิ่งซีสือ (Thai)

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5 stars
11 (18%)
4 stars
27 (46%)
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15 (25%)
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4 (6%)
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1 (1%)
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
Profile Image for yel ᰔ.
644 reviews204 followers
September 18, 2023
2.5/5 🌟

probably the most inferior among the meng xi shi novels i've ever read, in my opinion. i was excited at first when i saw that it has some time paradox/time travel element because i always loved some good time travel (the danmei novel titled 'Mist' is a pretty good one, highly recommended), but to be honest, this isn't it. though meng xi shi's recipe for her novel is still here, i felt like this was written by another person.

the start was actually good, but the more the story goes on, the more i detached myself from it. my interest gradually lessen and it's kinda sad since i actually liked the power couple. there's also this random perspective from some minor characters that was very detailed when it doesn't need to be, and that took me out of the story. if i'm being honest, there are a couple of parts that i skipped. even the climax itself is kinda dull and i was wishing for this novel to end as soon as possible. this ended with so much plotholes and questions left unanswered, i really wasn't satisfied.

very disappointed because i assumed that i'll like this as much as meng xi shi's other three novels, or even more, but i didn't.
Profile Image for XieYu_lover .
62 reviews7 followers
March 28, 2024
Está novela me sacó de un bloqueo lector bastante preocupante, los primeros capítulos fueron tan buenos que mis expectativas subieron mucho y ya está segura que sería una calificación de 5 estrellas. Ay, que dolor.
Si me han acompañado desde el inicio o han leído todas las reseñas que he hecho, ya se habrán dado cuenta que soy la mayor amante del desarrollo de trama y personajes. Y diferente de algunas personas, considero que deben ir de la mano, sí. Entonces, notarán mi sorpresa y decepción cuando la trama que me había enamorado comenzó a decaer, agregado al hecho que el desarrollo de personajes fue nulo.
Sobre la trama, específicamente, la falta de emoción en las escenas de acción me hizo dormirme en vivo. Lo que es bastante malo, considerando que el género principal de la novela es la acción y que estás escenas no me transmitan nada no es bueno. A mitad de la novela hubo un corte abrupto con un viaje en el tiempo, que terminó por arruinar la historia para mí porque básicamente fue una versión de la primera parte pero con otros personajes secundarios. O sea...
Y sobre el desarrollo de personajes, bueno, no existió. Además del hecho de que Changming y Yun Weisi son grandes cultivadores y que son shizun y discípulo, no se sabe mas nada de ellos. Comida favorita, pasatiempo, personalidad, evolución personal. Nada. Además que sus personalidades son demasiado parecidas, lo que volvió aburrida su relación. Deberían haber dejado a Yun Hai que habría sido mucho mejor.
Ahora, algo que me ha incomodado mucho en esta novela y sobre Meng Xi Shi, es que nunca sabes en qué momento se enamoran los shou's en sus historias. Se pasan más de la mitad de la novela siendo maestros muy serios y centrados, indiferentes a los sentimientos y al segundo siguiente están correspondiendo al gong. ¿Cuándo paso eso? Nadie sabe. Y la sensación más horrible que me deja está novela, particularmente, es que Changming se enamoró de Yun Weisi únicamente por el poder del guion. Porque su personalidad es tan rasa e indiferente a relaciones sentimentales, que enamorarse no va con él y si no hay un crecimiento orgánico de esos sentimientos queda difícil de aceptarlo. 150 capítulos y ninguno fue para enriquecer esa relación. No puedo, no puedo.
Profile Image for Neha D'souza.
241 reviews47 followers
October 31, 2023
Someone on Novel Updates compared this to Thousand Autumns. That’s what motivated me to pick this up but this was sadly, a let down.
The plot is convoluted and unlike Thousand Autumns, this book doesn’t have the depth one would usually expect from a Meng Xi Shi book.
Profile Image for Rebecca.
1,253 reviews90 followers
October 10, 2023
Meng Xi Shi is the author of some of my favorite Chinese webnovels, like Thousand Autumns, Peerless, and The Fourteen Year of Chenghua. These were really good for different reasons. Imo she's not the best at writing romance, but the interesting and politically complex plot, humor and main characters usually make her novels very engrossing. Also, Thousand Autumns still remains one of the most poetically written danmei I've read (other than Qiang Jin Jiu). So, it was pretty disappointing that Shenshang felt like a mess. This is a very slow novel, and it was only around chapter 30-40 that the plot truly kicks off. The plot is slow as molasses and a bit of a mess.

Meng Xi Shi spends quite a few authors notes explaining the plot points to her jjwxc readers and I actually needed those "TLDR's" because it was hard to stay engaged with the story. There is a huge cast of side characters, some of which she really focused on, but they're all very unmemorable.

The most interesting part of the story is actually the relationship between the two main characters, Jiufang Changming and Yun Weisi (the love interest) because the two have A LOT of history together and you often have to read between the lines to figure out their real intentions towards each other. The slow unveiling of their past and history was the most engrossing thing in the story. Their relationship also gradually changes as the story goes on. Jiufang Changming's relationship with one of his other disciples, Zhou Keiyi, was also interesting. A lot of baggage there too.

The climax felt anticlimactic and I was skipping by the chapter near the end. Disappointed that I really couldn't get into this. I'm always searching for the next good webnovel like the likes of Qiang Jin Jiu, priest, Meng Xi Shi's earlier stuff, etc, but it's so hard to find good ones nowadays!
Profile Image for pareidolia .
197 reviews1 follower
June 28, 2023
Neither to the sky, nor to the ground, don’t even think of leaving me behind!

This is a xanxia novel with the MXS-typical slow burn of a romance - or rather, Yun Weisi has been burning with single-minded devotion for his shizun for quite a while, but there's all that pesky double amnesia and personality troubles getting in the way, not to mention the demons and a conspiracy involving nothing less than the end of the world. Meanwhile, Jiufang Changming is grandmaster of not acknowledging his feelings.

Readers already familiar with MXS will recognize a lot of elements here: the aforementioned amnesia; the split personality trope; the protagonist who has lost his cultivation and is plagued by physical ailments; the cultivator going his own way, disregarding other people's opinions, inspiring killing intent the moment he opens his mouth; and the yearning. Most of all the yearning. Estranged is a story about longing, about repressed desires simmering for decades; about coming to terms with your past without getting lost in it, to get ready to step into the future. MXS doesn't write explicit sex, but the yearning is horny, and there's no doubt that this shizunfuckery gets scorching.

All familiarity aside, YWS and JFCM are very much their own characters. The supporting cast is vast, the stakes are high, and the worldbuilding is intricate. I especially enjoyed the parts set in the Nine Layers of the Abyss and was a bit sad when we had to leave the place behind; I was somewhat less engaged in the events in book four, as climactic as they were, but was thoroughly entertained by our couple's trip to the past. Things may seem chaotic in the beginning, but everything is connected and comes together over the course of the story, the very abrupt ending that leaves several side character arcs dangling notwithstanding (some of those character arcs probably continue in the extras which I haven't read yet). Though while the plot follows a plan, I sometimes still had the impression of reading a first draft in need of more polishing. Some scene transitions were a bit jarring, and some things could've been better explained. (I've heard similar things about The Plough, which I still intent to read, once the translation has progressed a bit more). Regardless of this, I enjoyed the novel a lot.
Profile Image for Dianna.
871 reviews63 followers
December 3, 2023
I've read two other books by this author (Peerless and Thousand Autumns), and while it has her signature intricate plots with plenty of mystery, there were a couple points that made me enjoy Shenshang less than the other two.

The MC in this case is Jiufang Changming, a man who used to be at the top of the cultivation world. He was believed to have died while participating in a formation 50 years ago that was meant to seal the crack between the demon and human worlds, but as we learn, he's been wandering the Yellow Springs without his memories and barely staying alive. The story starts when he finally leaves the Yellow Springs and slowly recovers his memories of who he was and how he got to this point.

Before Changming participated in the formation, he was known as an eccentric cultivator who dabbled in a bit of everything. Once he reached the peak of understanding in one area, he would move on to another in hopes that he would be able to gain additional insights and break through. In his life, he took in 4 disciples, one from each school that he studied: Daoism, Buddhism, demonic cultivation, and Confucianism, and it's one of these disciples that is the ML.

**Warning: Spoilers Ahead**

I've come to associate MXS with intricate mystery filled plots and intelligent main characters who are a pleasure to read as they work together to solve the mystery, and that was true for this book as well. I was engrossed in the story and was so curious what happened to Changming previously, how he ended up at odds against Yun Weisi, one of his disciples, why he was framed and blamed for messing up the formation, amidst many other things. For the most part, all of my questions were answered by the end, though not everything made sense.

My main complaint with the story has to do with the time travel aspects. We got a glimpse of it early on when the MC and ML travel back to the past briefly a couple times in the Void Shore, the Ninth level of the Abyss, but I didn't realize time travel would become so critical to the story later. I'm not a huge fan of time travel in general since I think it has the ability to make things super confusing, and while that wasn't the case here, I didn't like how the author used it as a way for the MC and ML to essentially redo history and fix everything that happens in the future. Seemed like a cop out story-wise.

Essentially the story can be split into 5 main parts/arcs:
1) Changming returns and meets his 3rd disciple Zhou Keyi again
2) He goes to the Nine Layers of the Abyss where he meets his 1st disciple Yun Weisi and his alter ego Yan Hai
3) BAD THINGS happen to the Jianxue Clan and they investigate
4) They go to the city of You where they find out the esteemed Wanlian Buddhist Temple is doing more bad things. The last two disciples, Sun Buku and Song Nanyan, make an appearance here
5) When the bad guys succeed and the whole world ends, the MC + ML return 100 years to the past to try and fix things a second time

I don't like this time travel cheat the author wrote into the story. The main characters weren't able to stop Luomei's plans to destroy the world in the present time, so conveniently they're able to return to the past 100 years ago when Luomei had just started executing his plan so they can stop him early. And after they kill him in the past, they return back to the "future" i.e. their present time, and now everything has changed according to the changes they made in the past. Blegh. Why couldn't the author have written the story so that they managed to beat the bad guy the first time around??

Also, I'm not happy with how the author ended the story so abruptly. We get half a chapter indicating that they returned to their time in the future and that's it, with only a couple additional extra chapters clarifying how some of the side characters are doing in this new future created by them. I know Chinese novels can sometimes end suddenly, but this book takes the cake. It's funny because even the author's note in the last chapter talks about the sudden ending, so I know it's not just me.

Over the course of the whole story, we meet Changming's other three disciples, but none of them are that important in the grand scheme of things. Zhou Keyi is the only other semi-significant disciple, since the bad guys kidnaps him to lure Changming as bait, and he returns with them to the past albeit in the form of a dog. Most side characters (and there are a LOT of them), most random members of other sects, come in and out of the story but don't really stick around. I didn't mind having so many side characters and names to remember, but where it got annoying was when in the middle of a fight, the author would jump from the MC's perspective to some random side character's POV and I'd have to read for a couple minutes before the author returns to the MC's POV. All the jumping around felt quite disruptive during the fight scenes.

I did appreciate the romance as it came up in the second half of the story though. There's much more of it here than in the other two MXS books, so while I didn't go in with very high expectations on the romance front, I finished very pleasantly surprised. By the end there's even talk of dual cultivation, and our main characters have become Daoist partners. Color me shocked :O

It was refreshing to read a master/disciple romance where the disciple didn't blacken and the feelings on both sides came naturally. The romance was quite sweet after both Changming and YWS regained their memories. Turns out they weren't at loggerheads in the past after all; they were just pretending (though it's never explained why??). Changming is such an important presence for Yun Weisi that he is the core of YWS's Daoist heart, and Changming finally reciprocates those feelings once he examines his own memories and realizes that YWS is always the one who's accompanied him in the past and in his memories, and the one that he always makes an exception for. If that's not sweet, I don't know what is!

I'd like to end my review with a shoutout to the translator, Jinyu, for her hard work on this story. The translations were done very well and I was impressed by all the explanations of Chinese idioms and the various Daoist/Buddhist concepts that were mixed in. This couldn't have been an easy story to translate, so I appreciate the translator's efforts a lot for bringing us this story.
Profile Image for Beatrice Lapa.
Author 2 books11 followers
December 15, 2023
Was about to list this as my second favorite Meng Xi Shi work (Fourteenth Year of Chenghua being the first, Peerless would have been the third), but the second half of the novel was just wrapped up with so many things left unexplained (Xiao Yun, Sifei sword, etc.). So now Thousand Autumns seems to be better written.

Even the passing mention of dual cultivation was just haphazardly thrown between two unrelated paragraphs that left me wondering when it actually did happen.

The first part was really good, though. I wish she could just come back to this and fix the second half. It was so promising. But TBH, I wish she'd go back to writing historical Ancient Chinese court intrigue like Fourteenth Year, which I feel (as a lover of history) is her best work.
106 reviews
January 6, 2023
Good relationship, great plot, loved all arcs and characters but needed more romance
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
52 reviews
November 15, 2023
2.5

和作者另一篇的主角初始设定一样
然后和另一篇一样,永远都在强调主角身负重伤,但永远都能打败甚至打赢对手…..
感情线着墨不多,故事线又因文笔和知识储备有限,写的差强人意。
文笔功力有限,所以导致写出大段大段的描述也无法准确的表达出所想表达的东西
Profile Image for Helen Kord.
374 reviews43 followers
December 16, 2023
This was the best book ever until about 70% where it feel like MXS ran out of steam. Still loved it though. Loved the characters, I think these were some of her best side characters so far
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews

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