七爷 [Qi Ye] Lord Seventh

★★★★☆ [4/5 stars]

Oh, Qi Ye...Such a beautiful novel. Qi Ye follows Jing Beiyuan who, by his terrible luck, has his fate messed up to which he is cursed with being killed by his soulmate in every lifetime. It reaches to the point where Jing Beiyuan is killed six times, and due to his stubbornness, he remembers every single time. In the current timeline that the book takes place, Jing Beiyuan is on his seventh life, which gives him the title of Lord Seventh. In this new life, Jing Beiyuan's feelings for his soulmate finally diminish, and he can properly get on with his life. (There is a lot more to this, but I don't want to give spoilers). In this new (old) life, Jing Beiyuan ends up meeting the young Shamanet of Nanjiang, Wu Xi, who is very cold, distant, rude, etc. To keep things simple, this Shamenet and many others of Nanjiang are hostage in the Great Qing, but he's kept in good care considering his high status. He's a foreigner to them, not even speaking the same language, not knowing a single thing about their etiquette. Jing Beiyuan's goal is to help the Crown Prince, Helian Yi, become the Emperor. He believes that Wu Xi will be of help to him, so he makes the effort to befriend him. Eventually, Wu Xi ends up warming up to him. And only him. It's truly sickeningly sweet. I personally love Priest's writing style. She always manages to make things easy to read, entertaining whenever, and super funny. Her characters are always top notch in my opinion, consistent, and hilarious even if they're meant to be a serious character. This novel is labeled as heavily political, but I think it has the right amount of political aspects considering a war takes place during the novel. Some of the characters do some truly messed up things, and you can really feel that with Priest's writing. It has the right amount of everything <33 I definitely recommend Qi Yi to others **Depending on what you read first is probably what you would call the main character. In Qi Ye, he's mainly referred as Jing Qi, prince of Nan'ning. But if you read Tian Ya Ke first (the sequel but you can read these independently and or out of order), he's more referred to as Lord Seventh or "Beiyuan."

Wow this was something!!!!! The whole idea of reincarnation and Jing Qi returning to his love again was fascinating but what happened in his seventh life was even more interesting. There were moments where I couldn’t figure out where the story was going, but the author managed to bring all the threads together perfectly. The romance is really like a story of legends and an intense slow burn full of yearning, and I loved how the two MCs ended up together. That last 5-10% of the book is especially spectacular and I had tears in my eyes when I closed it. All the characters are really compelling, most of them wearing masks (literally or figuratively) to conceal their true thoughts from others and it was quite a task to understand their motivations. But ultimately my favorite was Wu Xi who had such an open and honest heart, and it was absolutely refreshing in a book of full of court intrigue, back room dealings, twists and turns and betrayals. It took me quite a while to read this book because while the translation was very good, it just wasn’t the binge read kinda book. However, I really enjoyed it and the idea that I should read more novels by Priest is cemented in my head. In the meantime, I’m just waiting for the episode in Word of Honor where Lord Seventh will show up and I can’t wait to see his interactions with the amazing Zhou ZiShu.