The story started out great until about episode 17. The humor gave me endless laughs, the adventures of the main characters were fun to watch, and ML and FL had a lot of chemistry. The villains were compelling and gave us plenty of reasons to hate them. Then, the story went off the rails and started introducing new plotlines and characters who didn't need to be there. I normally don't like love triangles because they usually follow the same tropes and deviate from the plot. This show was no exception. Bai Xiaosheng (BX) was a fun and neutral character who should've stayed neutral. Suddenly, we had to watch multiple episodes involving a love triangle between BX, Tianyao and Yanhui because Tianyao and Yanhui had some tension in their relationship. There were better ways to get it resolved and to get Tianyao gain back Yanhui's trust, instead of sticking BX between them for several episodes. In the second half and towards the end, BX mostly disappeared from the plot making the entire love triangle angst completely pointless.

Even the chemistry between Tianyao and Yanhui became stale in the second half. They had no physical or even romantic chemistry although they were married. They kind of regressed from being a dynamic due to an old boring couple. When Tianyao protected her from any threat, she looked at him in surprise like he wasn't supposed to do it. Ya'll are married. Why are you surprised? Thankfully, or not, they finally shared a very chaste kiss in episode 38 after being married for how long? Pretty damn long,

An endless slew of minor characters and their stories, too many flash-backs, and fillers made the story progression very slow. An entire episode was dedicated to some weird demon capturing Tianyao so she could marry him just to be defeated and never seen again. We did not need to watch short lived romances between minor characters, who all died an episode later, or flashbacks from Yanhui's childhood in the Taoist sect. It was all boring and irrelevant. We also did not need to see Suying's sad romance with the general. There was nothing redeeming about her. She was a reprehensible person, so there was no point trying to make her even a little bit sympathetic.

The end boss was incredibly boring. He was a cookier cutter villain without any motivation or personality. He did bad things because villains do bad things, not because he had a compelling reason to be bad. Taoists were much more interesting and complex.

There were problems with the acting too. Zhou Ye was really cute as Yanhui who was lively, dynamic, and funny. Neo Hou was the opposite. This is the first drama I watched with him and I was completely unimpressed with his acting. He spent a huge amount of the time standing around and staring - forlorn staring, sad staring, observant staring, romantic staring, staring, staring, and more staring. In many scenes involving multiple characters, he just stood around and stared like a place holder. It seemed like the actor either needed more lines or the dialogue needed to be sped up. After some time, the constant staring became very noticeable. Tianyao was the main character with the plot revolving around him, but he looked like Yanhui's side kick most of the time.

Overall, I enjoyed the first half of the show because it was funny and engaging. Unfortunately, the story that started out as an interesting tale of redemption, forgiveness, and new beginnings turned into a constipated mess of stale plotlines and a crusade against a cliche villain. I am actually very disappointed with the way it turned out because it had such a great start.