Aarif is introduced and Li Zhi grows up!

So let’s just touch on the important things that happened within these next few episodes. This is going to be brief because I just want to move on. The plot just surrounds the main theme of “everyone is against Mei Niang but Emperor will not get rid of her”. It’s going to be like that for another good twenty episodes so brace yourself.  The royals go outside the palace for a hunting tournament. Even though Mei Niang is not favoured anymore because of the prediction, but the Emperor decides to take her. Why? Well, being the d-bag that he is, it’s an opportunity for him to ditch Mei Niang in the woods, because he doesn’t want to take a risk with the prediction that she will be the downfall of his dynasty. The Crown Prince, Cheng Qian is not allowed to go because he’s been drinking a lot, but he went anyway, to protect Mei Niang, as directed by his teacher.

And oh my gosh. Aarif is Li Zhi now.

  

I would like to remind you that two episodes ago, he looked like this:

What the heck did they feed him? He grew six inches taller and look exponentially more handsome. Bottle it up and patent that.

The Emperor commands a soldier to take Mei Niang away the night before. Except the soldier doesn’t just want to take Mei Niang away, he wants to kill her because of the prediction.

But the Emperor was the one that directed a soldier to take Mei Niang away and help her escape the royal palace right? Suddenly he stops and decides to turn back. Firstly how does he know that there’s something wrong? I mean he can’t hear them right? And if everything is going according to plan, he wouldn’t know, because the plan is for the soldier to let her escape, and he could only know that it was successful or not afterwards. Why does he turn back? #plothole If you were going to leave her anyways, why did you turn back? How did you know that your soldier was going to become an assassin?

 

Well the Emperor turns back. And he was conveniently right, Mei Niang was on the verge of being killed. Luckily, Cheng Qian came in time to save her. Mei Niang literally faints in every other episode. I could make a page of collages where she faints.

And Xiao Chang, the antagonist, is pregnant. I hate her, and she’s horrible, but I would point out that her method of pregnancy is literally this:

1) Popping a pill before sex

2) Drinking lots of Chinese herbal medicine after sex

That’s actually all they do in the drama, after her and the Emperor had sex once. This is like magic.

Meanwhile, Pang Po Po dies. That is all. The only remarkable thing about it that, she wants Mei Niang to tell the Emperor how much she hates him. She makes Mei Niang promise her to do that, or else Mei Niang will suffer the fate of not being loved by the man she loves and being feared by her own son.

Pang Po Po passes away before Mei Niang could save her.

As Mei Niang was spreading Pang Po Po’s ashes into the wind, she bumps into the Emperor. Well she breaks her promise to Pang Po Po, and tells the Emperor that Pang Po Po has forgiven him.

Adding in this scene where the Crown Prince has a nightmare, and Chen Xing is there to comfort the Crown Prince…

With his own wife by his side. Sew awkward.

Finally Xu Hui goes crazy – and decides that she needs to get rid of Mei Niang. After the Emperor rescues Mei Niang from the forest, he stops visiting and speaking to Xu Hui. To him, she’s only a tool for him to make Mei Niang broken hearted.

I would like to remind you all that at this point, Xu Hui and Mei Niang are still not twenty something year olds. They’re technically still teenagers. I guess it makes it more justified that they’re so obsessed about a guy, and technically a guy that’s their first love.

Her acting was so good in this episode. She decides to break off the jade bangle that Mei Niang had gifted her. She officially has turned evil. Just a collage of her angry expressions:

I called it. Either the best friend dies or becomes evil. These few episodes  so uneventful, they’re just merely to ‘build up’ to something more. Since I’m already up to date with it, it just seems so boring, up until the point where the Emperor dies… but I’ll still summarize  the rest.