Spoiler-free!

Names were removed but there are word-for-word paragraphs of the novel.

I watched the TV adaptation back when it aired and I saw a lot of the original novel's fans saying it was trash; I've been wanting to re-watch it lately and it occurred to me, why not? So I read this. And I regretted it instantly.

Narratively-wise, there're a lot of problems.

The world building. It's not like the world building is bad written, it's that there is no world building at all. You know it's a fantasy, Chinese mythology setting —because it's a Xianxia, so it's pretty much a requirement,— but you don't know anything else because the novel is not telling you absolutely nothing about the world outsite the main characters; because the novel doesn't even have a plot, it's entirely character driven. The author just pretends the protagonists are doing some adventurous quest to resolve an issue for forty hours of your time only for it to... resolve itself? with no explanation or applied logic at all? Which brings me to my next point.
The author doesn't care about her own creation, she doesn't care about her own story. She doesn't care how many unexplained things or plotholes she leaves behind, she doesn't even care about finishing her own "plot," she only cares about giving her couple an ending; because the romance in this novel is not written on a setting, it's the setting that's written around the romance. And you can clearly see this by looking at the incredibly ridiculously forced romance scenes in the middle of the plot climax. She doesn't respect her work at all because the story is not her actual work, it's just the romance.
The writing. At the first dozens of chapters you can see the author didn't even know what she was doing, she just had the words "Xianxia" and "gay" in her mind and rolled with them until it created something in its own. Most of the spiritual mechanics she provides are lacking and underdeveloped or straight-up contradictory with later chapters. Some living characters die by something that barely even scratches other ones, some dead characters form a mind of their own but others can't; and you never get a remote explanation for any of it. You can see this getting slightly better gradually, but it still felt like the author just rolled a dice for characters she didn't need.
She also seems to not recognize which moments she should be funny at and which to take seriously; actually, she seems to now know how to take any moment seriously at all. She writes the most off-putting lines in the middle of a tense, active scene; writes exclamations at the end of most lines on situations that are supposed to have you on edge. Instead of writing "A dramatic turn of events!" in the middle of a fight, you could show how dramatic this turn of events was— but, of course, she didn't. Which brings me to the next point.
The unseriousness. Throughout the whole novel there are some lighthearted, stupid jokes which work as a comedy relief, as a fresh air after all the darkness, as a soothed sigh after all that exhausting action. Problem is, that never happens. There is no "comedy relief" because the comedy doesn't stop at any moment. The first few chapters you find it funny, but after a thousand pages and then some you just roll your eyes and force yourself to continue.
The narration. This novel is written in a third-person omniscient point of view. You have the main character, whom the reader follows during the whole story, and the other main character, who the reader knows nothing about because the author never wrote even an insight into his mind eventhough that's the entire point of a third-person omniscient POV.
This type of POV is used so the reader has a dive into other characters' thoughts the main character has no way of knowing. It's another way of building the world around your characters that may not be really apparent to them. It's a method to deliver information and context to your readers so that your characters —whom might feel unnatural to hear that info from— don't have to. And yet, the author decides to make them do it, which brings me to my next point.
The pacing. Most scenes are extremely, unnecessarily, boring-to-death long. I'm not talking about the chapters, I'm talking about the scenes; scenes where a group of characters are supposed to come to a conclusion together but, somehow, are wrong everytime because the main character figures it out by himself on his own. These "piecing things together" moments are eternal, because you have to read how every character argues, how every dialogue repeats itself over and over again and how the narration doesn't say absolutely anything and keeps wording the same known facts differently to pretend it does; all while the main character paces around the room until he says "I get it now!" and you just get info-dumped by either endless blocks of text or even more never-ending flashbacks you don't know where this character ever got from. And don't expect to get any explanation about how did he come to that conclusion.
All this interminable scenes could've been much less tedious and bland if the author had just used her narration POV. But she doesn't. Because she only uses it for weirdly specific moments, usually to give you "hints" about how this character you know nothing about likes the main character.
The flashbacks. There is a huge amount of flashbacks in this novel, flashbacks inside flashbacks, and none of them are indicated. You just get thrown intro a black whole of timelines and are expected to know where were you when you get out. You're just supposed to guess if what you're reading is the present story, the 13-years-ago one or the 13-years-ago and some months after one relaying fully on characters present that shouldn't be there or interactions that feel out of place. It's exhausting.

Now, morally-wise.

And I'm sorry but this is going to be so long.

1. The misogyny.

There are no recurring women in this novel. There is a total of... seven? women, all of them end up dying or sacrificing themselves for a man, appear twice in the whole story or are portrayed as hysterical, exaggerating termagants. You learn there are female cultivators on the very last chapter, but you only meet one and isn't even part of the story. The lack of women did not stop the author from being extremely misogynistic during the whole novel, though.

You get things like the main character claiming the arm of an unknowing body must belong to a man because it's bulky and it just isn't a woman's arm; he even considers the possibility that the arm's owner has three arms before considering it's a woman's. Men calling other men femenine names to insult them, men seeing female ghosts and claiming they would be prettier if they cleaned themselves, men saying it's not the same if a man gets his face scarred than if a woman does, men getting weirded out by other men crying, men talking about "inusual cases" of family heads when discussing a ruler-breaker one and mentioning a female family head just for being a woman, and much more. However, there are some specifically disgusting moments:

a.) Main characters asked some male cultivators to undress a bunch of male bodies to look for a specific mark in them. These characters are grossed out, and the narration claims:

[...] and today he had to strip the corpses of their trousers [...]. Male corpses, at that!

Because, for some reason stripping female corpses would be any better.

b.) The main character sees a young girl trying to steal from a man. This man realizes and grabs her wrist, taking her to the verge of tears. For some reason, the main character gets to the next conclusion:

Oh no, she’s gonna yell “Harassment!“

c.) The main character and other protagonist get scolded by a leader's son's handmaid. They claim she "fumbled her way to her position" by "getting into her master's bed" and ask each other how dares she give them orders.

[...] she was one of his personal attendants. No need to specify exactly what kind of “personal attendant”—everyone knew. She had been a handmaid in the service of his wife, but thanks to her good looks, had climbed into her master’s bed after tossing him a few flirtatious glances.

[...] Such was the current state of the world—they were taking orders from a smug, arrogant handmaid who had fumbled her way to the top by climbing a ladder made of her mistress’s bedsheets! The two of them didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

d.) The main character claims it's not harassment if he does it because it's only considered harassment from "greasy" people.

“ [...] I’ll have to thank her big time when we get back.”
“ You mean, harass her big time?”
“ What are you saying?” Wei Wuxian tsk-ed. “It’s not harassment when I do it. It’s only harassment when it comes from someone greasy [...]“

e.) The treatment towards prostitutes in general in this whole novel. They are portrayed as if they enjoyed their work even when they're forced to do unhinged things. Towards the end of the story, it's stated over twenty of them were slaughtered— one of them a teenager. This is quickly forgotten and eclipsed by a single man's murder. One other prostitute was questioned, doubted, asked for physical evidence and accused of lying after detailing how she was forced to have sex with a dead man.

f.) A handmaid says she told her mistress the truth about her husband being actually her brother. The main character outright blames her for her mistress' suicide.

Wei Wuxian smiled. “But did you never consider the blow you would deal her by revealing the truth to her? Or are you really that clueless? [She] committed suicide specifically because you told her about this.”

2. The homophobia.
I don't care how time accurate it is. Women being really prevalent in every backbone that makes up Xianxia as a genre is also very time accurate, yet here we are.
This novel makes sure you know for a fact that every single character in this story hates gay people, grills it into your skull. Since the very first chapter all the way to the very last the author keeps reminding it to you by getting everyone on Earth call the main character a cut-sleeve —needless to say, in a not-so-nice way— and won't forget about pointing it out to you every chance she gets the same way she forgot to include any woman. Anyway.
It's one thing to include homophobia in your story —nothing wrong with it,— and it's another much different one to endorse it.

Throughout the novel, you learn the main character's body's actual owner was a gay man who was kicked out of his clan for sexually harrasing his leader, who's also his half-brother (I'm too exhausted to get into this incest shit). The main character, although evidently in love with the other main character, always claimed he's not a "cut-sleeve," both aloud and in-narration, including his thoughts. When he started feeling attracted to him, he even considered if being a cut-sleeve was "contractable" through the ritual he got that body from. The only one time he called himself a cut-sleeve was when he deliberately went to harass his body's 15-year-old nephew (oh god) to keep his cover. He never once thought of himself as a homosexual or even attracted to men.

Despite this, however, the main character doesn't hesitate to use his body's open-secret homosexuality to keep other men from bothering him. Every time he wants to get rid of a man, he flirts with him and, if that doesn't work, sexually harasses him by jumping into him or getting in his bed. He does all this deliberately to verbatim "disgust" them.
Having the only explicit gay man to be a sexual harasser is certainly a homophobic choice I hope I don't have to explain.

Another very important part of this homophobia is the romantized sexual abuse, which brings me to my next point.

3. Lack of consent.
This novel has at least seven sexual interactions. None of them are consented.

The first one is a kiss. The main character got the other protagonist drunk, knowing his clan has never been allowed to drink and knowing for a fact he cannot take even one before losing consciousness. He kissed him unannounced, tongue included, then the other protagonist passed out of drunkness. He couldn't remember nothing the day after and the main character pretended it never happened.

The second one is also a kiss but was showed in a flashback, back when they were both between 16-18. The other protagonist found him alone in the middle of the woods, blindfolded and half-awake, so he silently got closer to him, slammed his back against a tree, strongly seized both of his wrists, kissed him and forcibly kept his head in place as he tongued his mouth, all while ignoring his struggles to break free.

His wrists were locked in place, and he had been pinned against a tree. And the person who had done it was kissing him.
He struggled violently for a few moments, wanting to break free and yank off the black blindfold, but surprisingly didn’t succeed.
[...] He could hardly breathe. He wanted to twist his head away, but the other squeezed his face in their grip and forcibly twisted it back.

All this gets narrowed down to "been smooched silly."

The third one was masturbation. Again, the main character got him drunk to wheedle his feelings for him out of him. He ended up not even asking him because he felt bad about taking advantage of him while he was drunk. He did, however, end up masturbating him.
Before the sex in question happened, before getting him drunk, he kept repeating himself to "not do anything to him."

If he doesn’t drink, then let it go. If he does, just ask a couple things. Don’t do anything else—just figure out how exactly he feels.

He ended up bathing him, per his request. Here, he arrived to the conclusion that he shouldn't ask him about his feelings because he was in a vulnerable state; he trusted him by drinking with him, and getting private information out of him taking advantage of that would be just as violating his trust.

But though the questions were at the tip of his tongue, he held himself back. If he was unwilling to speak of the matter on his own, he would not ask. Although he would have no memory of it after sobering up, the fact that he dared to drink in front of Wei Wuxian meant that he trusted him. If Wei Wuxian took advantage of his intoxicated state to pry forth private matters and secrets that he did not want others to know, wouldn’t that be extremely underhanded of him?

A moment later, the other main character asks him to stop touching him, because he didn't want him to keep bathing him anymore. He answered by grabbing his dick and stroking it.

“Considering the state you’re in right now, what do you think you can do to me if I insist on touching you?”
He plunged his other hand into the water and ruthlessly cupped a certain part of him.
“Don’t try to pretend you don’t like it when I touch you like this!”

[...] Deep within him, a faint voice told him that it was wrong and inappropriate to be doing this kind of thing while he was drunk and unable to distinguish between right and wrong—but the voice was immediately snuffed out like smoke by another breathless flurry of kisses. ”

They both masturbate each other and just afterwards, he sobers up, stiffs, shoves him and refuses to look or talk to him. The main character interprets this as him haven been an unwilling participant in what happened, recognizes he took advantage of him.

Since this was his reaction now that he was clearheaded, it meant he’d been an unwilling participant in what had transpired earlier.
[His actions when drunk were] more than enough to prove that his intoxicated actions were not within his control. Wei Wuxian obviously knew this, and yet he’d still exploited a situation when he was easily susceptible to manipulation.

But somehow, this all twists to a whole different conclusion: him not liking him back.

One of his worst theories had just been confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt. [He] was indeed very nice to him, but…it was probably not the kind of nice he had been hoping for.

The fourth one was a blowjob. The main character got on his knees and the other one pushed his shoulders back. Still insisting, he said "Allow me," to which he refused again. The main character still did it anyway.

[...] brushed and teased this dangerous territory. [He] reached out to push his shoulders back, as if he could endure no more.
[...] Sensing what he was about to do, [he] grew a little flustered and objected quietly.

“No.”
“Yes,” Wei Wuxian countered, then gently captured him with his lips.

The fifth one is just right afterwards, where the other one pins the main character to the ground and fingers him only to then penetrate him, all of this unannounced.

“Why so impatient? I said, next time you can…”

There was an abrupt jab of pain from his lower body that elicited an “ah” from his lips. He frowned slightly.

He asks the main character if it hurts. Teary-eyed, he answers yes. This, for some reason, makes the other protagonist hard.

“…Does it hurt very much?” He asked.

Wei Wuxian hugged him, his body shaking uncontrollably. Teary-eyed, he said, “Yeah, it hurts. It’s my first time, of course it hurts.”
As soon as he said that, he felt the thing inside him grow harder.

During this whole scene, the main character says repeatedly he's hurting, cries and asks him to slow down, to be more gentle and to stop. He, obviously, doesn't do any of them.

After letting loose a horrible yelp, he slumped and groaned.
“Wahh…waahhh, help, no, not like that, that’s too much.”
He wanted to curl up and escape this pounding—not that [he] would let him.
[...] “You…get what you deserve!” he gasped, savage fury evident in his voice.
[...] “I’m gonna die, you’re gonna fuck me dead. I was wrong, it’s my bad, don’t punish me like this. It’s my first time—! Be nicer to me…”

[...] Wei Wuxian raised his head and cried at the top of his lungs, “Somebody help! [He], he…ah! …I don’t dare anymore…”
[He] kissed away the tears his thrusts had forced out of Wei Wuxian.

[...] “You’re so strong, I definitely wouldn’t have been able to fight back. If I’d yelled, you could’ve silenced me. No one would have come to my rescue even if I lost my voice from screaming [...] ”

I'm not even going to detail the other ones because I'm getting sick already. Though I will go over one last non-sex scene.
For this scene, the main character keeps detailing the other protagonist how to act on bed, which is simulating a rape scene. He found this very complicated, so he offered to "be the one raped" instead.

Wei Wuxian walked him patiently through the scenario, step by step.
“When I hold you down, push back and don’t let me pin you. Close your legs and struggle with all your might, and while you do so, scream for help at the top of your lungs…”
[...] “That sounds complicated.”
[...] “Nothing for it, then,” Wei Wuxian said. “Let’s switch. You can rape me instead—”

The next scene, known in the fandom as "Incense Burner Scene" as I'm aware, describes how both of them got horny after watching their teenage selves have rough sex on a dream sequence (this described with sentences like "being forcibly opened up"), so they also start having rough sex next to them. Of course, this involves a lot of pained screaming, crying and begging.

I loved the TV adaptation. It was well developed, well-focused, didn't barely feel ragingly offensive. I loved the characters' interactions, their relationships, how there were women in it, all the screen time they had and all the roles they played. The novel, on the other hand, barely has a plot, the little plot it has gets forgotten before it even ends, you can't feel almost no relationship outside the main characters' and you could count the scenes all the women that played a major role in the show in one hand. Yes, it's censored, but that was not the writers or directors' doing— and they, by themselves, did a much better job for this story than its own author ever did.
Truly disappointing and a honest waste of potential.

Content Warnings

A review by horave Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu

Spoiler-free!

Narratively-wise, there're a lot of problems.

Now, morally-wise.

A review by horave
Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu