Bottoms' Garden

There are plenty of random one-off mentions for little worldbuilding things in TGCF, but I'm going to Charlie Day some of those loose threads into a little tapestry here, because I've been thinking about this for weeks and feel like I'm on to something.

Thread number one: Hua Cheng says, "No one has returned alive after stumbling into the Black Water Demon Lair…except for one individual. He was traveling home with the corpse of a family member. After his boat sank, he rode the coffin and drifted back to shore."

Who is this individual? We never find out, because in that moment, there are much bigger problems to worry about. But what if it was none other than the real Ming Yi, pre-ascension?

The waters in He Xuan's territory are not exactly friendly to intruders even if they do have a coffin to ride in. Hua Cheng and Xie Lian get bashed around by the bone dragons during their homoerotic coffin ride, so I think it's safe to assume that whoever it was that survived in the past was an exceptional person, capable of navigating their way through all the additional threats on top of the whole sinking-instantly problem. A person destined to be a god, perhaps?

We have little information about the South Sea where He Xuan's territory is, other than the fact that it's pretty barren (which is why they flee there during the Heavenly Capital Mech fight, to avoid mortal casualties). I don't think it's a stretch to assume that the coffin-rider would've found themselves on Black Water Island (as, most likely, the nearest piece of land), and from there they must've run into the ruler of the territory eventually. We know He Xuan-as-Ming Yi was very regularly absent from the heavens, so it's not as if he would have struggled to get away to go deal with an intruder on his island after being notified by his sentries.

So we've got the real Ming Yi, before his ascension, riding the coffin of a family member, and then running into one of the two most powerful ghosts in existence. We know that He Xuan takes Ming Yi's place somewhere between Ming Yi defeating his heavenly trial & his ascension, and I think that it's before this point that the two of them come to some sort of agreement.

Think about it: How the hell would He Xuan have nabbed Ming Yi's place in heaven in that tiny window between heavenly tribulation & ascension if he didn't already know him? It's explicitly stated in the books that heavenly tribulations are functionally a natural phenomenon, coming to those who show potential to become gods. Either He Xuan has been somehow coming up with a list of people who might be given a trial and stalking the fuck out of all of them, waiting for his chance to strike, or he met someone with the same aura that Xie Lian sees in Lang Ying and made some sort of plot to impersonate them in the event of their passing a heavenly tribulation.

Perhaps Ming Yi the Human has no desire to become Ming Yi the God. Or maybe He Xuan demands some sort of enormous favor in repayment for letting Ming Yi live & leave the island. Maybe Ming Yi has major beef with some heavenly official and has no desire to go live as their peer. The point being that the reason why Ming Yi would agree to let He Xuan take his place can only be speculation, because we never get a chance to meet the real Ming Yi and thus have no personality traits to work off of to infer his reasoning here.

However, I posit that it was a willing transaction, because we DO get to know He Xuan. I find it hard to believe that he would destroy someone's life via wrongful imprisonment after his own very violent death in which he raged against those who ruined his life via wrongful imprisonment. He may have a whole host of bad personality traits, but with how deeply he obviously feels about his own wretched fate, I just can't reconcile with the idea that he would do that same thing to someone else.

I'm also very interested in knowing whose coffin Ming Yi would've been riding on, and how they died. Maybe he and He Xuan bonded a little over the deaths of loved ones... who knows? But I digress. Onto thread #2!

Xie Lian speculates that He Xuan must have kept Ming Yi alive for all of these years in order to extract information and assistance from him-- after all, He Xuan is a water ghost; he'd need help figuring out how to solve Earth Master Problems.

Now let me ask you something: If you were powerful enough to be a god and someone imprisoned you and took your place in the heavens, do you think you'd be particularly inclined to give good advice to your captor on how best to impersonate you? Even on threat of pain, certainly you'd find ways to at least give them mediocre advice-- you wouldn't help them become one of the most highly-worshiped gods in heaven, right?

'Ming Yi' comes in 9th place during the Mid-Autumn Festival! Certainly He Xuan must have learned a few things over those many years, but as we see with his struggles when he uses the Earth Master Shovel (!!), he's clearly not 100% perfect at the job even after all that time. The fact that he's so highly-revered heavily implies that the real Ming Yi is giving him good advice.

And the Earth Master Shovel is its own whole fuckin thing-- spiritual devices are stated to be extremely challenging to make. Ming Yi would have had to craft the Earth Master Shovel after ascension... and then handed it over to He Xuan. I mean, sure, maybe He Xuan threatened to torture Ming Yi if he didn't make him a spiritual device or something, but we've been told in the books that many heavenly officials don't have spiritual devices at all because they're so hard to make. Ming Yi easily could have lied and said he wasn't capable of making one, but no! Given the canon timeline of events, he had to have made that shovel after He Xuan took his place, and then handed it over!

I dunno, maybe Ming Yi made the spiritual device to break free from He Xuan's prison & He Xuan caught him and took it from him... but crafting something like that, in secret, in a prison cell, presumably in He Xuan's territory where his spiritual powers would be suppressed, doesn't seem super likely to me. If Ming Yi had that kind of skill to swing around in prison, I don't think he would've taken centuries to escape.

All of this brings me to my final thread: Hua Cheng says, “I don’t know if [He Xuan is] the one who killed the real Earth Master.”

He has absolutely no reason to lie to Xie Lian about that-- everything is already revealed, and Hua Cheng wouldn't lie to Xie Lian for no reason. And after all my pondering and ruminating, I feel pretty fucking confident that He Xuan didn't kill the real Ming Yi-- I think that Jun Wu killed him.

The real Ming Yi setting off that distress signal is what kicks off the entire Blackwater Arc. We know that Jun Wu had some serious fingers in that pie behind the scenes-- he's the one who pushed all those fishermen into Shi Wudu's heavenly trial in order to get Xie Lian mixed up in it, and we know that he was eager to get rid of Shi Wudu in particular because he was getting too powerful in the heavens. Xie Lian speculates that Jun Wu knew what Shi Wudu had done from the start, and he just chose to ignore it until the time was right.

What better time would Jun Wu have to finally expose Shi Wudu's misdeeds than right then? His favorite toy Xie Lian is back, and XL's two biggest supporters are Shi Qingxuan and Hua Cheng. Jun Wu can never know exactly how the pieces are going to fall, but by knocking over the first domino (killing the real Ming Yi, but ensuring he called for help first), he knew a massive clusterfuck was sure to follow that would bring down Shi Qingxuan at a minimum and hopefully tear a rift between Xie Lian and his new buddy Crimson Rain Sought Flower, too. Of course, Xie Lian didn't end up holding it against Hua Cheng when he withheld what he knew about He Xuan's plot, but Jun Wu would have expected that Xie Lian would feel betrayed by that and rely less on Hua Cheng in the future because of it, which would suit Jun Wu very well.

So. Jun Wu had a lot of reasons to want He Xuan to finally take his revenge. But what about He Xuan?

It's never explicitly stated how long He Xuan has known about what Shi Wudu did to him, but the way it's spoken about, it feels like he's known for a long time. Like, a long long time.

Why doesn't He Xuan take his revenge straight away? Well, we know he's a cautious type-- maybe he wanted more time to prepare. Maybe he thought he needed to consume a few more water ghosts before he would be powerful enough to take Shi Wudu down, or something along those lines.

But seriously-- we see just how easily he kills Shi Wudu when he gets him on his island. I refuse to believe that the absolutely brilliant He Xuan couldn't have conceived of any other way to get Shi Wudu there earlier on if he'd really wanted to. He didn't need to wait for Shi Wudu to be in the middle of a heavenly trial. He only risked making things harder for himself by waiting to take his revenge; after another heavenly trial, Shi Wudu would be a lot more powerful.

But the real Ming Yi's death backed He Xuan into a fucking corner. Without his ally by his side to continue helping him solve Earth Master Problems, there's a ticking clock on how long he can continue to maintain the ruse, so he's forced to make a choice: Either take his revenge soon, or let it go.

And obviously, letting it go just isn't an option.

As a small aside, even if the real Ming Yi was imprisoned that whole time, and he really did escape, and He Xuan was really the one who pursued him, why would he kill him? Was it an accident? Why, after ALL this time, would he decide to murder him? It doesn't make sense!

And then he keeps Ming Yi's bones because of some nebulous “If [Ming Yi's bones] weren’t treated with solemn respect [because he was a heavenly official] and were buried carelessly, the bones wouldn’t rest in peace. No coffin would hold. So [He Xuan] was forced to worship it with grand ceremony within his own halls.” speculation from Xie Lian.

Why would He Xuan give a fuck if the bones can't rest peacefully if Ming Yi was his prisoner all this time? It's not like he needed to worry about Ming Yi becoming a vengeful ghost, because He Xuan is a goddamn ghost king. He's powerful enough to not have to worry about little things like the long-term consequences of not properly respecting an enemy's remains.

But he would give a fuck about properly respecting a friend.

I have a vague thought that perhaps he even tried to cultivate the real Ming Yi's spirit into a ghost in order to continue his ruse, but it's the most out-there part of the theory. We know that having the corpse is important in the cultivation of a ghost a la Quan Yizhen hauling around Yin Yu's corpse at the end of the story, but Xie Lian also says (of Ming Yi's bones), “It doesn’t have a single breath of its soul left. If it did, we would have noticed strange disturbances when we approached.”

Perhaps He Xuan intended to cultivate Ming Yi's soul into a ghost in order to continue procrastinating on taking his revenge, but his hand was forced by Ming Yi's spirit dissipating too completely upon death.

At this point my headcanons all turn toward the way He Xuan feels about Shi Qingxuan and the reason he's procrastinated on taking his revenge for so long, but this is way too long already so I'll leave it here sdgfsugkd

Apologies for any inconsistencies or inaccuracies, I reread the Black Water arc super carefully recently and took a bunch of notes on it, but there might be pieces of info from other parts of the books that contradict some of this that I've just completely forgotten about (I hope not though!)