The thing about sj is that he's genuinely afraid of lbh's potential. Or rather, I think he fears the idea of any man being more powerful than himself.
"他嫉妒洛冰河举世无双的绝佳天资，内心畏惧这个每日修为都能突飞猛进的弟子，总是百般嘲讽，千般作践，连带同门也一起对他看轻。"
"He envied Luo Binghe's peerless talent, secretly feared his disciple whose cultivation advanced each and every day at a prodigious rate. He mocked him a hundred-fold, debased him a thousand-fold, until the rest of the peak followed suit and held him in contempt."
This is why I don't feel like sj, without some kind of psychological intervention, would ever be satisfied until he's the most powerful man in the world, and even then he'd still be paranoid and deathly afraid that some new contender would leap out of the shadows to replace him. Rather than being afraid of men in general, my take is that he's specifically afraid of powerful men, because that means they'd potentially have power over him and the very idea is intolerable on an intrinsic, animal level.
I guess this is my attempt to explain why he resorts to attempted child murder (via the fake cultivation manual) instead of just finding some excuse to kick lbh out. Even without cqm, lbh could still find some way to grow powerful. He needs to make sure that he is ruined, that he'd never ever become a threat.
As for what his deal with nyy is, there's a huge amount of room between "lecherous creep" and "devoted shizun." There are a near infinite number of ways in which an unstable authority/parental figure can fuck up their charge, even when it's done out of love, and for that to be later recontextualized and twisted into something more insidious. The fact that the narrative really spotlights how he's neither killed lqg nor slept around heavily implies that the nyy charge is fabricated too, though at the end of the day he still fails nyy, since only that version of her grows up to think that it's a good idea to betray her entire sect, flawed and corrupt as it is, and to join the harem of some crazy emperor far more dangerous to both herself and the wider world.
stormborns
gummygunk
tangentwithtanner
titsay
izzy806
