Zhu Xian 2nd Season

I have been reading manhua, reading novels and webnovels about cultivation and martial arts, and watching various donghuas for many years now; to put it bluntly I've been hooked on the genre ever since I picked up my first cultivation manhua. One of my complaints with 99.9% of the series of this genre is that the romance sucks so much that I'd rather the author just skip it all together. Usually the MC either has intercourse with some random beauty because of an aphrodisiac while she's hurt/being chased by enemies; or/and the female is simply irrelevant to the story only serving as a burden to ... the MC; or/and the female's actions are of no relevance to the story whatsoever.

Zhu Xian is quite literally driven by the romance between the characters. So much so that I believe that season 1 mostly serves as foreshadowing for the complicated problems and romantic drama of season 2. Seriously, it's so heart-wrenchingly depressing, from the soundtrack to the interactions between the characters, that I felt my heart go into my throat and my eyes tear up. Everything that happened wasn't overly melodramatic and made perfect sense with all the set up of the world setting we got in season 1. This was quite literally peak xianxia romance, and was way better than 90% of series (manga and manhwa included) that completely focus on romance and nothing else.

The overarching main plot didn't progress quite as fast as I expected it to for 26 episodes worth of time, but it was definitely interesting and continued to build on the mysteriousness of the world that we got to experience in season 1.

And as for the action scenes and animations, they were probably the very cream of the crop of donghua. I genuinely got goosebumps. Especially during the second half of the season. Seriously, they got progressively better throughout the season and peaked in the last 2 episodes in a very dramatic fight that was a resultet of an unfortunate but very understandable misunderstanding...

Overall, if you want to watch a donghua then I couldn't recommend Zhu Xian more, especially this 2nd season. The translation generally found on the free streaming sites isn't that bad, if anything it's above average. However, I would recommend torrenting the episodes with the translation from [Hall_of_C] as it's more consistent and as of 02/11/2024 they have released 22/26 episodes with their translation.