i feel like it isn't stressed enough that shen jiu and yue qingyuan are fucking goats. they started out as slaves where the practice of slavery was in its peak of brutality considering that pidw/svsss (when luo binghe was born) are approximately set to have happened in the late moments of the shang dynasty transitioning into the earliest moments of the ching dynasty (though my history might be wrong so feel free to correct me on that<3), which means that shen jiu and yue qingyuan were born into the shang dynasty, which, historically, is noted to be one of the two dynasties which had the most extreme practices regarding labor and human life (slavery). the two literally had two years and a half (?) to go from the bottom of the hierarchy to being not just disciples but head disciples of one of the biggest and influential four sects....

not to mention that both are probably also cultivation geniuses. not only did yue qingyuan suffer being literally broken inside-out to fix his cultivation to reforge it the way you fix your weapon, but he somehow recovered and fully linked his soul with xuan su for only one year before he was sent to the battlefield to fight tianlang-jun, a literal heavenly demon, and defeated him with a sword that has his soul (a literal human's soul vs a deity from heaven that couldn't get away from past traumas, developed heart demons, and 'fell from grace', but is still considered to be 'out of this world'-powerful where, even if he got ambushed, still took a lot of lives...do you know how drastic that comparison is). then we have shen jiu, whos cultivation was literally beyond saving but he still somehow got an unadulterated sword like xiu ya, surpassed his peers (like qi-ge, like xiao-jiu) even though he entered severely late, and literally managed to put up a good fight against liu qingge, who is the definition of prodigy.

and the only reason all of their ambitions weren't done is because they just weren't the main character...

i aspire to be this locked in.