man i have a lot of various feelings about this book.
first of all, my favorite characters in this duology consistently were Ouyang and Wang Baoxiang. i think they're both absolutely fascinating, and i loved the amount of focus on Baoxiang in this book.
i also think that part three of this book is the best part by far, and a highlight of the entire book is that lake battle scene. oh my god. that was incredible.
okay now for the critique. im gonna hide this behind spoilers because 1: it just straight up does include spoilers, 2: im gonna be talking about one of the topics in this book that i believe requires massive content warnings, Ouyang's self harm.

so in case you click on this without having read this book, Ouyang consistently self harms through burning or cutting throughout the book. he seems to believe that it helps him (really, it just blocks out any feelings, but that's what he wants it to do). i wouldn't mention this if i didn't believe that it's relevant, and i'll probably never mention it in a review again, but i have a history with self harm and really felt oddly about how it was portrayed in this book. ii love Ouyang as a character and through a solid chunk of this book, i believed that where the plot was going was that eventually he would be okay with teaming up with Zhu Yuanzhang and would recover. this is very much not the case, instead Zhu discovers what Ouyang is doing and hurts him to try and harness that """focus""" or whatever. i understand that this is a story of two pretty villainous characters both focused on their individual goals, but i just was not comfortable with how self harm is handled as that's a pretty damn serious topic

long tangent but i felt it needed to be said. all in all, i do think this duology is incredibly well written, with generally amazing character work and discussion of fate, but i do have some quibbles with it.