The way Tang Lici’s life unfolds in the new Xianxia drama Whispers of Fate at first appears excessively cruel and almost arbitrary. He faces one tribulation after another with little pause for recovery, creating the impression that fate itself is against him.

When he loses Fang Zhou, who was his core emotional anchor and the reason he began to believe in humanity, Tang Lici is barely given time to grieve before the next rupture occurs. His best friend turns hostile and begins a long journey of unwarranted revenge, leaving Tang Lici to confront humiliation, confusion, and disbelief simultaneously. Along with his grief for failing to save Fang Zhou, he must also process being betrayed, being suspected, and being denied all at once, without explanation or closure.

While in recuperation, he is then framed by the same best friend and public suspicion follows where he is watched, judged and whispered about. His motives are questioned, his past reinterpreted, his silence taken as guilt.

With his resilience, calm wisdom and deep insight into those around him, Tang Lici slowly uncovers many truths, builds alliances, and rises in rank, power and recognition. Yet his fate refuses to let this rise function as reward. When he falls again, the forces against him only become more cruel, more painful, and more isolating.

Each experience, bond or loss introduces a different emotion: sorrow (悲), anger (怒), grief (哀), fear (惧), longing (思).

At one point, Tang Lici even attempts to reverse time to prevent his first loss and what he believes was the beginning of his tribulations (saving Fang Zhou). He believes that if he can correct this single event, then he can prevent the resulting suffering. But then he finds out that it was this attempt to reverse time which caused the very events he was now trying to prevent.

We finally uncover that it was not his fate guiding his life, but someone who deliberately engineered this sequence of events: Ye Mo, who orchestrated these events so that Tang Lici could become the perfect celestial body – a feat which Ye Mo himself failed to achieve.

In his view, a perfect celestial body cannot be formed through cultivation or having high physical power alone. It must be additionally capable of containing emotional depth and experiencing life’s worst tribulations, without becoming corrupted by them.

This requires full exposure to the seven emotions and six desires (七情六欲): — 喜 (joy), 怒 (anger), 哀 (sorrow), 惧 (fear), 爱 (love), 恶 (aversion), 欲 (desire).

Where Ye Mo’s emotional structure became fixated in 怨 (resentment), Tang Lici allowed his anger to resolve into understanding, his grief to settle into acceptance, and all his attachments to be released. Thus, Ye Mo cannot become what Tang Lici is becoming.

This is the critical distinction between the two.

Ye Mo has the highest possible level of physical power and has understood the necessity of emotional depth, but is unable to embody it. He can design the path for Tang Lici, but he cannot walk on it. Tang Lici, by contrast, is shaped precisely because he neither avoids pain nor allows it to turn into hatred. His deep emotional structure complements his high physical power level, bringing him closer to “perfection” than Ye Mo could be.

I think this message from the drama really resonates with me: that to become whole, one must experience all that can be felt, without becoming imprisoned by any single feeling. This is what ultimately makes Tang Lici “perfect”: his capacity to feel fully and still remain capable of compassion & choice afterward.