5/5 stars on Goodreads
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| The Disabled Tyrant’s Beloved Pet Fish by Xue Shan Fei Hu |
Volume 2 of The Disabled Tyrant’s Beloved Pet Fish is even cuter than the first. Prince Jing is such a simp while Li Yu believes he’s only helping the prince in order to fulfil the tasks of the computer program, aka ‘the fish scamming system’, in charge of his transmigration journey back to human.
The volume starts where the previous one ended, with Prince Jing realising that Li Yu, the young man who mysteriously appears and disappears in his quarters, is in fact his beloved pet fish Xiaoyu. But instead of being shocked, he concludes Li Yu must be a yao, an animal spirit that can take a human form, on a personal trial. And since Li Yu doesn’t reveal his true identity, he concludes the spirit wants to keep it a secret, so he won’t bring up that he knows the young man and the fish are the same. It causes many silly moments as Li Yu struggles to hide before he transforms back to a fish, believing his identity is still a secret.
Li Yu has no idea he’s supposed to be a yao. He has his hands full with increasingly bizarre demands of the fish scamming system, like indulging with the prince. His rewards include a transformation into a proper koi fish, much to the astonishment of everyone, and learning Prince Jing’s secrets that raise more questions than they solve. But he’s still limited to only two hours as a human every day.
Prince Jing has his own ideas of what it means that the fish is a yao: he must share essence with the young man in order for him to grow. And that means intimate contact. But when he tries to kiss Li Yu, everything goes sideways. Li Yu has no idea what’s come over the prince and finds the whole incident frightening. It leads to maybe the best scenes in the book where the prince tries to make up to the fish who keeps moping. But Li Yu figures out his own feelings in the end and making out with the prince doesn’t sound so bad after all. If only he could stay as a human longer for them to take matters further.
There isn’t as much court intrigue as in the first book, but the other princes fighting to become the crown prince still cause Prince Jing constant trouble. Prince Jing deals with them with the help of his fish. And he’s starting to think that he should try for the crown himself too. But even though he manages to please his father the emperor, there’s no reward. Instead, there’s a great change for Jing and his fish. The book ends there.
This was such a bowl of cotton candy, silly and cute, with occasional darker moments to balance things out. Prince Jing’s amusement with his lover trying to hide his fishness, and secretly helping him, and Li Yu’s obliviousness is fun to follow. There are many silly moments when Li Yu earnestly tries to please the prince, only to make a mess. They are so much fun together. It seems Li Yu will be successful in his overall mission of preventing Prince Jing from becoming a tyrant, but there’s still a lot to come. We’ll see how things go in the next book.
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