The Villain’s White Halo (Novel) Vol. 1 by Hao Da Yi Juan Wei Sheng Zhi: review

4/5 stars on Goodreads

The Villain's White Halo by Hao Da Juan Wei Sheng Zhi

This is a new Chinese BL author to me, and there doesn’t seem to be other books by them translated to English yet. The Villain’s White Halo is a transmigration novel and takes place in a historical fantasy cultivation world with its own geography and timelines of hundreds of thousands of years, so not a secondary earth.

The Villain emerges as a soul into a Rebirth Company of the in-between space, a business that caters to the needs of souls that want to transmigrate or reborn. The Villain has been transmigrating for so long that he doesn’t remember his original name or world, but in all of them he’s been a two-bit background henchman of the main villain, dying after a couple of lines, only to transmigrate again. This time, he wants to be the final boss.

The employee at the company is eager to help and sells The Villain an ultimate final boss packet and a fiend halo that activates at certain triggers, like glaring or saying “I was never good to begin with,” and other villainy lines. The Villain gets to choose the world, but then he’s sucked into it so fast that he forgets the halo. The employee throws one after him, only to realise he sent the wrong one. Unfortunately, the world seals before he can correct the mistake.

The Villain emerges as Yin Biyue, a 19-year-old cultivator. Turns out, he’s in a jail for trying to kill Luo Mingchuan, a fellow cultivator a few years older, and the protagonist for whom The Villain chose this world in the first place. Things look bad for Yin Biyue, but the fiend halo, which is in fact the opposite, though still activated by the villainy triggers, comes to a help, and makes Luo Mingchuan take the blame for the incident. Both go free.

The beginning is a bit confusing, and rather slow. The pace doesn’t pick up much from there, but the story becomes more straightforward and fairly interesting. Yin Biyue settles into his new life as a cultivator. Thanks to all his previous lives, he knows what that entails, and he has a soul much stronger than the OG, so cultivation isn’t a problem for him. His sword is. It won’t recognise his qi energy, a huge handicap for a cultivator and a potential for a disaster, because other cultivators might find out he’s not the original Yin Biyue.

The story leads Yin Biyue, a fellow disciple Duan Chongxuan, who has secrets of his own, and Luo Mingchuan to a cultivation tournament. The plot of the first volume is about the journey there and the tournament, which doesn’t end before the first volume does. There are small conflicts every now and then, but nothing that the protagonist couldn’t overcome.

Yin Biyue is a good and interesting character, but he isn’t much of a villain. The OG was filled with hate, which may have led to him trying to kill Luo Mingchuan, but it doesn’t affect Yin Biyue. But because he’s decided to be a villain, that’s what he sees himself as, but the malfunctioning halo complicates things. At first, he decides that the storyline is the villain befriending the hero, only to backstab him, but as the story progresses, he becomes more and more aware that he might not want to be a villain anymore. And on the side, his friendship with Luo Mingchuan starts to turn into something more.

Despite the rather straightforward storyline, it’s not boring. The author has a great way to describe cultivation process from within, and make fight scenes lively and like the reader is part of it. The tone is fairly cozy and the plot low-key, and not very emotional. Scenes at the Rebirth Company make it a little different from other stories, and I kept waiting for them to intervene with the real halo. Maybe that’ll happen later. This wasn’t the most exciting danmei, but I’m interested in reading more.