Heaven Official's Blessing Volumes 2-3 Manhua Review

With the ghost bride issue resolved, Xie Lian returns to Earth to try to re-establish a temple for himself. He's soon joined by a young man in red calling himself San Lang, and Xie Lian is kind (and perhaps naïve) enough to take him at his word. The two work together to build a temple to The Crown Prince Who Pleased the Gods, but as soon as they finish, word comes that travelers are vanishing in the long-dead kingdom of Banyue. Accompanied by Fu Yao and Nan Feng, Xie Lian sets out to find out what's going on – and if he can trust San Lang to be who he says he is.

Heaven Official's Blessing is translated by Mimi and lettered by Viet Phuong Vu.

With the ghost bride issue resolved, Xie Lian returns to Earth to try to re-establish a temple for himself. He's soon joined by a young man in red calling himself San Lang, and Xie Lian is kind (and perhaps naïve) enough to take him at his word. The two work together to build a temple to The Crown Prince Who Pleased the Gods, but as soon as they finish, word comes that travelers are vanishing in the long-dead kingdom of Banyue. Accompanied by Fu Yao and Nan Feng, Xie Lian sets out to find out what's going on – and if he can trust San Lang to be who he says he is.

Heaven Official's Blessing is translated by Mimi and lettered by Viet Phuong Vu.

Danmei novels can be intimidating. Typically running at least four hundred pages, they also span multiple volumes and are filled with dozens of characters. The source novels for Heaven Official's Blessing are eight volumes long, and if you're not a fan of prose reading, that's a lot. But the fact that this series has both hardcover and paperback releases, as well as a donghua adaptation and this manhua, should tell you something: a lot of people love this story.

There's a good reason for that. The plot follows Xie Lian, the crown prince of a vanished kingdom, as he both ascends to godhood and is cast down again a truly embarrassing number of times. While on earth, he investigates things that the heavenly realm needs looked into, or sometimes that mortals simply ask about. In volume one of STARember's comic adaptation, that's the strange tale of the ghost bride and her forest of hanging corpses. In volume three, it's people vanishing in a long-dead country's borders. Volume two doesn't feature Xie Lian investigating much of anything, but is instead downtime between adventures, something the crown-prince-turned-god needs in order to begin reestablishing his temple – because without worshipers, gods lose out on power. They need people to believe in them if they're to make it, and Xie Lian's kingdom faded away eight hundred years ago.

Xie Lian is an appealing protagonist. He's sweet in a puppyish kind of way, determined to do his best for those around him and willing to live in what other gods would consider squalor in order to do so. He's colloquially known as a scrap collector, meaning he goes around picking up trash and discarded items to make money. While he can seem foolish, that's not quite the case, as we see in these volumes. He just has learned, over the course of eight hundred years, that sometimes things happen. If you roll with the punches, they can't destroy you.

This may be part of his allure for San Lang. Who this young man (or “young man”) may be isn't clear. Fu Yao and Nan Feng, two gods who were mortal alongside Xie Lian in Xianle all those centuries ago, seem to suspect him of being Hua Cheng, the “crimson rain-sought flower” and one of the Four Calamities, a name for powerful ghosts. Xie Lian is willing to take San Lang at his word, and there's a sense that the other two gods think that he's foolish to do so. But this is part of Xie Lian's character: if he is a fool, he's The Fool from Tarot, representing new journeys, innocence, and idealism. His trust in San Lang is something he chooses deliberately because he wants to trust him. The bigger question we should be asking is why San Lang wants to be with him…and how it is that he was able to paint such a beautiful and accurate portrait of Xie Lian as he was during his mortal life. There are only so many people who would still be around who knew Xie Lian at the time, and not all of those people are what the gods would consider positive influences.

Volume three begins the Banyue storyline. This joins the issue of a plague that causes people to grow tumors or spots in the shape of human faces on their bodies, as a vestige of the past comes back to bother, or infect, the present. It makes sense that these issues would come back around simply due to the cyclical nature of human civilization, but that both are returning at once may be the part to focus on. Although Banyue came and went after Xianle's fall, it's still an event hundreds of years old. Is any of this, or all of this, related to Xie Lian's ascension to godhood for the third time? Is he the trigger, and that's why San Lang is so determined to stand by him?

Those are questions for another volume, and the sheer beauty of STARember's art makes it easy to stick around for it. While the adaptation does skim over some elements of the novels, most in terms of pages of description or Xie Lian's scrap-collecting adventures, the art ensures the story flows. Colors are rich with an emphasis on golds and reds (arguably Xie Lian's and San Lang's signature colors), and characters move gracefully across the page. While it does occasionally feel like a page is missing due to the adaptation skipping over something from the novels, these, for the most part, read well. It's not fair to call them the condensed version of the story, but novel readers may at times feel that to be the case. Taken as its own story, however, it's still very good.

Heaven Official's Blessing's manhua adaptation is more than worth your time. Like Seven Seas' novel editions, Inklore provides pronunciation guides, some footnotes for unfamiliar terms, and a character list at the start of each volume, which helps readers keep track of who's who. If you didn't pick up the novels based on length, this is a good way to experience the story.