The feeling I get after watching the whole series is the feeling of waking up suddenly in the middle of the dream. I may well wish to continue with the dream but can't. This is another series that is tough to review. There is plenty I like about it, but it's too obviously incomplete to unreservedly give it a good rating.

This series reminds me of Dream Detective, a series with an uncannily similar premise about entering people's subconscious, which isn't as interesting to me overall but has a much more nicely done ambiguous ending.

The revelations in the last episode complicate things a little, so I will just review Episodes 1-35 first.

Set in the Chinese Repulican era, the story starts with Jiang Shuo being found in a ditch. He has lost his memory but hasn't forgotten his special skill of entering people's subconscious. Some incidents result in his forging a friendship with a psychiatrist, Qin Yi Heng, and a romantic relationship with a warlord's daughter, Yuan Mu Qing.

Like a detective series, this series can be divided into a series of cases (which are ultimately tied to a mysterious masked person, Liu Zhi (meaning Six Fingers). The story occupies an interesting position between a conventional detective series and a series about supernatural occurrences: it is actually neither but has elements of both.

Some events in the stories are a tad too illogical. For example, one of Mu Qing's schoolmates is supposed to have lost her mind after a traumatic incident, but she still turns up in school properly uniformed and no one really seems bothered though everyone knows she has kind of gone nuts. There are also occasions when Jiang Shuo could look exactly like another person by simply wearing a mask of the person's face over his head (and the masks get made in an instant, it seems). This is the stuff of some wuxia dramas that are meant to be far-fetched anyway, but isn't what you would expect in a series like this one. Still, if we are not too exacting, the cases can be fairly nice. One involving a trip to an isolated island goes a little too far with its extended dream sequences with layer upon layer of dreams, but still, the story remains quite fascinating.

The main characters help in making the series more watchable. Mu Qing likes Yi Heng at first but shifts her affections towards Jiang Shuo. The romance part isn't excessive in my opinion, but shows the increasing attachment between the characters.

The bromance between Qin Yi Heng and Jiang Shuo is also nicely done, though I suspect it is more like one-sided and repressed romantic affection on Yi Heng's part--it can't be shown anyway, thanks to China's censorship rules. From Yi Heng's expressions as he observes JS while tailing him (to investigate an early case) to how he stops wearing glasses after Jiang Shuo comments that he looks better without glasses, his affection for Jiang Shuo seems to go beyond bromance. There are many more examples though I would urge you to skip the next paragraph if this isn't your cup of tea:

When Jiang Shuo almost drowns trying to save Mu Qing, Yi Heng frantically calls out Jiang Shuo's name though Mu Qing is also his friend. After near-drowning incident, Jiang Shuo is hospitalised and the only person next to him after he wakes up is Yi Heng and not Mu Qing who is starting to fall in love with Jiang Shuo. After Yi Heng is sacked from the hospital (affiliated to his family), he wants to rent a place where Jiang Shuo stays. Jiang Shuo asks him what he's doing there, and Yi Heng just says emotionlessly that it's because he misses Jiang Shuo. (This later leads to some joke about Jiang Shuo being Yi Heng's sugar daddy.) Sometimes Yi Heng is shown brooding in a corner when Jiang Shuo and Mu Qing are being loving, though he could simply be thinking about the mysteries (yeah, right). Yi Heng is always protective of Jiang Shuo: in one scene, he assures Jiang Shup that he doesn't have to fear because he (Yi Heng) is around. Though Jiang Shuo is clearly in love with Mu Qing, the way addresses Yi Heng is also suggestive; he insists on calling him Qin Er4 (short for the second son of the Qin family), but it sounds suspiciously similar to Qin Er0 (which would actually be affectionate). The good thing is the series doesn't bait BL fans in an irritating way; it just doesn't say exactly how Yi Heng feels towards Jiang Shuo.

The revelations in the last episode, however, complicate things too much and the series doesn't end properly as a result. Spoilers are inevitable here:

In Episode 36, it is revealed that everything that happens in the story (so far set in the Chinese Republican era, remember?) is merely occurring in Jiang Shuo's subconscious as he is seeking treatment from a psychiatrist (Dr. Qin, whose alter-ego is Yi Heng). Jiang Shuo is actually someone existing hundreds of years after the Chinese Republican era. Liu Zhi is his evil split personality trying to take over the body fully. To take over the body completely, Liu Zhi has to lock the good Jiang Shuo in the subconscious (as deeply in it as possible) and make him accept being locked. So, because of Jiang's attachment to all this people like Mu Qing in his imagination (these people are very real to him even though he now knows that they are imagined), he will have to destroy the anchor that allows him to get back to the real world. In other words, he has to save these imagined people he loves (hmm...). Well, he also wants to save Dr. Qin. So Jiang Shuo destroys the anchor and lets himself be locked in his subconscious in exchange for the safety of both the imagined people and Dr. Qin, which allows Liu Zhi to take over the body entirely.

But wait a minute. As if the above isn't complicated and convoluted enough, it is very possible that this thing about Jiang Shuo being Dr Qin's patient in the real world could simply be yet another illusion created by Liu Zhi. Perhaps the dilemma between saving Dr. Qin of the real world and saving the imagined people who feel entirely real to Jiang Shuo is itself an illusion. In Episode 35, the environment of the ship the characters are on suddenly takes on a reddish hue. There is some attention-grabbing visual effect in case you don't notice the sudden change in the environment, which makes it seem as though the ship has entered a different realm. So everything that happens after this point, including the "revelations" in Episode 36 could be illusions created by Liu Zhi in Jiang Shuo's subconscious. The purpose could be similar: to trap Jiang Shuo in the world of the subconscious. The ultimate reason for doing so could be different. (After all, the real world hundreds of years later doesn't make much sense. Jiang Shuo tells Dr. Qin that someone called Liu Zhi has been harassing him, and he shows Dr. Qin the mobile phone texts sent by Liu Zhi. All Dr. Qin sees is a blank screen. If Liu Zhi is another personality in the same body, he could well send actual messages using another phone. How does he make Jiang Shuo see something non-existent?)

Nevertheless, if the "real" world of centuries after the Republican era isn't truly the real world, why would Liu Zhi be able to create an illusion of a future in which the Republican era is over and which has things like computers? What sort of power would he need to have to predict things like computers and mobile phones? On the other hand, if everything in the Republican era is is not real but meant to fool Jiang Shuo, why would the stories involve the other characters' personal affairs and interior worlds that Jiang Shuo does not have access to? We end up with a situation where there are many possibilities but none really makes complete sense. Even if there is a sequel, we would likely have to settle for story with significant plot holes. It would actually be less problematic if the writers had not opted for such an unnecessarily far-fetched twist in the last episode.

At its worst, the series is like a bad story that ends with "I woke up and it's all a dream." However, there are also interesting things before the equivalent of the "I woke up" bit that are the story's redeeming qualities.