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IT is cleared! Anemo cycles are the best, I cleared two of the latest stages with Xiao (had to kept Faruzan and Xianyun for him), and I had still several good characters at the end too, so the clear was not a problem on my second try.

Ah the end of this chapter was so great, giving all its meaning to the title.

And with this I finished the first volume! I’m counting them as one novel, so nothing changes on the site. The fact that the first volume ends on this chapter makes the end more impactful…

흉담 is a really great novel if you like occult and curses. I also really loved the presence of Jeon Gun-woo himself as protagonist, it made the book even more compelling!

I’ve been seeing 흉담 everywhere since it came out, but it’s funny because I read three books by Jeon Gun-woo published this year, and this one is my least favourite. It doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it, but it was less my cup of tea. First of all, I really love the mystery part, when the characters don’t know for sure what’s happening or are investigating the curse: how it works, how it comes from, how to escape it, etc. In this novel, this part was shorter I feel like, and there were a lot of action/suspense scenes as well as horror scenes, which I liked less. I like horror that comes from the realisation of something horrible, rather than our characters seeing apparition or being in danger.

It’s just a personal taste, but it explains why I loved 믹스테이프 better, especially side A, because it was mystery/investigation focused. Both novels share a similar theme, but I loved the background of 흉담 (the origin of the curse and historical background) more, it’s just that 믹스테이프 was a more enjoyable reading experience for me.

죽은 집에 관한 기록 stays my absolute favourite book of 2026 by this author, and 불귀도 살인사건 might still be my favourite overall.

The number of books published by Jeon Gun-woo this year is very impressive, maybe I’ll read another one before the end of the year!

Ended up finishing it! That’s the only positive things of waking up before dawn

I woke up at 3.30 and couldn’t sleep again, so I read 흉담 instead, even though there’s a warning not to read it at night.
I don’t find this book really scary though, so it’s fine. Maybe I’ll continue during the day and finish it today?

I finally finished Odette’s character story. Even though we knew about the outline of her life through the AQ, reading the details was heartbreaking. I feel like I understand her much better now.
The episode of the photograph was so sad to read.

苦痛是我的羽翼，我的翅膀。

Second episode was much better, I’m glad I continued. Not my favourite series by any means, but it might be worth continuing.

I finished the chapter 저주의 비밀, I had the feeling that the curse did not date back from Joseon but from Korea’s recent history, but I didn’t know about the Bodo League massacre (보도연맹 학살 사건), this is really shocking…

Placed my bets for the day! I think it would be so cool if this was a permanent thing, with an arena somewhere where you could play the auto-battler, but also bet mora once a day.

The last two chapters have been incredibly engrossing! Mystery in Wuxia, that’s the absolute best!!
(It’s funny that Bai Xiaosheng, who ranked Li Xunhuan’s flying dagger 3rd weapon in his manual, ended up dramatically underestimating it when it mattered).

I really like this event! I had some good bets, some bad ones too, but now that we’ve reached the quater-finals things get much more interesting since we already saw each team performance once, so betting is much more strategic now

I already got all the rewards which were easy to get, so it’s just for fun. I just need to remember to do it every day, thankfully my husband reminds me.

I read this book for the Readmoo Reading Challenge, and it was a really nice discovery!
The novel contains five chapters that are independent cases. They focus on the little mysteries of daily life and are not criminal cases (except for the last one). This is usually not my cup of tea, but I really love this novel, the characters we meet all feel very real and have interesting and complex personalities. We share a slice of their life through private detective Cheng Chung-fan‘s eyes, and this alone made for great stories, but the plot and mystery are also very good, with some twists and surprising reveals. I also found that Chung-fan’s deduction skills were really good, but he never makes a show of it, which actually gave them more impact and made them more impressive.

I learnt in the afterword that the last story, 聽海的聲音 was actually written first as a standalone, and the author idid not intend to develop it into a series of linked short stories. 聽海的聲音 won the 13rd edition of the Mystery Writers of Taiwan Award (2015) and was published in the collection 《寂寞球體》, so some readers have read it first. I find it fascinating to learn about the creating process. 聽海的聲音 seems so natural as the last story of 同名偵探事務所, it’s hard to believe it was initially a stand alone! I think that reading it first would have changed my perspective on Chung-fan and the other stories, because I like complex characters that are not perfect.

One other thing that I really enjoyed is sharing songs with the characters. Each story is linked to a song, but the song themselves really do matte a lot for the characters. I knew none of them, but being able to listen to each of them and feel like a part of it was really cool.

王少杰《同名偵探事務所》書中歌單｜博識出版眾文圖書 · youtube.com↗

I’ll read other books by Wang Shao-jie in the future!

The last short story really took me by surprise. I was expecting the last chapter to explain the circumstances that led Cheng Chung-fan to quit the police, so I was happy to see that it was the case. However, Chung-fan is such a nice character, and the stories are all quite positive, so I thought that even if he went against the law, it would be for noble reasons like hiding evidence to save an innocent from being falsely accused or something like that. So i’m really shocked by the end.

I wonder if reading this story first would have affected the way I saw the character and all the other stories. And I think the answer is yes, a little. I think that I personally would have preferred the reverse reading experience: know Cheng Chung-fan’s past first, then read his recent adventures. It’s funny to think that this could have been possible given that the last story was published previously.

Anyway, I don’t know if there are other books with Cheng Chung-fan, I’ll have to check. I would be interested in reading more!

I finished chapter 2… I don’t like this novel at all, it feels like jumping from scene to scene, but it lacks an underlying thread or structure, something that would make the novel compelling. Everything feels very shallow to me.

I feel like it’s going to be tough to decide my favourite book of 2026 between 多情剑客无情剑 and 山中邪神. And the third one will be 流星蝴蝶剑… All wuxia novels.

Is crime fiction really my favourite genre?

So many twists in a single chapter!! It’s so suspenseful!