The new wuxia drama The Journey of Legend premiered yesterday and has already soared to 26000 on the Tencent Video heat index.
Along with the C-drama’s success, viewers are apparently obsessing over male lead Xiao Qiu Shui/Li Chen Zhou, Xiao Ming Ming played by actor Cheng Yi (Mysterious Lotus Casebook), as he has already grabbed 200 million character popularity points in just 24 hours.
According to Tencent, that is the fastest any character in a C-drama streaming on their platform has exceeded 200 million character popularity points in 2025 so far.
Congratulations to Cheng Yi for that then, eh?!
New poster of Cheng Yi as Xiao Qiu Shui
Tencent announced the milestone on their Weibo account this morning with a cool and quite fiery poster of Cheng Yi in the drama, and a comment saying:
#Cheng Yi’s Role as Xiao Qiu Shui Surpasses 200 Million in Popularity##Join the Journey, Express Your Love for Cheng Yi#
Amidst the swirling winds and clouds, the heart yearns for light.
Congratulations to Cheng Yi for surpassing 200 million in role popularity on Tencent Video, making Xiao Qiu Shui the fastest role to reach this milestone on the platform in 2025!We welcome all members of the “E Squad” to join Cheng Yi in immersing themselves in this journey!
Visit the表白Wall in the The Journey of Legend discussion area (on Weibo) to share your messages – let your heart and Cheng Yi’s unite on this adventure!
Two more episodes of The Journey of Legend have now dropped today, taking the drama up to 8 episodes available to watch for VIP subscribers both on iQIYI and on Tencent Video.
Meanwhile, if you haven’t begun watching the wuxia drama yet, check out its official trailer below.
Personally, I am currently watching Episode 2 and I have to say The Legend of Journey, which was one of my Top 3 most-anticipated C-dramas of 2025, is not what I expected as it is quite bland.
The story is uninteresting, I don’t like any of the characters so far, including Cheng Yi’s Xiao Qiu Shui, the production looks quite cheap – especially as a huge amount of money was reportedly spent on it – and some of the wire work has been done very poorly.
Something that is unusual as wire work in Chinese dramas is generally superb.
It also features an enormous amount of exposition in many scenes, with the screenwriter apparently not familiar with the mantra ‘show don’t tell’.
Of course, to be absolutely fair, I will give the C-drama another four or five episodes to see if things improve.
If not, and sadly as I generally love Cheng Yi’s dramas, it will be a drop for me.
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