Three Days Through Bailushe's Linghua Yuri Series: From Jisheng to Nanzhi

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 11:00:00 +0800

My first visual novel was one I opened on the afternoon of February 27, 2024.

Before that day, “galgame” and “visual novel” were still only vague labels to me—“games where you read text,” as others put it—and I had no real idea how they differed from an e-book or a piece of animation. It wasn’t until the screen lit up, the background music came flowing in, and the first line of text paused there, waiting for me to click it forward myself, that I realized “reading,” too, could be something you take part in with your own hands.

The one I opened was Bailushe’s Jisheng. Only later did I learn this was the starting point of an entire series. Bailushe set these yuri works in a single fictional “Linghua Girls’ Academy,” their timelines linked one to the next, and gave them all English subtitles landing on the same word—Symbiotic Love, Melancholy Love, Eternal Love, Unwavering Love—four kinds of “Love,” corresponding to Jisheng, Qianmian, Yeyong, and Nanzhi.

What I did over those three days was simply read from the first word straight through to the fourth.

Jisheng · Symbiotic Love: A Seemingly Sweet Romance with Tragedy Buried Beneath

The afternoon of 2024-02-27, the story begins in the garden of Linghua Academy.

The two leads of Jisheng are nearly opposite in temperament. Zisha comes from an ordinary single-parent family; her mother is chronically ill, and she carries life on her shoulders while studying—yet she’s bright and cheerful, and a top student. Zihua is the reverse: born into wealth, cold outside and warm within, but standing behind her is a mother of overwhelming, almost merciless control—one who keeps her hemmed in, forbids her from associating with anyone, and is convinced that everyone who comes near her has ulterior motives.

It’s amid this family shadow that Zisha draws Zihua, bit by bit, out of her shell, and the bond between them crosses past friendship and slowly turns into love. In the garden on a rainy night, Zihua, startled, buries herself in the arms of a suddenly-appearing Zisha; at the Mid-Autumn lantern festival they watch the program side by side, lift a sky lantern into the night together, and then lace their fingers tight.

Later, when Zisha runs a high fever from a cold and grows delirious, she instead pours out the feelings she’d been hiding all along, and Zihua answers her openly and head-on. In that stretch even sharing a single matcha chocolate stick was sweet.

But the subtitle “Symbiotic Love” was never only sweet—at its core it’s a modern yuri Romeo and Juliet. Around Christmas, the truth detonates like a bomb: Zisha and Zihua are in fact half-sisters by the same father (Zisha, slightly older, born to the father and a former partner; Zihua born to the father and his current wife)—and crueler still, the death of Zisha’s mother was brought about by Zihua’s mother’s own hand. What lies between the two of them is not only the difference in station of Romeo and Juliet, but the taboo of blood and a blood feud from the previous generation.

That moment of consciousness slipping away is perhaps the heaviest single frame in the whole work:

“Zihua, her consciousness draining away, let her body go completely slack, tilted her head past the obstacle of my nose, and kissed me, firmly.” A kiss, and yet more like a farewell. Fate has already driven them to the very end, and all they can do is hand over this one kiss, firmly, before they lose each other entirely.

Jisheng has five endings in all, every one named after a “flower”: Twin Flower, Flower of Frenzy, Flower of Martyred Love, Flower of Reincarnation, Parasitic Flower. Most paths lead to tragedy—Zisha resists an unjust fate in the most extreme way, while Zihua almost always ends up losing her mind. Only the true ending, “Twin Flower,” leaves the faintest sliver of hope: perhaps Zisha didn’t truly die, but went far away, planting spider lilies all across the ground, waiting for the day she might reunite with Zihua. The spider lily is the image running through the whole work—when the flower blooms the leaves are unseen, when the leaves grow the flower is unseen; longing for each other yet fated to find meeting hard.

This game hides blades even in its names: read aloud, the two leads’ names—Zisha Zihua (紫娑梓婳)—pun on zì shuō zì huà (自说自话), “talking only to oneself”; and the rare character in the title, 甡, written out, is almost two 死 (“death”) characters standing side by side.

Looking back at that opening embrace on the grass—“clutching that slender body desperately, pouring unraveling emotions onto her shoulder”—I finally understood it wasn’t the clinginess of new love, but a near-despairing grip held tight by someone who already sensed she would lose the other in the end. Choosing a tragedy steeped in spider lilies as the very first visual novel of my life was, in hindsight, fairly bold—but it was also exactly what made me feel, for the first time, the weight of text, character art, and voice layered together and clicked forward by my own hand: something unlike reading a novel or watching animation.

Oh, and there’s Qianyu, the pink-haired girl on the right of the frame. She doesn’t get much screen time, but she’s lively and striking, the one bright spot I took an instant liking to in this heavy work. At the time I didn’t yet know this would be among the very few times I’d see her in the whole series—but that’s a story for later.

Qianmian · Melancholy Love: Ten Years Later, the Sweetest of Them All

The next day, 2024-02-28, I went on to open Qianmian.

Its timeline is set at Linghua Academy ten years after Jisheng, and the Zihua of back then is by now the headmistress of this very school—and so the series ties the older generation to the younger. This installment tells of a new pair: Mianxue, labeled a “delinquent bad student” but in truth kind-hearted, and Qianxun, the class president and model honor student who seems well-behaved yet inwardly craves freedom.

The title “Qianmian” is both a fusion of the two names “Qianxun” and “Mianxue” and a pointer to the theme—everyone has another, hidden side. Qianxun is forever going out of her way to bother Mianxue, when really she’s drawn to and secretly yearns for the free, unfettered air about her. The trouble is that Qianxun is too afraid her true self won’t be accepted, so before Mianxue she pretends that cheerful, unbound self is “her own twin sister.”

So the one Mianxue falls for is, in fact, the true self Qianxun has kept hidden all along—and yet Qianxun has hung that side on a “sister” who doesn’t exist. “Maybe, no matter how I answer, she won’t be satisfied”—that anxious push-and-pull is the keynote of this installment. Its English subtitle is “Melancholy Love,” but that melancholy isn’t despair; it’s the flutter that comes built into romance itself, the fear of being found out alongside the longing to be seen.

The true ending, “Thousand-Layer Snow,” is a happy one: Qianxun’s double identity is accidentally exposed by a prank of Mianxue’s, and she finally asks to “be friends one more day”; the two at last find the courage to face their true feelings, untangle the misunderstanding, and end up together. (The other two endings, “Tuberose” and “Forget-Me-Not,” lead to bad ends.) And precisely because it slowly unfolds, one by one, all those most maddeningly ticklish moments of a crush—drawing close, dodging away, words caught in the throat, and finally the confession—Qianmian became, in my mind, the sweetest of the whole series. After the tragedy of Jisheng, it was like being granted permission to be properly, thoroughly sweet.

Yeyong · Eternal Love: The Epiphyllum and the Cocoon, the Steady One

By 2024-02-29, I’d begun the series’ third work, Yeyong.

It picks up half a year after Qianmian, with the lead now Qiuling, who had already appeared in the previous work. This installment lands its theme on the “epiphyllum” and the “cocoon”: two girls who each keep a first love buried in their hearts, binding themselves up as if in a cocoon of their own making, and how they let go of the past and turn instead toward loving each other. “In the hush of the night, I could even faintly hear the violent pounding of my own heart, along with the blood rushing at full speed through my body”—descriptions like this, of a heartbeat magnified to the limit in the dark, are actually quite delicate taken on their own.

Yeyong left the faintest impression on me of the four. Its ending isn’t a knife at all—it’s even quite sweet, with three generations of leads sharing the frame and a gentle mood throughout. But perhaps because it’s so steady—the buildup of the two’s affection isn’t very vivid, and the “couple chemistry” before the ending comes a touch slowly—it couldn’t seize me the way the first two did. Read all four back to back, Yeyong is probably the piece that bridges what comes before and after yet can’t outshine its neighbors: it puts “Eternal” in its title, while the story itself feels more like a quiet interlude. That’s not necessarily a flaw—it just looks unremarkable standing between two brighter installments.

Nanzhi · Unwavering Love: I Caught Up to It on the Very Day It Released

And then came the luckiest thing of the whole journey.

I finished the three earlier works—Jisheng, Qianmian, Yeyong—on exactly February 29, 2024. And the series’ fourth and then-newest work, Nanzhi, had a release date of precisely 2024-02-29—chasing along over three days, I caught up to it, neatly and exactly, on its very release day. The warmth of the previous works hadn’t yet faded when the new one was placed in my hands.

Nanzhi picks up a year and a half after Yeyong. What moved me most is that it turns the lens back onto the series’ very first pair: Zisha and Zihua. After that heart-aching parting in Jisheng, this installment uses the occasion of Luna returning from an exchange abroad, bringing people back to the country, to let Zisha and Zihua meet again after many years, and to decide anew where their relationship goes. This reunion—“a little rueful, and full of apology”—almost makes good on the slim hope buried in Jisheng’s true ending: the one who, years ago, planted spider lilies across the ground and waited alone did, in the end, get her reunion.

I love its way of wrapping sorrow inside a joke—like that line, “There, there, you can go back without worrying. Oh, and watch a little less anime from now on.” It’s plainly speaking of parting, yet said in so homey, so playful a way that it stings all the more. And what truly struck me was this line:

“You adorned my six years, then swept across a full cycle of years to sweeten my eighteen, and after wandering a full circle, found your way back to my thirty.”

Six, eighteen, thirty—most of a person’s life, strung together by this one feeling. Here the subtitle “Unwavering Love” takes on weight: it isn’t intense to the point of breaking like Jisheng, nor scaldingly sweet like Qianmian; instead it stretches time very long, long enough to prove that “no matter how long apart, they will find each other again.” As the close of a tetralogy, Nanzhi gives the series a very gentle place to land.

A Selfish Little Regret: I Never Saw Qianyu Again

With all four finished, beyond the heartache of the plots, I’m also left holding one very personal regret—right up to Nanzhi’s close, I never got to see Qianyu again.

She’s the pink-haired girl from Jisheng, with little screen time, yet she left an unusually vivid impression on me. I’d quietly kept hoping that, since the next three works share the same Linghua Academy and the timelines run one into the next, she’d surely turn up again in some form. But work after work, new leads came and went, the faces at the academy changed batch by batch—and that pink-haired girl never reappeared.

This is no fault of the works, of course—a series can’t find a proper place for every beloved side character. But as a reader, that absence—“she’s clearly still in this world, yet never appears again”—stays with me even more than the tragedies in the plots. Call it a small, unfillable regret this journey left me with.

A Few Closing Words

Looking back, those three days at the end of February 2024 were really two things happening at once: I finished Bailushe’s Linghua yuri tetralogy, and I finished the very first batch of visual novels of my life.

It was Jisheng that, with a tragedy like spider lilies, first showed me how heavy this medium can be; Qianmian that let me taste how sweet it can be; Yeyong that taught me a series will have its relatively plain link too; and Nanzhi that, with a coincidence on its release day plus a reunion years overdue, drew this whole getting-into-it experience to a close that almost seems arranged.

Four kinds of “Love” read through, and I suppose I’d officially stepped through the door of visual novels. Ever since, opening a new galgame is, for me, no longer “reading text,” but once again an encounter I’m willing to take part in with my own hands.