She has absolute power. She has lived for four centuries. She controls Guixu (归墟), the realm of the dead. And before she even meets the male lead, she has already gone through twenty-two previous lovers. That is He Simu (贺思慕) from the drama Love Beyond the Grace (白日提灯). Many viewers call her the coolest, most unstoppable female character in recent costume dramas.
But is her story really about winning at everything? Look closer. Underneath her sword-wielding, ghost-commanding shell, she is a prisoner who has been drowning in a vacuum for four hundred years. Her strength and immortality were never gifts. They are the cruelest punishment carved into her bones. Let us peel off her frozen armor and see the broken soul that desperately craves human warmth.
Starved of Sensation
Imagine being locked in a dark room with no sound, no color, no heat or cold, no pain. One year might break you. What about four hundred? That is He Simu’s reality from the moment she becomes the Ghost King. As the most powerful ruler of the dead, she terrifies every living creature. But she has no idea what pink peach blossoms look like in spring. She cannot taste the sweetness of osmanthus cake. A gentle breeze on her skin is a luxury beyond reach. Many viewers first saw her as a cold villain. In truth, devouring strong emotions and fear is the only way she can feel even a faint connection to the world. She is not evil. She is starving.
Then Duan Xu (段胥) appears. A magical bond ties their senses together. For a blind person trapped in darkness for four hundred years, someone suddenly hands them a kaleidoscope full of blooming flowers. Through his eyes, she sees peach blossoms so pink they look wet. Through his tongue, she tastes liquor so strong it burns her throat. Through his ears, she hears raindrops hitting green tiles. This is not some romantic fate. This is a drowning person finally grabbing a real piece of wood. Can you imagine the trembling shock of four hundred years of emptiness suddenly filled?
She had turned into a monster that survived by feeding on fear. But fear is not life. It is only a shadow of it. Every ghost she devoured, every scream she swallowed, left her more hollow. She became a queen of the dead who had never truly lived. That is the twisted irony of her existence. The strongest creature in the underworld cannot feel a single heartbeat of her own.
The Iron Queen's Soft Core
He Simu gives everyone the same first impression. Arrogant. Cold. Merciless. She creates the Jinbi (金壁) Law as the iron rule of Guixu. She declares that living souls are merely her possessions. When a wandering ghost breaks the rules, even with the saddest reason, she executes them without mercy. But look closer, and you see the contradiction. Her coldness is not natural. Guixu is a place where humans and ghosts live together. Without an iron fist, chaos would explode. She has been the Ghost King for four hundred years. Ruthlessness is simply what she needs to keep order. She cannot show kindness openly. So she wraps her gentleness in cold deals and strict rules. That armor is the only thing protecting her soft inside from being eaten away by the endless void.
Here is the hidden truth. Every time she punishes a ghost, she is also punishing herself. Every cold word she speaks is a wall she builds around her own heart. She has learned that caring leads to loss. Loving leads to watching people die. So she becomes a statue. A beautiful, terrifying statue that nobody dares to touch. But statues do not feel. And deep down, she is dying to feel something real.
Duan Xu sees through it. Not because he is smart. Because he is reckless. He throws himself at her walls without caring if he breaks. And slowly, the cracks appear. She starts giving small mercies disguised as transactions. She spares a ghost here. She shows a sliver of patience there. She would never admit it. But the iron queen is already melting.
Choosing Mortality Over Eternity
When the bond first forms, He Simu sees Duan Xu as a tool. A useful pair of eyes and tongue. A pawn to help her solve the mystery of her own past. But hearts do not follow orders. Sharing senses day after day, she does not just share his taste and sight. She shares his pain and his tenderness. Duan Xu carries the trauma of his family’s massacre. He never shows weakness. Yet in the Nine Palace Maze prison, he tells her he is willing to become the twenty-third grave in her lonely cemetery. That desperate devotion shatters four hundred years of numbness. She never knew that being placed at the center of someone’s heart could feel like this. His messy, alive, burning humanity pulls her out of the vacuum.
Some viewers say the ending ruins her character. She gives up being the Ghost King. She abandons immortality to become a mortal. They call her love-blind and weak. But that choice is exactly her greatest moment. What did four hundred years of eternal life actually give her? Constant forgetting. Watching everyone around her disappear. Not even remembering her own parents’ faces. Endless emptiness. She had forgotten her own name. She only knew herself as the cold Ghost King. Duan Xu gave her something much bigger than love. He gave her the taste of sweet. The feeling of being chosen without doubt. The experience of “real” that she had missed for four hundred years.
Unlike gods in other dramas who destroy worlds for romance, He Simu does the opposite. She gives up her divine power. She gives up forever. She chooses to embrace sickness, aging, and death. Because she has seen light. Why would she ever go back to a lightless vacuum? A few decades of cooking rice, feeling pain, and laughing until tears come—that is worth more than billions of years of nothing. This is the clearest, most awake choice a character can make. A philosophical return from god to human. A final claim of her own existence. He Simu’s arc is not about becoming stronger. It is about becoming real. Four hundred years of loneliness proved one thing: no amount of power can fill the blank space where love should be. And one lifetime of messy, painful, beautiful humanity proved another: even a moment of truth is a million times more moving than an eternity of emptiness.
