I think some people are still confused about the time loop.

The hardest part is identifying the starting point. We know there was a first rewind.

Base Timeline:

LWY sees Ji Ling injure WWY → JY possesses WSG → JL then uses the power of three demons to start the rain → Ji Ling stops the drought → Ji Ling's death → Ji Can then appears → offers LWY the ability to rewind time to save Ji Ling.

This is probably the loop most viewers would agree on.

LWY rewinds many times → repeatedly fails to stop Ji Ling.

Eventually, one loop changes things:

LWY becomes strong enough to overpower everyone → stops the drought herself → her supposed death occurs → Ji Ling is consumed by loneliness → falls into a coma → Ji Can appears again → offers her the ability to go even further back to discover the true origin of Ji Ling’s loneliness.

IMPORTANT TO NOTE:

Bai Ze tells LWY that Ji Can does know how everything ends.

Ji Can has the power to rewind time and see the futures.

Before the Hanba Arc in Episode 19, when Ji Ling told LWY that A’Wu used to talk to him, proving this had already happened before.

Second Layer of the Loop:

LWY travels further into the past → cannot interact with anything → witnesses Ji Ling’s early life → YWH influences him → Ji Ling gains human form → accidentally swallows the dragon scale.

We then learn the roots of his loneliness:

Imprisonment in the Shilin Sect → watching people close to him die → being powerless to save them.

Critical Cave Scene:

Ji Ling reaches an emotional breaking point → wants to end his life.

But inside A’Wu was LWY all along.

In that moment:

LWY severs her tail → speaks to Ji Ling:

“Don’t be sad. Don’t cry. I’ll always be with you.”

Ji Ling regains hope → does not go through with it.

And here is the paradox:

LWY saves Ji Ling in the past → Jiu Ying created LWY specifically to use her to get close to Ji Ling (Long Shen) → Ji Ling lives long enough to meet LWY in the future → LWY later travels back to save him.

If LWY had never existed, who would have gone back to save Ji Ling in the past?

If Ji Ling never existed, why would Jiu Ying create LWY to influence Ji Ling?

IMPORTANT TO NOTE:
Even if Ji Ling did not die in the cave by committing suicide, LWY still would have saved him, as Ji Can mentions that the moment of LWY’s sacrifice, when she severed her tail and said, “Don’t be sad. Don’t cry. I’ll always be with you,” gave Ji Ling hope and helped him become who he is today.

This is important because his ultimate fate was to be consumed by Ji Can; he wants to save JL from himself, from his loneliness. So the hope that LWY gave Ji Ling may have been the extra spark that altered all the following loops and allowed him to reach the point we saw in episode 29 when he actually broke the loop and altered their fate.

Even though we were shown 20+ rewinds, from what we learned, it could literally happen forever, as LWY cannot die due to the oracle stone in her body, so the backlash from the rewinds ultimately did nothing.

In Episode 25, Ji Can knows this and tells us his goal is always to send LWY back in time to become A’Wu and

Save Ji Ling.

But even here, he still tells Ji Ling about the paradox of their existence:

“LWY was created by Jiu Ying, and she will die when Jiu Ying dies, and Ji Ling was created to kill Jiu Ying.”

But he also tells us that even if he can see the future, he cannot perceive everything.

The paradox is only broken when either LWY or Ji Ling is removed from the loop.

And that’s what happened in the final episode.

Something to note: to get to this point where Ji Ling goes back in time, kills the Fox Queen, takes LWY, and opens an exit to an unknown destination...

We don’t know how many tries it took for them to reach here. As LWY says, she tried countless times.

With that being said, I still don’t think this was the best use of time travel in a show. The cause and effect are there, but the way it was told felt messy at times.

You can piece the logic together afterward, but while watching, too much was held back for too long, rushed through, or explained in a vague way. That made it confusing.

But again, time travel and loops are just vehicles to show the theme of love and obsession.

The theme of love that transcends time and space is not something new, and that's probably what Guo Jingming wanted to show us through Veil of Shadows

That’s a good question some people have raised: if he truly died in the first timeline, then there would be no rewind.

So I included this in the original post:

Even if Ji Ling did not die in the cave by committing suicide, Lu Wu Yi still would have saved him, as Ji Can mentions that the moment of LWY’s sacrifice, when she severed her tail and said, “Don’t be sad. Don’t cry. I’ll always be with you,” gave Ji Ling hope and helped him become who he is today.

This is important because his ultimate fate was to be consumed by Ji Can, his loneliness.

So we can reasonably assume he may not have died in that cave. And if we hold to the idea that, unless something changes, events always unfold the same way, then he would always survive. Which means the chain of events would always repeat:

Ji Ling survives the cave suicide attempt → Jiu Ying creates Lu Wu Yi to get close to JL → LWY and JL meet → all events progress as before → LWY is eventually sent back in time → LWY severs her tail and gives JL hope → JL survives the cave incident and becomes the person he is today.

As Ji Can mentions, he wants to save Ji Ling from himself, from his loneliness. So the hope that LWY gave Ji Ling may have been the extra spark that altered the following loops and allowed him to reach the point we saw in episode 29 when he actually broke the loop.

Another observation: so the plot from episode 1 itself was in the time travel loop, right?

DistantDream:

Yes, if we just look at everything from episode 1 onward and assume it is one of many timelines. We would already have been in the loop. Because in episode 19, JL already told LWY that his A'Wu had really spoken to him.

This indicated that LWY had already been back in time, and that scene in the cave had already happened.

So, yes, starting at episode 1, it was already not the original timeline

Ji Chan already measing the timeline from the very beginning lol think we should made graphics of the timeline to make people easier to understand what event took place in what timeline.