CloudA

(This analysis is based on the character’s development through Episodes 1–20.)

Some people call Murong Qingyi a lovesick fool. Some call him possessive. Some even call him unhinged. But once you really look closely at him, these labels all feel too thin. He isn’t any one “type” — he’s a walking contradiction, woven together from years of overlapping trauma responses.

From a psychological point of view, what makes a character “complex” usually isn’t that he has many different personalities. It’s that he carries many mechanisms that clash with each other, yet are all true at the same time: strong on the outside, shrinking on the inside; clear-headed, yet willing to bet everything; desperate to belong, yet convinced he must walk alone. The five sections below try to peel that contradiction apart, one layer at a time.

1. The Foundation: Three Relationships, Three Beliefs Carved to the Bone
Murong Qingyi’s pain wasn’t caused by a single moment. Psychology separates “single-incident trauma” from “relational trauma.” Single-incident trauma (like an accident) injures one point in memory. But long-term trauma — the kind inflicted by the people closest to you, with no way to escape — injures something deeper: a person’s core beliefs about the world, about others, and about himself. What Murong Qingyi carries is the second kind, and it came from three people who were supposed to love him. Each of these three relationships carved one belief into him.

1) His adoptive parents: the one who hurts you and the only one who protects you are the same person

During the twelve years he spent lost with the wrong family, his adoptive father Li Rongzhang subjected him to constant psychological and physical abuse — not simply beatings, but a “taming” designed to crush his dignity and achieve total control. And yet, strangely, to the outside world Li Rongzhang was the only one who ever stood up for him: when he learned that the Huo family had severed the tendons in Qingyi’s hands, he was the only one who ordered the truth to be dug up. His adoptive mother was tangled in the same way — herself a victim of domestic violence, she took all her pain out on him, and then, afterward, would tend to his wounds.

This pattern — harm mixed with occasional kindness, alternating unpredictably — has a specific name in psychology: trauma bonding, driven by intermittent reinforcement. It torments a person far more than pure abuse would. If someone is only ever cruel to you, you can hate them cleanly. But when harm and shelter come from the same hand, your heart is pulled back and forth — you can neither fully hate them nor ever feel safe. What makes it crueler still is that Li Rongzhang’s “protection” wasn’t love at all. It was possessiveness — you belong to me, only I get to hurt you — and he even used Qingyi’s suffering as a bargaining chip to extract profit from other powerful families.

So the first lesson this relationship taught him was: closeness and danger are tied together; the people who love me are also the people who hurt me. This is why, as an adult, he can’t easily trust anyone who gets close.

2) His birth mother: the “scapegoat” for her grief

After surviving so much and finally returning to his birth mother, Cheng Jinzhi, the warmth he hoped for never came. She blamed him for her husband’s death in an explosion — convinced that he had indirectly delayed the military intelligence, that he was a “bad-luck omen” who brought disaster. In psychology, this is called displaced anger and scapegoating: when a person can’t face their own enormous pain (here, the loss of a husband), they redirect it onto a weaker, “safer” target. Murong Qingyi wasn’t the reason for his mother’s hatred — he was simply the container she poured her pain into.

On top of that, in a well-to-do Republican-era family, “swapping the wrong baby” was a shame too embarrassing to admit — keeping up appearances mattered more than reclaiming a blood tie. And she had long since given the “son” spot in her heart to the adopted child she’d raised (Li Boze). All of this made her resist her real son’s return, meeting him with years of cold words, belittling, and slander.

The second belief this relationship carved is the most damaging of all: “My very existence is a mistake, a disaster.” When a child is repeatedly rejected by the one person who should love him unconditionally, it’s almost impossible for him not to absorb that rejection as a verdict on himself. His famous line — “one is born to walk alone” — is rooted right here: having never received real motherly love, he simply cut off his own hope for love before it could hurt him again.

3) Ren Susu: the light he finally grasped, turned into a betrayal

Three years ago, when he had finally handed over his heart completely, he heard that cold word — used. And then, to keep from dragging him down, Susu faked her death right in front of him. Psychology calls this betrayal trauma — harm caused by the person you trust and depend on most does far more damage than harm from a stranger, because it shakes the very foundation of whether you can believe in love at all.

For Murong Qingyi, this blow cut even deeper. Susu had been the one faint light in his dark life, the one exception he’d finally dared to bet on. Her “leaving” confirmed, all over again, the core fear he’d carried since childhood: in the end, I will always be abandoned. This explains his most contradictory behavior later on — he claims his love has turned to hatred, yet he can’t let go, asking her again and again whether she ever loved him. What he’s really after isn’t the answer itself. It’s the need to confirm one thing: whether, just once, he was truly wanted.

These three relationships are, in the end, the source of everything about him that looks “irrational.” He didn’t suddenly become fragile or obsessive. Long ago, these three people each taught him a lesson: closeness is danger, existence is a mistake, sincerity always gets betrayed. Nearly every choice he makes afterward can be traced back to these core beliefs — he is simply trying to survive, using the only method his childhood ever taught him.

2. The “Raw Meat” Scene: Why Would a Strong Man Suddenly Back Down?
A man who is decisive and ruthless in the outside world, yet silently swallows raw meat at a single command from his adoptive father — many viewers don’t understand it. But from the standpoint of trauma psychology, this is exactly the most typical response.

When people feel threatened, there are four instinctive reactions: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. We’re used to treating “resistance” as bravery. But for someone who grew up under constant pressure, compliance itself is a survival program the body has learned — because in his childhood, fighting back usually brought harsher punishment, while giving in kept the damage as low as possible.

There’s an even deeper layer here, a phenomenon called state-dependent regression: the moment he’s placed back inside the oppressive atmosphere his adoptive father creates, his status, his power, everything he gained as an adult instantly falls away, and his nervous system automatically drags him back into the state of a helpless child. So it isn’t a question of whether he wants to resist — his mind stays clear, but his body reacts before his mind can. That gap between awareness and instinct is the most painful thing about this scene: he understands everything, and still lowers all his defenses.

It makes even more sense when we connect it to the trauma bonding from the last section: the person he’s obeying is the very one who both hurt him and was the only one to stand up for him. Inside that obedience is fear — but also a thread of twisted attachment he can’t quite cut. This isn’t weakness. It’s a tamed nervous system choosing the path of least damage.

3. The Deepest Contradiction: Insisting He “Walks Alone,” While Flying Straight Into the Flame
Growing up starved of love, abandoned, and unaccepted shapes an anxious way of relating — what psychology calls anxious or disorganized attachment. People like this carry two voices at once: a desperate longing for closeness, and a terror of being abandoned.

The way Murong Qingyi handles this contradiction is to set up a defense first — “one is born to walk alone.” This is really a form of counter-dependency: if I never expect anything from anyone to begin with, then no one can let me down again. The line sounds free and detached, but underneath it hides something else: I don’t dare to gamble anymore.

The moment Ren Susu appears, that defense collapses in an instant. He throws himself toward her, and that moth-to-a-flame obsession is, at its heart, a backlash of the long-suppressed hunger for attachment. Someone who has never been truly cherished, when the first faint light appears, wants to grip it with everything he has — even if it leaves him covered in wounds.

This is where his most moving complexity lies: the defense and the longing exist at the very same time. His words say he doesn’t need it; his actions bet everything on it. This isn’t inconsistency — it’s the real inner structure of someone starved of love. The wall his mind builds can never hold back the instinctive longing to belong.

4. Forging Suffering Into a Moral Compass: Rebuilding the Self After Trauma
If the story stopped at “pitiful victim,” he wouldn’t be this compelling. What truly makes this character stand out is that he turned his suffering into a value system of his own.

Three years ago, he chose to become a doctor, to save lives; in the rain-alley standoff, he shouts, “examine yourself, serve the nation and its people”; his measuring stick has always been good versus evil, not the powerful families’ logic of us versus them. Psychology calls this transformation meaning-making and post-traumatic growth — after enormous pain, a person gives that pain meaning and grows a tougher self out of it.

And there’s a clever psychological twist here: precisely because he’s an “outsider” in both the Murong and Li households, he was never tamed by “the existing order.” The people with power habitually dress up their selfishness and blindness as “maturity” and “seeing the bigger picture.” But because he never belonged to any camp, he kept a bystander’s clear sight. His moral sense is both a genuinely pure heart and an identity a rejected man rebuilt for himself — you won’t give me a place, so I’ll define who I am on my own.

The wound of being cast out became, in the end, the very ground he stands on to refuse to be corrupted. It’s one of the most dignified exits a trauma survivor can find.

5. An “Unfinished” Person: Trauma Shaped Him, But Never Fully Defined Him
Fate has been almost merciless to him: rejected by his birth mother, his beloved gone missing, three years imprisoned on a false charge, the tendons in his hands severed, and then — just when he’d barely made it out — his supposedly dead love reappears, about to marry his own brother. Again and again, he’s been knocked back to square one.

And yet, through all of it, his real life’s work has never stopped: to notice, and break free from, the reflex of compliance his childhood trained into him — to stop trading his self-respect for a moment of safety. He’s walked part of that road. Even now, after everything he’s been through, he still stands up for Susu and for those innocent girls — proof that the part of him that “fights back and protects” never died.

Because from beginning to end, he never became the kind of person he most despises. This is the character’s deepest complexity, and also his most moving quality: trauma shaped him profoundly, but it never fully defined him. He was crushed over and over, but each time, that heart — the one that knows right from wrong and holds others in mind — was still there.

As Zhang Linghe put it, speaking for this character: someone raised in coldness doesn’t lose the ability to love — he loses the memory of being loved. And what Murong Qingyi proves with his whole life is this: even though no one ever taught him how to be loved, he still chose to love and to protect. That isn’t weakness, and it isn’t being a lovesick fool. It’s the most fierce, most precious clarity of a man who grew up in the ruins.

Closing: The One Who Looks the Most Unhinged Is Actually the Most Clear-Eyed
Put these five layers together, and Murong Qingyi may well be the most complex role Zhang Linghe has taken on so far — and the one that best shows what he can do as an actor. What makes this character hard to play isn’t how hard he has to cry in any single scene. It’s holding all those contradictory-yet-true things in one look at once: clarity and brokenness, sharpness and retreat, hatred and the refusal to let go. Play him too shallow, and he’s a lovesick fool; play him too far, and he’s just unhinged. Only someone who truly understands his psychological logic can strike that balance.

And the most solid thing about this character is that his growth arc is complete and his behavior always makes sense: every time he backs down, every time he rushes forward, every time he steps up, it can be explained by his underlying trauma — not a single beat is forced just to “manufacture drama.” His makeup is far more complex than “lovesick.” It’s because he clawed his way up out of the very bottom of suffering that he can truly feel the pain of the trampled, nameless people around him — and that’s why he’s willing to fight a lonely, hopeless battle for orphans, for trafficked girls, for lives lost to injustice.

Set him beside his elder brother, and that clarity stands out even more sharply. The brother is a textbook warlord who puts profit and family above all, who believes in protecting the existing order and seeing the bigger picture. Murong Qingyi, meanwhile, insists on measuring the world by good and evil, which makes him the “clueless” oddball in everyone’s eyes. And yet it’s exactly this man — the one who looks the most unhinged, the most out of step — who is living the most clear-eyed life in the entire drama. He sees straight through the selfishness and blindness wrapped in the word “maturity,” and he refuses to close his eyes just to fit in.

He was crushed by fate again and again, yet he never let himself become the very thing he hated most. That, in the end, is Murong Qingyi.