Like the second arc, out of all the flowers they just picked that specific flower that will protect them and they keep it everywhere they go

Or the Animal world, where they speculate about the dog being the solution without any hint to it, it's all guesswork without any evidence but it's correct at the end. Basically author just by BSing anything and magically it's the solution, feels very lazy.

It is known that as long as there are people who survive after entering a painting, the level of difficulty in entering the next painting will continue to increase without exception until they manage to survive without any people dying.

after all, each of painting will have an important role and clues for the final twist at the end

The reason why they were able to get out of this painting was only because they suddenly found a mountain which had the painter's signature on it.

Towards the end of the story, the author will tell you that there is actually intelligent female character who should have entered the painting earlier (she has the same level of intelligence or maybe even superior then ML... and because of this, "the things" that behind the painting ended up preventing her from entering earlier (they caused her an accident)... even when she finally entered the painting world, she was still in a wheelchair.

in the early arcs, there was little to no down time with the characters in-between paintings, so I felt that I couldn't get sufficiently attached to some of them who were only around for an arc or two, plus I felt that the author had trouble juggling too many characters

Qin Ci - Arc 1 Doctor

Mu Yiran - Arc 1 Big Boss ML

Ke Xun - Arc 1 Gym Owner MC

Wei Dong - Arc 1 Bestfriend

Zhu Haowen - Arc 3 Engineer

Luo Bu - Arc 9 Rich 2nd Gen

Fang Fei - Arc 9 Diver

Shao Ling - Arc 9 Editor

Wu You - Arc 11 Mystic

Du Qingqing - Arc 12 Bookworm

Yue Cen - Arc 13 Art Connoisseur

Hua Jiqiu - Arc 13 Art Curator

Li Xiaochun - Arc 13 Chef

It's true that in the first few arcs most female characters had less presence, but I don't know,

Mother Geng from Arc 2 stuck with me, she was willing to die for her son

Sha Liu from Arc 2 as well was a horrible person who was willing to step on others to survive, but she was realistic, she was a complex character whose first and foremost priority is to survive, innocent people be damned, so no I don't like her but as a character, I could appreciate her.

Arc 5 had Guo Lixia and Yening Chenyi.

Yening Chenyi was a normal art student, cheerful and helpful, she didn't have much role, but I liked her.

Arc 6 had Xu Zhen the dignified and rational office lady, Cai Xiaoyan who was timid but still did her best and the three fujoshi friends.

Arc 8 had Zhao Yanbao and Chi Lei.

Chi Lei was someone who was willing to stay strong despite all the hardships she went through and Zhao Yanbao willingly sacrificing herself for the group since she wanted to stay where Chi Lei was.

Arc 9 had Xue Ge who also willingly sacrificed herself for the rest of the group and Fang Fei who was brave, courageous, and fierce.

There's also Yue Cen who is knowledgeable and unflappable, Wu You who was normal and terrified but was willing to get through the paintings, and Du Qingqing who is a bookworm and tried to offer as much help as she could

They did have lesser screen time, that's true, but honestly, it's pretty obvious that the author was struggling with giving screen time to all characters, not only the female ones

The wedding scene was definitely not detailed but that just makes me feel bittersweet. I felt mixed emotions. Happy that they're married. Sad that its the end of their journey.

It also made me feel curious of the two women wearing evening dress and holding hands. And the man who caught the flower and another man staring at him.

I remember the old man in the painting arc Bamboo Shoot. He sacrificed himself for others. In the end when they came out of the painting, they saw him happy inside with the girl.

Ke Xun tattooed a kiss mark on his neck/nape not sure but said 'under the tip of his hair'. He also tattooed Mu Yiran's username from WeChat, 'Mooney' at the top of his tailbone.

Mu Yiran made a silver ring for the both of them.

At Valentine's, Mu Yiran gave Ke Xun a customized expensive chocolates. Ke Xun gave something for the two of them, a pair of necklace. It had their initials. M for Mu Yiran, Mooney. C for Ke Xun, Corgi.

They frequently used that nickname from their WeChat, Corgi and Mooney. Like that was so cute!! ><

The story itself deals with a lot of metaphysical stuff, such as higher dimensions, etc. All the paintings in the novel have a theme that's pretty philosophical. Each painting has a theme that leads up to the final mystery as to why 13 people must enter paintings. I didn't write the themes down, I just wrote the general description of each world.

Please don't read the bottom half if you don't want to get spoiled any further.

2) Faith - a world where people have to get sacrifices for a god, appealing to the good side of a dual-sided god

3) Breakthrough (Bamboo apartments) - ghosts replaying their lives and death in an apartment building

4) Animal world- when humans are at the bottom of the food chain and cows are on top, humans get treated as livestock

5) Shadow- colorful world where people cannot be stained with another person's color

6) Human Studies- human experimentation galore, different experiments that you see in your psych textbooks but more dangerous (frontal lobe extraction, electroshock therapy, etc.)

7) Pure Land- cartoon world where each world is connected somehow, people must become a person in the cartoon

8) Scarlet Beast- a world where your troubles manifest in the real world as like some kind of symbolic thing

9) Rhinoceros on the Sea- on a boat, facing an illusion that tests the basic seven emotions (joy, desire, fear, sadness, surprise, anger, contempt) trying to find a signature that doesn't exsist

10) Inverse- a place without time and the introduction of different timelines, a place where time is taboo and trying to determine how the timeline works

11) Schrodinger's cat- a gameshow like world where people have to solve questions, a reference to how strict our school's are, as they focus on memorization and following the principals decided by others

12) Restart- a world where 2012 occurred and how humans have destroyed the world due to their own carelessness AKA: ebola outbreak, global warming, pollution

13) Harmony- different worlds and solving puzzles in a smaller group, different because everyone is truly split up with no ways of contacting each other

14) Shanhai - where the final 13 discover the different dimensions

The first and second painting that the protagonist didn't go to was a crime world and then a medical world.

The ML is the only character I have a problem with, he's way too OP. He's an art dealer but he practices martial arts, knows a lot about various subjects, and is practically like a detective. Every other character is pretty well written and has a pretty distinct personality, the doctor is my favorite character. The female characters are pretty well written as well.

MC: I LOVE HIM SO SO SO MUCH. HE'S A SUNSHINE, A HERO! His character is kind and supporting. I love how courageous he is. I love how straightforward he is when it comes to his feelings for ML. He wants to leave no regrets and he's confidently gay! He's independent and smart. I just love his character so much.

ML: Cold, very smart and handsome! I love how he slowly fell for our sunshine MC. He's kind tho he needs to be logical in a situation where his life is on the line. It's refreshing that the progress of romance between him and MC is slow. It's realistic and logical. You cannot hate ML's character even though he is very cold at first.

Wei Dong (MC's best friend) : I LOVE HIM TOO. He is there for MC. They're really brothers in death! He is also funny af.

Qin Ci (supporting character) : AAAAAA I LOVE HIM TOOO LOLSJDHWKSJ. I love how his patience is long af and how gentle his character is.

Zhou Haowen (supporting character) : MY BABYYY, PLS BE MINE. Logical and cold! Very smart and observant!

When they’re listing out the “hints” that each of the paintings has given them, they’re like, “Since the arc 7 painting has tools such as animal ears that we can wear, it’s telling us that the we have patterns tattooed onto our bones that we can use as tools.” Like... how did you make that connection?

Another example: “One of the paintings depicts a scene from the Qin Dynasty, which tells us that the entering painting incidents started during the Qin Dynasty.” But there are also paintings taking place in other ancient time periods, in the 1990s, in the year 2012, and in the present day, so why did entering paintings definitely start in the Qin Dynasty and not in any of those other times?

Arc 3, which I liked because you got to see the emotional struggles of not just the “painting hoppers” but the NPCs as well. The arc takes place in an apartment complex and you find out about some of the previous tenants who died for various reasons, but they each had an insecurity or traumatic event that they were plagued by, and it was sad but beautiful to get to see that part of humanity.

Arc 7 because the theme was cartoons and I found out about a lot of cartoons I hadn’t know about. Also because they have props that they have to carry/use/wear, including cat ears, bunny ears, etc. and it was cute lol.

Arc 8 because it was so heartbreaking!!! One of the characters who died was a surprise to both me and the rest of the characters. They were mad about it and so was I, but more in the way where I just cried a lot because the author did a good job of weaving this story together. You also find out about the doctor’s backstory here. And the backstories of some of the other characters who were introduced in this arc were so sad too.

Arc 1 for some reason that I can’t put my finger on; it just didn’t draw me in or feel as compelling as the later arcs. Even though the scenes described sounded like they were pretty terrifying and grotesque, for some reason they just didn’t give that FEEL of being terrifying and grotesque. But I didn’t have the same issue with the later arcs; in those, the horror and gore elements were sufficiently, well, horrifying and gory.

Arc 12 felt weaker to me because there were so many mixed and seemingly unrelated elements/clues. Even after they figured out that all the clues were tied together by the concept of the world ending/restarting but freed from human evils, it still just didn’t feel cohesive. And it really bothered me that the doctor was like, “I’ve been so stuck on the gruesome and exaggerated deaths that the paintings always have, so it didn’t even occur to me that our group members in this painting died of an actual, normal, real world disease, and the only exaggeration is the time frame.” And I’m like... no, this is actually a VERY exaggerated depiction of death from ebola virus??? Because real victims of ebola virus... don't melt into a puddle of blood. Also, there’s this part in the beginning (ish) of the arc where they were like, “It’s useless to search in the jungle because it’s huge and there’s no way we’d be able to see a tiny signature amongst all the wildly overgrown trees.” And then after they have the breakthrough where they figure out that the theme of the painting is to restart the world but in a more “natural” way of living, they’re like, “Oh, that means the signature must be in the jungle! Let’s go comb through the jungle!”... which makes no sense because the jungle is STILL huge and filled with wildly overgrown trees and plants, so they still wouldn’t be able to see the signature...

One of the reasons was: "if no one die, they HAVE to Chose/Vote someone to die".

One example, Forced to watch a Giant figures having s*x and had to listen too!!! LMAO