Before getting to the actual complaint about the final arc, some commentary about the suspension of disbelief. Mostly this is just reasonable silliness. Some of the actions the villain is able to take are frankly kinda silly, but it's sort of expected with this sort of politically connected villain type, most books are not going to put that much thought into their political systems. However, occasionally the amount of influence that the villain has kind of feels like it varies to serve the plot rather than being consistent. For example, the scene where semi-known actress Gu Chong was killed in her room right after she has the police check her room with a witness that wasn't killed was... kinda silly. I get the idea that he can suppress the police or whatever but it's later established that he had problems and had to put in extra effort to deal with some rando online just posting asking about where her missing friend. This feels like it contradicts how much political pull he has from scene to scene, and also is just generally silly since it seems like it's practically bragging about him having power over the police. Not something you really want to do with higher-up connections that might abandon you if you keep pulling dumb stunts that increase the effort they have to put in to cover things up.

I'd also normally complain that the family aspect didn't really feel all that relevant thematically or as a plot detail, but in this case I think it did enough just acting as establishment for Lin Shangci's character and contrasting early on with how she seeks support from Gu Chong in the ending.

There are two 'actual' problems that I have. The first is the way that the relationship is handled late in the book. I found the memory recovery near the end of the book to be rather abrupt and to disrupt the flow of the character and relationship growth. It's a cool concept and in isolation it's a fine addition to the plot, something that can be called out as "a cool thing that happens", but in practice it just resulted in the part of the relationship where the issues are fully exposed between the two and the final form of the relationship is slowly forged to be awkwardly skipped over. Not really worth the tradeoff imo.

The second issue is the structure of the final act. The final arc tries to do an action then reveal plot structure, where the reader is left in the dark while the plot occurs and then things are explained afterwards. I think the problem is that overall, the final arc involved too much, and the balance of what was to be hidden and what was to be shown to the reader was off, so that it ended up feeling messy rather than a climactic reveal. For example, a major problem comes from which parts of the book are used to set this up. It of course makes perfect sense for dialogue, descriptions of actions the characters are doing, and other things of the like to be unreliable. These are elements that can be easily presented out of context and then reframed later to recontexualize entire scenes. However, the book also tries to do so using things that don't really make sense. For example, the narration claiming that "the same name occurred to both of them", when in-context clearly they were putting on a pre-planned show, or Tang Xu's joking awkward inner monologue that meeting with Gu Chong 'felt like cheating', which doesn't feel like it matches what Tang Xu, who is in on the plan and thus has an idea of the goal they are working towards, would be thinking about in that situation. It's not like we're dealing with elements of mind control or fourth-wall breaks that would cause objective book narration to mess with the reader. There's no reason why these elements of the book should be 'lying' to the reader, resulting in the execution feeling extremely messy. In addition, in trying to go for this structure, the atmosphere was sacrificed. The book cultivates a specific tone and mood throughout most of it that doesn't really mesh with this plot structure, and thus the final arc loses a lot of the background tone that elevated the story significantly.

I do think that the way that the story resolves is nicely thematic though. It represents both the relationship theme of Gu Chong and Lin Shangci learning to open up to each other and the story mechanic of using all the information gathered over the loops to pre-plan. However, it also involves the idea of bringing in outside help. This kind of works as an extension of the 'opening up to each other' theme, but it does kind of conflict with the "involving the innocent" theme to some extent brought up by Qi Qi's actions. The theme of 'opening up to others' also wasn't really particularly present, so the fact that the 'involving the innocent' theme was never really fully resolved presents a thematic clash that the book never really tries to address.

who is 'God' and are they the fortune teller that Lin Shangci's mom met back then?and also, again, curious about Gu Chong's background.