Los adopté el 17 de mayo de 2026.
Son lo mejor que me pasó este año. Los adopté de un refugio, son hermanos biológicos y los únicos dos de esa camada. Ya están castrados y con todas las vacunas al día. Tienen ahora mismo unos 8 meses.
Adopten gatitos, son lo mejor de la vida.
In chapter 29: The compromise, of LN12, while "judging" Hulan for the attempted murder on Shikyou, there is the following exchange:
>You’re contradicting yourself,” Jinshi said. “So far you’ve done nothing but heap praise on Shikyou. I’m asking why you would have wanted to kill him.”
>Chue piped up, “It’s not a contradiction at all!” In her hand was a slice of soft fried bread. “As long as Mister Shikyou is alive, there will be somebody who backs him for leader. Which is a big ol’ problem if you’re trying to lead without him.”
>"Precisely,” Hulan confirmed.
And it made me think that the same could happen later in the novels with Jinshi himself. This can be a precise mirror of that situation, in fact.
Jinshi has stated in many ways up to this point that he doesn't want to be the Emperor. >!He even marked his own body in the epilogue of LN 8 to avoid being used for a political marriage. !<But this quote is terrifying because, as I see it, the point is:
It doesn't matter if he wants it or not.
A new faction can be created solely based on his existence and legitimacy as heir to the throne, for instance. And that is the worst case scenario, because as the LNs state, he can be an excellent politician, but for peace times. He's excesively competent as administrator, even for his own good.
But besides that, this quote can be showing that Jinshi can be forced to take the throne, in an unavoidable way. Like destiny, more or less. Of course, this is speculative, since I didn't read past this chapter.
So please, no spoilers. Thanks!
After my completely unscientific attempt to reverse-engineer Jinshi's birth chart from twelve volumes of character development, someone asked me what I thought about Maomao.
This is dangerous, because now I have been thinking about it.
As with the Jinshi post: I am not claiming that these characters secretly have canonical birth charts. This is basically literary analysis using astrology as a symbolic system. I'm asking a very silly question very seriously: if I had to build a chart that reproduced Maomao as a character, what placements would I need?
And unlike Jinshi, who I see as fundamentally water + fire, I think Maomao is overwhelmingly earth + air.
My starting hypothesis is that most of her personal planets are clustered around late Capricorn and Aquarius.
And yes, this means Saturn is everywhere.
But unlike Jinshi's Saturn, which seems to constantly beat him over the head with a stick, Maomao's Saturn actually works.
Maomao is one of the most relentlessly pragmatic characters in the series.
She understands hierarchy. She understands material limitations. She understands that being intelligent doesn't magically exempt you from the social structure you live in. She constantly calculates what she can realistically do from the position she occupies.
And, most importantly, she values competence.
She doesn't particularly care about prestige for its own sake. She wants to know how things work and to be useful at the thing she has chosen to do.
Her identity is deeply connected to her work as an apothecary >!and doctor!< and to the knowledge Luomen gave her. She takes enormous pride in knowing what she is doing, even when she doesn't particularly care whether anyone else recognizes it.
That feels very Capricorn to me.
But she is far too weird, independent and intellectually unconventional for Capricorn alone to explain her.
Which brings me to the Aquarius problem.
This is probably my strongest non-negotiable placement for Maomao.
And not simply because "she is emotionally detached."
Look at her experience of family and belonging.
Her biological family is an absolute disaster. The people who actually raise her form something much stranger: Luomen, the women of the Verdigris House, and essentially an entire little community.
Maomao's real family isn't the conventional biological unit. She is raised by a network.
That is an extremely Aquarian Moon story to me.
Even her biological parents are two spectacular intellectual oddballs. Maomao comes from weirdness and is raised within an unconventional community, and she grows into someone who is perfectly capable of belonging to people while remaining profoundly independent from them.
Then there is her emotional detachment—but I don't think it represents an absence of feeling.
It is a functional distance.
Maomao can look at blood, illness, poisoning, death and physical suffering and ask: What is happening here? What do I need to do?
That ability is part of what makes her such a good medical practitioner.
She cares, but caring does not necessarily require emotional identification.
She can care by observing.
She can love by understanding.
And she can help by solving the problem.
This is also why I don't think her apparent emotional coldness should automatically be read as repression. Some of it certainly is defensive, especially regarding Jinshi, but some of it is simply how Maomao processes the world.
Also: Aquarius is fixed.
Maomao is adaptable externally and stubborn as hell internally.
Good luck making that woman believe something she has decided makes no sense.
This one almost writes itself.
Maomao doesn't simply possess an unusual intelligence. Her mind is attracted specifically to anomalies.
Something doesn't fit?
Something behaves strangely?
There is an unexplained symptom?
Someone has been poisoned in a way she hasn't seen before?
Suddenly Maomao is interested.
She thinks laterally, notices patterns other people miss, and is perfectly willing to entertain explanations that violate conventional assumptions if the evidence supports them.
That is the Mercury in Aquarius I want for her.
And I would put Mercury close enough to the late-Capricorn Sun to form a conjunction, possibly an out-of-sign conjunction.
Because Maomao's intelligence isn't merely something she has. It is central to her sense of who she is.
Which creates one of my favorite recurring jokes in the novels:
Maomao is extremely intelligent and therefore has enormous confidence in Maomao's intellectual interpretation of Maomao.
Unfortunately, Maomao is not always a reliable expert on Maomao.
Especially where Jinshi is concerned.
Her body can be reacting, her behavior can be changing, she can be doing increasingly irrational things for this man, and somewhere inside her head Mercury in Aquarius is still calmly preparing a report explaining why none of this constitutes sufficient evidence of romantic attachment.
Girl.
Please.
This is where I completely agree with the person who suggested it on my Jinshi post.
Maomao's love language is almost aggressively practical.
Jinshi wants emotional reassurance.
Maomao checks his wounds.
Jinshi wants affection.
Maomao makes sure he isn't developing an infection.
>!Jinshi asks for a "charge."!<
>!Maomao gives him a mooncake because she assumes he wants sugar.!<
>!Honestly, that scene might be the entire JinMao relationship compressed into thirty seconds.!<
>!But here's the important part: she stays.!<
Maomao's affection becomes visible through reliability, responsibility, care and concrete action long before she is willing—or perhaps able—to articulate it emotionally.
Her version of love is not primarily:
"Let me tell you how deeply I feel."
It is:
>!"Show me the wound."!<
That is an extraordinarily Capricorn Venus sentence.
And it also explains why Jinshi and Maomao can simultaneously understand each other extremely well and drive each other completely insane.
If my Leo Moon hypothesis for Jinshi is right, he wants to know:
Do you love ME? Did you choose ME? Am I special to you?
Venus in Capricorn Maomao:
I have personally kept you alive multiple times. What additional documentation do you require?
This is the placement I'm least certain about, but I increasingly like it.
At first I considered Aries because Maomao can be astonishingly impulsive.
But I don't think Maomao has much fire.
Her impulsiveness doesn't feel like:
I WANT THIS → GO.
That's Jinshi.
Maomao is more like:
Wait. That's weird.
And suddenly she is doing something incredibly dangerous because curiosity has temporarily overridden self-preservation.
Her action can be sudden, erratic and unconventional, but it is very often intellectually triggered.
She isn't consistently aggressive or confrontational. In fact, she can wait, observe, obey strategically and make herself inconspicuous when necessary.
Then an anomaly appears and:
OH MY GOD, POISON.
There she goes.
So I'm tentatively putting Mars in Aquarius, probably not tightly conjunct everything else, but part of the same Aquarian cluster.
That would also give her Mercury and Mars the same basic operating principle:
notice the anomaly → investigate the anomaly → act on the anomaly.
Sometimes before remembering that human bodies are mortal.
Because I think Maomao is fundamentally Saturnian.
But this is where comparing her to Jinshi becomes fascinating.
Both characters are intensely concerned with limitations.
They just respond to them completely differently.
Maomao:
The limitation exists. I need to understand it so I can work within or around it.
Jinshi:
The limitation exists. I WILL PERSONALLY BECOME THE LIMITATION.
>!And then he bangs his head against a pillar.!<
This is why I think Maomao represents relatively functional Saturnian energy while Jinshi's hypothetical Mars-Saturn conjunction is such a disaster.
Maomao uses limitation to structure herself.
Jinshi uses limitation to contain himself.
She survives by understanding reality.
He survives by controlling himself so brutally that sometimes the control itself becomes destructive.
And I think this is one of the reasons they work so beautifully together.
This might be my favorite part of the whole theory.
I see Maomao as overwhelmingly:
Earth — practical, material, competent, realistic, stable.
Air — analytical, detached, curious, unconventional, observational.
And Jinshi as much more:
Water — emotionally intense, secretive, psychologically complicated.
Fire — desire, will, pride, action, sexuality, ambition.
Jinshi feels something and eventually it becomes impossible for him not to act on it.
Maomao notices something and eventually it becomes impossible for her not to investigate it.
He needs her because she can give form and stability to things that threaten to overwhelm him.
She needs him because he is one of the few phenomena she cannot completely reduce to an intellectual problem.
He keeps becoming personal.
And Maomao hates when the experiment starts affecting the researcher.
Sun: late Capricorn
Moon: Aquarius
Mercury: early Aquarius, conjunct Sun
Venus: Capricorn
Mars: Aquarius (tentative)
Basically, I have constructed a woman who is 90% Saturn.
Which honestly feels correct.
I haven't even tried Jupiter or the outer planets yet because I would like to retain some fragments of my sanity.
I'm especially curious about Mars, though. Where would you put it?
I know Jinshi is a fictional character, we don't have the data to calculate an actual birth chart, and astrology isn't exactly Luomen-approved science. This is purely an archetypal character analysis.
But after reading up to LN12, I have developed a theory I can no longer unsee:
Jinshi is a Libra Sun, Leo Moon, Scorpio Rising, Virgo Mercury, with Venus in the 12th house conjunct his Sun and a nasty Mars-Saturn conjunction in Aries.
I have no proof. I have a LOT of textual evidence.
Libra Sun — the man whose entire existence is an exercise in maintaining balance
The obvious argument is beauty, charm and diplomacy, but that's actually the least interesting part.
Jinshi constantly thinks in terms of competing forces and consequences. He rarely gets to ask “What do I want?” without immediately having to ask “What happens to everyone else if I do what I want?”
>!In the western capital, this becomes especially obvious. He is constantly trying to prevent other people from using his position to legitimize a war, carefully limiting the scope of the ritual he performs so it cannot be interpreted as imperial support for an invasion. When dealing with Dahai, he refuses to simply throw his authority around. His attitude is essentially: if I have evidence, then I have the right to be firm, as he says while confronting Dahai in LN11.!<
He is obsessed with balance precisely because his existence destabilizes everything. The succession, marriage alliances, regional politics, Maomao's future: Ka Zuigetsu cannot simply exist without moving pieces around him.
So naturally he's a Libra.
And naturally he's an incredibly unbalanced Libra.
Scorpio Rising — everyone projects onto him, while the actual person remains hidden
People almost never simply meet Jinshi.
They see the Moon Prince. The Emperor's younger brother. The celestial beauty. The possible heir. A political tool. A sex object. A threat. >!In LN12, the Ri emissaries size him up and initially seem to mistake his beauty for softness.!<
Meanwhile Jinshi is exceptionally good at detecting this because he spent years in the rear palace being watched and evaluated while simultaneously performing an identity that wasn't really his.
His entire life is full of Scorpio themes: secrecy, false identities, power, sexuality, political danger, bodily transformation and control.
He literally spent six years pretending to be a eunuch.
Then, when his own body once again became politically useful to other people, >!he branded it, in the epilogue of LN8.!<
Which brings me to the placement I will defend to my grave:
Mars conjunct Saturn in Aries — Jinshi's entire psychological problem
Mars in Aries says:
I WANT. I ACT. I FIGHT.
Saturn says:
No.
And that, to me, is Jinshi.
The fascinating thing about him is that he isn't naturally mild. He has enormous willpower, aggression, jealousy, competitiveness, sexual desire and a strong controlling streak.
>!We even get hilarious flashes of it in LN12, when Rikuson deliberately provokes him and Jinshi privately considers arresting him for impertinence, then starts looking for an excuse to punish him, without knowing he killed Gyoku-ou. !<
But Jinshi has spent his entire life constructing restraints around that Mars.
And when the aggression cannot go outward, it frequently turns inward.
>!He brands himself. He bangs his head against a pillar when overwhelmed. He works until he physically cannot continue. In the western capital, he writes nearly 200 of letters by hand and refuses to leave while things remain unresolved. Maomao explicitly observes that he is the kind of person who has to see something through “to the bitter end, sometimes to his own detriment.”!<
Even his six-year eunuch performance fits the pattern.
His sexuality, body and potential descendants represent political power?
Fine.
Neutralize them.
His body becomes the territory over which he can exercise absolute authority when he cannot control the political world around him.
This is why I don't think “Jinshi is a masochist” quite explains him. There are definitely jokes in the text suggesting that his relationship with pain is... complicated. But pain isn't always the point.
Containment is.
Jinshi has something of a tyrant inside him, and his solution is to become the tyrant's first subject.
That is Mars-Saturn to me: enormous force under enormous restraint.
The positive side is also obvious. Mars-Saturn can produce extraordinary endurance and disciplined action, and Jinshi has both. The problem isn't that he can't endure difficult things.
The problem is that he doesn't know when to stop enduring them.
Venus in the 12th conjunct the Libra Sun — beautiful to everyone, inaccessible to himself
This one almost feels too obvious.
Jinshi possesses absurd Venusian beauty and social charm, but he experiences that beauty less as a gift than as something that happens to him.
>!In LN12, he literally thinks that if Heaven was going to give him a gift, he wishes it had given him actual talent instead of a pleasant appearance.!<
>!Sir.!<
>!We just watched you uncover a seventeen-year coal scheme, understand its economic and geopolitical implications, corner Dahai without abusing your authority, and effectively threaten the western capital with the fantasy-Chinese equivalent of the IRS.!<
But sure. No talent. Just pretty.
The 12th-house part is his love life.
His desire is hidden, constrained, sacrificial and politically dangerous from the beginning. He falls in love while living under a false identity. The woman he loves initially thinks he is a eunuch. His potential marriage affects the succession. Even once his feelings are obvious, he cannot simply pursue Maomao as an ordinary man.
The great irony of Jinshi is that half the country could fall at his feet, while being with the one woman he actually wants is enormously complicated.
Very Venus-in-the-12th behavior.
Virgo Mercury — the placement I initially forgot until someone pointed out that it is painfully obvious
Jinshi has always been intelligent. We know it since the beginning. >!LN11 simply gives him room to show how intelligent.!<
Think all the way back to how he identifies Maomao as the literate servant: instead of randomly interrogating people, he creates a test in which only the person capable of reading his message will react appropriately.
That's his brain.
Observe. Gather information. Construct a test. Find the inconsistency.
>!In the western capital, this becomes formidable. He combines Lahan's clues, historical records, Chue's investigation, the smell and use of coal, the ironworks, the region's fuel needs, the disappearance of officially recorded mining seventeen years earlier, and the political situation surrounding Shaoh.!<
Then he doesn't merely solve the mystery. He figures out exactly how to make that information politically useful.
>!He's also constantly learning. When he realizes he doesn't understand ordinary market prices because of his upbringing, he learns them. He picks up medical knowledge. He learns from people who know more than he does instead of needing to be the smartest specialist in the room.!<
Mercury in Virgo.
No further questions.
Leo Moon — because underneath the Moon Prince is the world's most exhausted drama queen
I went back and forth on the Moon, but I think it has to be fire, and Leo fits best.
Jinshi's public self is extraordinarily controlled.
His private emotional self?
>!He lies spread-eagle on his bed muttering:!<
>!“Rikuson... I'll never forgive Rikuson...”!<
>!because the man had the audacity to propose marriage to Maomao.!<
>!This is also the man who needs a “charge” before a difficult political meeting and reaches through a curtain to hold Maomao's hand—and then keeps holding it throughout the conversation while his sweaty palm gives away all the anxiety his face cannot show.!<
His emotional need isn't simply to be admired. He already receives more admiration than any human being could possibly want.
He wants to be chosen.
Specifically, he wants Maomao to choose Jinshi.
Not the Moon Prince.
Not Ka Zuigetsu.
Not the beautiful imperial younger brother.
Jinshi.
That makes his comment that he actually likes the name “Jinshi”—a name ordinary people can say—hit much harder for me.
Everyone adores the celestial prince.
The Leo Moon wants one particular woman to love the exhausted idiot underneath him.
TL;DR:
So my completely imaginary Jinshi chart is:
☉ Libra Sun — diplomacy, beauty, balance, justice, relational identity
☽ Leo Moon — pride, warmth, drama, enormous emotional needs hidden under the performance
↑ Scorpio Rising — magnetism, secrecy, sexuality, power, projection, control
☿ Virgo Mercury — analytical intelligence, pattern recognition, evidence, terrifying administrative competence
♀ Venus in Libra, 12th house, conjunct Sun — extraordinary beauty + hidden/complicated/sacrificial love
♂ conjunct ♄ in Aries — tremendous desire and aggression colliding with tremendous restraint
And honestly, Mars-Saturn is the placement that makes the whole character click for me.
Jinshi isn't fascinating because he lacks a dark side. He is fascinating because he is terrified of what might happen if he ever stopped containing it.
His solution has historically been to turn the tyranny inward: I will control myself so completely that nothing dangerous can escape, regardless of what it costs me.
>!Which is why I think some of his recent development is so important. When he says “I need a charge” and reaches for Maomao's hand, he does something very different from branding himself, banging his head against a pillar, or simply enduring until he breaks.!<
>!He admits that he needs someone.!<
Maybe the eventual healthy expression of that Mars-Saturn isn't becoming less intense.
Maybe it's learning that he can contain all that desire, anger, power and vulnerability without hurting someone else—and without having to hurt himself either.
Anyway, thank you for coming to my completely unnecessary astrological analysis of a fictional pseudo-Chinese prince.
Please tell me your alternative placements so we can fight about Jinshi's imaginary birth chart with the seriousness it deserves.
His name is Krishna, he sleeps in my computer desk while I work. Sometimes with a tiny blep.
