General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The Demon Hunter's Romance (无忧渡)

The Demon Hunter's Romance (无忧渡, Wú Yōu Dù) is a 2025 Chinese costume fantasy romance television series produced by iQiyi, adapted from the novel Ban Xia (《半夏》) by the writer Ban Ming Ban Mei. In 36 episodes, it stars Ren Jialun (Allen Ren) as the demon hunter Xuan Ye and Song Zu'er as Ban Xia, a young woman whose eyes let her see demons, and it tells its story as six episodic strange tales set in the human-and-demon city of Guangping.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Title	Chinese: 无忧渡 (Wu You Du); English: The Demon Hunter's Romance¹
Broadcast	iQiyi, premiered 12 April 2025, 36 episodes; genres folklore, romance, adventure¹
Source material	Adapted from the novel Ban Xia by Ban Ming Ban Mei²
Directors	Lin Yu Fen as chief director, with Liang Sheng Quan, Cao Hua, and Huang Xiao Ying as co-directors²
Leads	Ren Jialun as Xuan Ye, Song Zu'er as Ban Xia³
Structure	Six units: "Xiao Yin" (鸮吟), "Hui Chun" (回春), "Huan Ming" (换命), "Ru Hua" (入画), "Shuang Sheng" (双生), "Hua Yao" (化妖)⁴
Performance	Broke 9000 on iQiyi's heat index within three days of launch, the fastest 2025 iQiyi drama to do so, and later passed 9500⁵^•⁶
Ratings	iQiyi rating 9.0/10 from about 376,000 users; Douban 7.6/10 from 206,061 users (as of September 2026)⁷

Spoilers

Premise and cast

The story is set in the prosperous city of Guangping, where humans and demons coexist and demons are skilled at hiding their forms and disguising themselves as people. Ban Xia, the daughter of a wealthy family, has a pair of strange eyes that often see the shadows of beings who are not there; however well behaved she is, she is secretly called "crazy." When she reveals that her cousin's sister-in-law is a demon, she is hunted, and she meets the demon hunter Xuan Ye. A gentle kiss he gives her eyes lets her thoroughly see the world where humans and demons coexist. As they investigate strange events together their relationship grows closer, but the secrets Xuan Ye carries push her away again and again, because he gradually discovers that although he is a demon hunter, he may himself be a demon.⁸

Ren Jialun, known for Under the Power (锦衣之下), plays Xuan Ye, and Song Zu'er, known for The Bond (乔家的儿女), plays Ban Xia, with a supporting cast including Xuan Yan, Fan Shuaiqi, Cao Jun, and others.³ The two leads meet through the "human-faced owl throat-eating case" (人面鸮食喉案), after which they work as a demon-hunting pair, probing human hearts and investigating demon affairs.⁹

Ending controversy

As the finale approached, a topic claiming "the ending of The Demon Hunter's Romance was changed by iQiyi" reached first place on Weibo's hot search list before the May Day holiday, and iQiyi's official Douyin and Weibo comment sections were flooded with complaints, without a public response. The planned happy ending (he) had become a tragic one (be) in which the two leads cannot stay together. A slide attributed to the iQiyi World Conference suggested the reason: during script development, iQiyi used an AI tool called "Script Workshop" (剧本工坊) to evaluate the ending, judged the original happy version to lack a sense of reality, and recommended the regretful version.⁶

Structure and literary roots

The series borrows the chaptered structure of traditional Chinese fiction: like the old television adaptation of Liaozhai, it tells self-contained strange tales in episodic units while a larger mystery about the two leads' identities runs underneath.⁴ Its six units, each a Liaozhai-style tale of the strange, are "Xiao Yin," "Hui Chun," "Huan Ming," "Ru Hua," "Shuang Sheng," and "Hua Yao," each following a Liaozhai-style small story of the supernatural.⁴^•⁹

Commentators traced its lineage to the zhiguai (strange tales) tradition. The late-Tang setting invites comparison with the Tang collection Youyang Zazu (《酉阳杂俎》), and the monster designs draw on the Classic of Mountains and Seas (《山海经》): the human-faced owl's appearance of "blue feathers and red beak" matches the Shanhaijing description of a bird shaped like an owl that can speak with a human tongue.¹⁰^•⁷

Themes: using demons to mirror people

The series follows the zhiguai tradition of "using demons to mirror people" (以妖喻人), with each unit mapping a demon calamity onto a human predicament. In "Hui Chun," the mirror demon feeds her lover jade pears that keep his face forever young while he unknowingly pays for beauty with his character; commentators read this case, in which a dancer's obsession with eternal youth mirrors real-world appearance anxiety. In "Huan Ming," the black cat "Nine Lives" repays a debt of one meal by trading its own lives for money, giving even its last life to its master.⁴^•⁹ The human-faced owl, which kills its victims by cutting out their throats to steal their voices so it can court the man it loves, abandons evil for love, and the puppet case is read as a metaphor for modern people clinging to the past and losing the present.⁹^•⁴

Production and visual style

Chief director Lin Yu Fen, whose credits include Eternal Love (三生三世十里桃花), Step by Step (步步惊情), and The Journey of Flower (花千骨), led a production praised for detailed craftsmanship. The color design uses a fresh, clean Chinese ink-wash style as its main palette, with a small number of contrasting colors drawn from Dunhuang mural pigments and natural light rendered differently in each scene.¹¹ Reviewers noted the built street sets and ambient environmental sound, and a horror technique that avoids gore: dread builds through sound and light, such as the hollow sound of a pear rolling on flagstones and candle flames casting layered shadows in mirrors.⁹^•⁴

The drama was shot about three years before its release and was shelved for reasons not publicly detailed; it aired in 2025 as a "surprise drop" with no promotional campaign, and the three-year wait reportedly raised, rather than lowered, audience expectations.⁶

Reception

The series opened strongly despite the lack of marketing. iQiyi's internal heat index broke 6000 within three hours of launch and peaked above 8500 the next day, then broke 9000 within three days, making it the fastest 2025 iQiyi drama to reach that mark; it later exceeded 9500.⁴^•⁵ On the Yunhe effectiveness chart it took the top spot on its second day with a 13.8% market share, rose to a peak of 23%, and reached number 24 on the yearly chart within nine days; it also swept the Maoyan, Dengta, and other data charts.¹¹ Internationally it topped iQiyi's international-version charts in 14 countries and regions.¹¹

Baidu Baike's aggregated figures record an iQiyi user rating of 9.0/10 from about 376,000 users and a Douban score of 7.6/10 from 206,061 users, both as of September 2026.⁷ The drama won the 2025 Weibo Vision Conference "Outstanding Work of the Year" award and the 2025 China-US TV Festival "Best Web Drama of the Year" award, entered iQiyi's 2025 Scream Night "National Hall" program section, and was rated a "popular drama" in the 2025 Douyin drama report.¹²

Criticism focused on pacing and character detail. Reviewers described uneven rhythm with too much dialogue drama woven into case investigation, units that ran too long and ended weakly ("tiger head, snake tail"), and underdeveloped emotional arcs, such as the human-faced owl's love for Ban Xia's brother, which is conveyed only in a dying line.¹³^•⁹^•¹⁴

Significance

Commentary cited the series as evidence that the zhiguai genre can break out of its type niche in long-form drama, following the two seasons of Strange Tales of Tang Dynasty (唐朝诡事录), and as a model of episodic structure that keeps a long series from dragging while sustaining a central mystery.⁵^•¹¹ Its success after three years on the shelf also became a data point in the 2025 discussion of shelved dramas: alongside Zhe Yao, it was held up as proof that content quality still decides a drama's fate.¹⁵

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026