Guardian Episode 20 Recap
> Guardian Recap
Before any significant leads could be extracted from Zhu Jiu, he fell into a coma from his injuries. With his life fading, Zhu Hong used an ancestral serpentine remedy to temporarily restore his strength, granting him a few more hours. Meanwhile, by tracing clues like the timing of firecrackers, the team located the missing trio.
They discovered that the city-wide power outage, engineered to capture Zhu Jiu, had inadvertently shut down the sub-zero freezing system in the lab where they were trapped, thus saving their lives. The power outage was a major breach of regulations, leading to Director Zhao Yunlan and Professor Shen Wei being summoned by the Marine Administration. In the car, a weary Yunlan dozed off and had a vivid dream of a revived Zhu Jiu stealing the hallows.
Recalling how a previous nightmare had come true, Yunlan was alarmed. He had been discussing the nature of his dreams with Shen Wei, who warned that meddling with the "wormhole" of time comes at a "great price." Spooked by his vision and sensing the imminent danger, Yunlan abruptly left Shen Wei to handle the summons and rushed back to the Special Investigation Department, urgently calling Zhu Hong to move the hallows.
Back at the SID, the revived Zhu Jiu attacked Guo Changcheng but discovered he was too late—the hallows were already gone. Black Robed Envoy confronted the cornered Dixingian, demanding to know the identity of his boss. Defiant, Zhu Jiu declared that he had one "last summon" to perform. Intending to fuel his master's escape, he channeled his remaining life force, sacrificing himself and disintegrating into a black, hollow bottle.
Ya Qing, receiving the summons, collected the bottle in silent mourning before setting off to find Yunlan. Simultaneously, in the Subterranean realm, the sky pillar prison glowed with an eerie green light. A surge of dark energy burst forth, escaping its confines and ascending to the surface. Zhu Hong, carrying the hallows with no safe place to hide them, met Yunlan on the street, where Ya Qing intercepted them.
Yunlan finally came face-to-face with the man Zhu Jiu sacrificed himself for: the Night King. Having just escaped his prison, the Night King, a figure clad in a white robe and a hollow white mask, introduced himself as the leader of the Subterranean rebellion. He contrasted himself with the peace-keeping Black Robed Envoy, declaring his ambition to lead the Dixingren back to the surface and reclaim the world from the "inferior" human race.
Yunlan challenged the Night King's distorted ideology, accusing him of using his people as pawns to satisfy his own ambition. He deduced that the Night King's physical form was unstable and that he desperately needed the hallows to counteract the surface world's energy and stabilize himself. Aware of the hallow's dangerous backlash, Yunlan decided to use it as a weapon, feigning to hand it over to exploit his enemy's weakness.
The Night King urged Yunlan to abandon the "ignorant" humans, but Yunlan, while enduring the hallow's immense strain, defiantly asserted his identity as one of them, declaring his faith that someone would arrive to win this fight. Just as Yunlan was about to be overwhelmed by the hallow's power, Shen Wei arrived. His presence was enough to force the unstable Night King to retreat back to the Subterranean realm. Yunlan finally collapsed, having held on just long enough.
After Shen Wei tended to him, Yunlan awoke, but the repeated exposure to the hallows and the immense backlash from this confrontation took a severe toll. He found himself plunged into total darkness, having lost his sight. As he recovered, Yunlan drily remarked to Shen Wei that he had caused another city-wide blackout.
