THE LUNEFABLE REVIEW
I Am Your Natural Enemy: Good Benefits, Bad Rules, and Missing Flavor
Wen Yan wants a secure job and a properly cooked dinner. Both turn out to involve questions about the supernatural that nobody thought to put in his offer letter.
THE SHORT TAKE
An inventive supernatural workplace comedy with an observant newcomer, ominous employee benefits, and a delightfully literal problem with things losing their soul.
The dish everybody else thinks is right
Wen Yan has just found a decent job, so he treats himself to water-boiled beef. It ought to be a modest celebration. Instead, the chef and the other customers insist that a dish missing the finishing touches he remembers is exactly as it should be. I Am Your Natural Enemy finds an unusually appetizing way to make a familiar world feel wrong. Something has changed, and arguing about lunch is not enough to explain it.
He takes the food home rather than waste an expensive purchase, then restores the flavors himself. That stubborn practicality makes him easy company. He is neither a visionary announcing disaster nor an adventurer eager to escape ordinary life. He wants his salary, his benefits, and the meals he enjoys. The opening gives those small expectations enough weight that interference with them becomes a mystery worth pursuing.
Choosing a profession by its ending
His dream of the Stele Forest turns career selection into a grimly comic exercise. The professions offer impressive possibilities, but the visions attached to them show terrible endings. Wen Yan’s criterion is refreshingly unheroic: he wants the option whose practitioner appears to have died peacefully. That preference sits comfortably beside his interest in a reliable year-end bonus.
The enormous Soul Devouring Beast makes the selection less reassuring than he intended. Meanwhile, the disaster-monitoring machinery elsewhere presents the same danger through official procedures, numbered artifacts, and people struggling to interpret a warning. A shabby gaming computer can matter more than a roomful of impressive equipment. The juxtaposition gives the supernatural world a strong personality: objects remain awkward, ordinary-looking things even when the responsibilities attached to them become enormous.
Please read the employee handbook
The funeral house introduces its own mix of hospitality and menace. Director He Jian brings breakfast and insists that Wen Yan eat before entering. His concern is practical, but the building soon reveals reasons for concern that go well beyond an unpleasant smell. A mirror feels subtly wrong, and the employee regulations devote an alarming amount of space to behavior that can get someone dismissed.
These are effective details because they belong to an institution that still has shifts, keys, departments, and paperwork. Wen Yan takes the rules seriously partly because he wants to keep the job. The reader gets to ask what experience produced each restriction. When the director himself suddenly needs help, orientation becomes an emergency before the recruit has finished learning what the organization expects him to notice.
An insult is not a complete strategy
Wen Yan’s first special ability has a ridiculous verbal trigger, and his attempt to use it reveals the distance between activating something and understanding it. The confrontation is funny because a dramatic declaration produces a very inconvenient practical problem. He can attract attention without being able to finish the encounter on his own. Having an unusual advantage does not spare him confusion, discomfort, or dependence on somebody more experienced.
The director’s protective clothing makes another excellent workplace joke. What first looked like an ill-fitting suit acquires a new significance, and a later uniform becomes a genuinely valuable benefit. Wen Yan keeps revising his interpretation of what the institution has offered him. The story’s best humor grows out of those revisions, with reassuring language becoming unsettling and an ugly piece of workwear becoming something he is very glad to possess.
A mystery worth taking to a meeting
The food complaints develop beyond an eccentric personal preference. A meal shared with senior colleagues exposes consequences that cannot be shrugged off as disappointing seasoning. The discussion then turns on what people mean when they say something has a soul. Language becomes evidence, and an ordinary expression may offer a better lead than the grand assumptions attached to a supernatural warning.
Cai Qidong’s response helps make the setting persuasive. He listens, seeks other perspectives, and brings younger colleagues into the investigation instead of simply treating Wen Yan’s idea as a joke. The contrast between official seriousness and everyday examples is amusing, but the willingness to reconsider a definition gives the bureaucracy competence as well as comic potential. Readers can enjoy the speculation because somebody inside the story is prepared to test it.
A charger and something to eat
The hospital encounter adds a welcome tenderness. Hungry, confused, and carrying a dead phone, Wen Yan approaches a nurse whose appearance should make the situation alarming. Conversation turns instead to makeup, charging his phone, and sharing snacks. His borrowed professional knowledge gives him something to offer another person. The scene makes ordinary courtesy interesting without requiring him to understand everything around him.
The tonal switches are not always gentle. A cruel reaction involving a pet and some broad bodily jokes can feel harsher than the more affectionate comedy, while repeated explanations occasionally flatten an otherwise lively discovery. Still, the opening has a generous supply of concrete pleasures: meals that fail in suspicious ways, rules with hidden histories, and a newcomer trying to behave reasonably when reason keeps needing revision. Continue for the possibility that getting along with a strange world requires listening as carefully as learning how to oppose it.
Based on chapters 1–8 of the English edition. This is an opening impression, not a full-series verdict. No later plot developments are discussed.
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