question: do i need to read passion (ilay, taeui) to fully understand this story?

I feel like reading passion(ilay+taeui) helps make you understand more. Like why does xinlu like taeui or like what happened between them. I guess it's only beneficial if you actually like care care or read for the plot.

Yes it would help a lot with understanding both characters and dialogue

I personally would say no, atleast if you are not interested in that story. You can read a few chapters because he too starts showing up pretty early. Or you can read the summary somewhere It will just make you understand better how far Xinlu has come in his character arc, when he was so obsessive about having Taeuli.

Not really. Passion is good so u can read it if u want to but all u need to know is that taeui liked xinlu at first (kind of like a puppy crush? Or just simple attraction) but then got involved with Ilay and slowly develops feelings for him. Xinlu didn't like the fact that taeui who once liked him now liked someone else, and that someone else was Ilay (he hates his guts as evident). So he does stuff to try and possess taeui. One of them was threatening taeui with jaeui's life (taeui's twin brother who's this genius weapon maker) and taking away taeui with him. Right in front of Ilay. Ilay ends up fighting Xinlu and injured him in one eye hence why he's blind. To make matters worse taeui rejected xinlu very firmly, which might have fueled his hate for Ilay even more. But yeah that's all you gotta know. You should definitely read passion tho if u can handle black flag ml's cus it's really good (it has sa in it tho)

thanks for all the replies/opinions. i’m largely familiar with passion because its very popular but i really like yuri and xinlu’s personalities from what i’ve seem from people’s editd and posts so i was wondering if i can skip reading it first since its already much longer than this one lol

Honestly Passion is a alright read, it had more hope in the beginning but it keeps going back to SA or confinement. I don’t know if you would enjoy reading it, compared to this story it’s a bit much.

But if you want the context of what led to this couple maybe read a summary or recap. I just personally don’t know if I’d recommend Passion as worth the read for context. It’s alright it’s just a lot of bs lately, it’s tiring.