I binged the whole thing last week, and honestly, it took a few chapters for the premise to click with me. The title makes it sound like a simple gag, but the development of that bond is anything but. It starts with this almost transactional, reluctant obligation from the master's side—he 'had to' pick her up, which sets up this inherent power imbalance laced with potential resentment.
What hooked me was how that forced beginning gets completely subverted. Their relationship becomes the core engine for worldbuilding. His duty to teach her forces him to re-examine his own cultivation principles, and her growth constantly challenges his reclusive, cynical worldview. It’s less about romantic tension (though some readers definitely read it that way) and more about a deeply pragmatic, slowly earned form of care. The mentorship is shown through exhausting, granular detail: correcting her stance for the thousandth time, worrying about her nutritional intake in a spirit-realm desert, the quiet pride when she innovates a technique he taught her. The bond's strength comes from it being forged through shared, mundane struggle, not destiny.
It ends up feeling like the most realistic depiction of a teacher-student relationship I've seen in xianxia, precisely because it had such an awkward, non-ideal start. The 'had to' part never fully disappears; it just transforms into a different kind of responsibility.