qiao wanmian and di feisheng's first appearances in the present-day narrative are mirrors of each other, orbiting the presence of li xiangyi and li lianhua. episode 5 introduces them both in the same way, stepping back into li lianhua's life while he watches from out of sight. di feisheng emerges from seclusion, qiao wanmian meets xiao zijin in yucheng. and what other information this episode gives us about these characters is the inverse of what we would've expected. where we assumed qiao wanmian might be the ex-lover, still mourning after ten years of missing li xiangyi, the first thing we (and li lianhua) see is that she's happy with someone else. it comes to be more nuanced than that, but the first impression we get is that qiao wanmian has moved on. di feisheng's first moment he gets by himself, meanwhile, is him drinking his grief over li xiangyi's absence away. he has jinyuanmeng bowing to his feet and and a tremendous amount of power in the jianghu he could use against anyone, yet here is, seemingly, above many other things, lonely.

the next arc serves to reinforce this idea, that where qiao wanmian by normal genre conventions should be the one who couldn't get over li xiangyi, it's di feisheng who continues to cling onto his history with him instead. during the liansanjiao's trip to baichuanyuan and pudu temple, we see qiao wanmian trying to work through her lingering emotions about li xiangyi over and over, and eventually (thanks to li lianhua's intervention) achieves some kind of tenuous closure on that part of her past. all of we see of di feisheng, on the other hand, is him becoming increasingly obsessed with what he views as unresolved events, until he finally chokes li lianhua against a wall to interrogate him about it. mysterious lotus casebook swapped what might be more typical framing of these characters. qiao wanmian is not a sad figure waiting for her sweetheart to return, but someone who realizes she was more attached to what he represents than to him, and in finding him as a person manages to become friends in this new life of the present. di feisheng isn't someone who moves on from an existence measured against li xiangyi and finds a new way to define himself, but rather a person who wound up isolated and frozen in time for ten years after losing him, and still struggles to leave their relationship behind or allow it to evolve.

tl;dr the real jilted lover of li xiangyi by the choices of the story is di feisheng, not qiao wanmian