- #1
Much later update. Original left below.So, this novel has definitely not kept up the quality it originally showed. Again, my first review covers what it did so well at the start. The first arc probably remains of my favorite in any cultivation novel. Every now and then a bit of that original brilliance shines through, but that almost makes it all the more disappointing. It seems the author can do so much better, but they just... don't.The novel has fallen into a lot of bad ruts. We basically just get the same cookie cutter villains that care endlessly about their face and raping and not much else now. The MC's powerlevel constantly leaves them in a weird spot where all but a few enemies are either a sure-win or sure-loss. There is a complete lack of any sense of time or space. People are just constantly where they need to be, exactly when they need to be. It doesn't particularly matter where they were last paragraph. This makes the world feel really small and disconnected.The fights are also in a bit of a weird spot. They're still pretty quick, which I do like quite a bit because I think too many novels see fighting as an end unto itself, rather than a way of exploring conflict and showing progression. But there's also quite a lot of fighting... which basically brings us back to fighting as an end unto itself. This is particularly bad in this novel because of the beasts. Each opponent ends up needing their beasts' introduced, and we see quite a lot of opponents. The fact all fights have a large number of participants also means a lot of time needs to be spent just managing basic information like who is fighting whom. So we've got short fights, with an unusual amount of time spent on introducing the opponents, and the real basic stuff that doesn't do anything for enhancing the conflict nor showing progression is multiplied several times over. And then the MC just kinda uses the same few moves and powerups have started to just starting laying on as uninteresting modifiers - "he used the same move he's been using for a long time, and now supported it with more sword ki" kind of thing. It just doesn't do much.The bits this novel still does pretty well - namely the interactions between the MC, his pets, and his friends - is still not all that focused on. You'll get a little bit and then a timeskip and then fighting and fighting and fighting and a few words on a powerup and then repeat. One character that he's had some really nice interactions with still lives with him, but they've barely had any direction interaction in awhile, and none all that interesting.Overall there's a lot here that just lacks impact. Every now and then the author will care enough to do something properly, and those bits are quite good. Strangely, this can even happen just a chapter or two after the author totally screwed up something extremely similar. I'm not really sure what might explain this.At any rate, there's some decent stuff here. It's far from great after the initial arc, but at least it's different from the weirdly similar mass of other not so great novels in this genre. And every now and then a bright spot shines through... though that almost makes the bad bits more painful, honestly.---So far this is quickly becoming one of my favorite CN novels. You won't find a huge departure from any tropes here, but tropes are tropes for a reason. The most excessive parts (got betrayed and crippled, basically) are also pretty restricted to the very first couple of chapters of the novel, though their influence continues after that.There's also some basic stuff I'm not typically a fan of, with the combat and arts being a bit more on the side of what you might find in an old Chinese martial arts movie. For example the MC seems to be gravitating towards using a whip as his main weapon. I enjoy the variety, but without headcanoning that basically everything he does with it involves magic, it's just kind of ridiculous. It's not too extreme, but it certainly tends this way.You even have everybody constantly talking about how the MC is tr*sh. Again in some parts I think this is getting a little excessive. However at least it makes sense for once. In most novels most people are tr*sh, so it's quite odd that the MC is always the one who gets singled out. But in this novel the MC is slandered and publicly known for essentially attempting to date r*pe a very well known and popular woman. It's fairly understandable that he would attract public ire at least. So far he's also legitimately fairly old for his current cultivation, so it seems pretty reasonable to me that people would be calling him tr*sh for now.However, as I said, this novel is becoming one of my favorites. It's because the story actually spends time on the actual relationships between the characters. So many stories do rely on the MC being willing to do a lot for their family but hardly ever show their interactions with the aforementioned family. They so often rely totally on people not questioning the fact the MC loves their mother or whatever, and as a result they say like ten things to each other in a thousand chapters. That relationship often just doesn't mean much unless you do a whole lot of self-insertion. However here the author actually goes into it. We get to actually see and understand how and why the MC cares so much for their mother. It's a wonderful payoff, and makes the story and the MC's struggles actually feel like it all means something. It's too early to say for sure, but so far this seems to be how the MC's other relationships are going too. I don't expect to see romantic partners that just fade into the background as soon as the initial flirting is over. It's really not something I should be so excited about, but...And just to top it all off, the fights are just enough and not too much. The fights are just long enough to make their point about the characters' strengths and abilities. And then they actually end, and the story moves on. It's wonderful.It's still early days for a novel this long, but so far I'm really excited about it.
