- #1
I found the way he treats his arranged fiance Ruyan was rather too harsh. He agrees his previous self was an idiot, Ruyan agreed with him and did not want to be married to him, so I don't see the reason for his ego to be hurt that she did not like him. (Some of the beginning face slappings were acceptable but it soon gets too much and childish.)
There is going to be spoilers (past the current translation), so read-only if you are ok with spoiler to like 750.
The most effective way of gaining counterpoints is to get the heroines but after Wanxi and Mei Yuxian. The rest of the heroines become too bland. Here is what I mean.
To get Ruyan he just keeps ignoring her and she automatically wants to love him more, until she becomes a flat character and he gets her.
To get Saying who is proud - he embarrasses, disrespect, and brainwash her into liking him.
Chi Qiyan - he is better than her at everything to get a little affection from her, chess - fighting, shooting, music, drawing, scriptures, fighting - he just upgrades these skills to beat her and make all her accomplishments meaningless. Some of these, I could just ignore, but later he steeps so low as to use his cheat to make cats like him more, so he can childishly claim another victory over her. The author makes her like him more for that...
Ning Mei (a character not yet introduced) - She is blackmailed into liking him and while she is S, his actions are way too much.
....
....
While there is clearly an attempt at creating unique characters, the simple repeated method of getting their affections makes it too 2d for me.
He claims to be better than MC, yet he exclusively follows his path and no girl that was not part of MC joins his harem, he pretty much replicates the MC's move into going to the same business medicine mask, and more. for all the sh*t he gives the story and MC he just follows it, only being a tiny bit better than the Ye fang only getting there ahead of him by one step.
While I can see his reason for being ruthless to enemies, you notice that he also treats others who are not his enemy with the same ruthlessness which makes the story less likable.
The story does go down hell as he uses the same move repeated on girls to get their affection higher. Keep beating them in everything they are good at, Keep on humiliating them so they can like him... (To me it reads like one of those videos where a mouse learns to press a button to get food.) When it comes to Chi Qiyan you can guess the next 5 - 10 chapter is him beating her at something else and she increases affection by 5- 10. Saying will get humiliated, Mei will get forced, and so on and on.
[collapse]So to summarize, the action element gets quite boring as the enemy Ye Fang has no room for growth, he is always 1 step behind so there is no real tension. While in other OP MC cases you get stronger and stronger enemies to create illusion of tension, here it seems like he just keeps on hitting a person who is down. There is no satisfaction at his victory after a point. The girls are boring as there is a cycle of repeated same moves that move the progress bar of romance slowly towards the MC/Villain's favor. The MC seems obsessed with Ye Fang's plot and girls and he uses Ye Fang's moves to get them making the process rather dull, not really making anything of himself, apart from brief moments at the beginning of the novel. (Large harem but all are Ye Fang's girls, best knowledge of medicine, but just uses to defeat Ye Fang, he could do so much more with that knowledge as he has the money.So far, for me, the beginning of the story was rather interesting, but later on, it was like 80 percent repetition of the same plot with only 20 percent new things. So I can not rate it higher than 2. Well, the translation is good so 0.5 points for that to get the rating to 2.5.Edit- Also the filler words describing heroines taking a majority of many short chapters gets boring and annoying.