- #1
3 stars.The story starts off strong! Just as advertised in the summary. The balance in the drama and how the ML and MC meets easily hooks reader's in.The thing that this story suffers from though is the inconsistency in its pacing. It feels like the story loses its drive after the initial part of the story is resolved. Alot of the plot feels like it was thrown together without any real thought. The reason why I say that is because parts where it should be tense and fast paced feels like it's dragging on and parts that should be slow and methodical goes by real quick.The romance of the story also suffers because of this. Just a huge FYI, this is not a romance story. Romance is an after thought in this BL, supposed to be superficial and shallow at best with it being used as comedic relief of some sort. But the author really wants to emphasize the budding feelings between MC and ML, and it seems kind of desperate to me while trying to make it subtle. Because of this, it makes it feel super forced.Spoiler
The subtlety comes from the fact that the ML spent 300 years in another dimension accumulating PTSD and losing his ability to socialize properly as a human. MC also doesn't help because he's too tunneled in on the fact that the ML has a harem of heroines from the novel.
[collapse]Due to the above, the MC and ML just doesn't click. Therefore it feels forced. The only bridging connection that keeps them together via plot is MC's skill. All the other side characters that are interested makes it obvious that they're just that. Side characters. So there isn't real romance happening there.The thing that probably would help on the romance side is putting POV shifts to the ML on what he thinks of the MC. And it's not a writing style issue since the author does it plenty of times with other characters. But they probably didn't side, again, romance is supposed to be secondary in this story.This story barely holds my interest. I think the one thing that would've kept my interest is if I knew what the MC was working up towards. MC's goal of wanting to survive is superficial to the plot. It's so predictable that it doesn't feel like the end goal to the story. Yes, there's another mystery that appeared, but it's a mystery therefore not tangible enough for me to grasp to keep going towards the end. I'm almost 90chapters in and I'm still waiting for the other plot shoe to drop.