- #1
The author is too smart for his/her own good. They refused to take the simple and straightforward path. Everything has to be overly complicated and convoluted. A cultivation technique can't possibly just that, it has to have hidden purpose, supposed to be used like this during that using this resources so that it could be this way. A friendship/ brotherhood cannot be just that, it has to involve schemes and secret background and interests and gains.
Some reviewers called this novel "slow", but I don't think it's slow at all, but rather it takes too many turns. Instead of moving on with the plot, the author keeps adding random side quests. Many time while reading, I stopped and asked what's the point of this part/arc?
To give you an idea how convoluted this novel is, the MC schemes and manipulates a wounded cultivator for about 30 chapters just so he could point the MC to the right direction (a sect). But no he can't just come to the sect and apply to become a student. He first has to con and manipulate an old mortal couple and convince them to adopt him, why? Because the couple know a person who worked for a small mortal clan who has quota to the student application. So the MC schemes his way into the clan for three years, to become a servant of a young master who has the quota. He then schemes to get rid of the other servants to make sure that he would become the main servant. This goes on for dozens of chapters. Eventually he succeeded and managed to become a student/servant. But wait, it's not actually the sect at all, it's actually just a mortal academy set up by the sect to allow mortals a chance to enter the sect. Years of scheming and manipulating just to become student-servant in a prep school.
All the while he's hiding from a huge sect due to some mcguffin. After years of laying low, the first thing he does in the academy/prep school was to announce his name in a grandiose way, alerting the sect who was looking for him and put him in their crosshair. Note that the sect didn't even know what he looks like, they only had his name, had he used a fake name, the MC would be safe and fine, he doesn't even have to do anything else. But no, that would be far too simple and straightforward. Everything has to be convoluted, remember? There's a reason for this idiocy, because he's scheming! Lol, the MC is so much smarter than everybody else, of course. He has everybody else figured out, he knows what everybody would do at any given time at any given situation. It says that the MC has no golden finger, but omniscience is actually his cheat, since evidently he's a is god that can manipulate everyone with a simple word or two, and predict everyone's move ten steps ahead because he's so smart and scheming... *rolls eyes*
So anyway, it's bloated. It's 250 chapters in, the MC is still a worthless student in the sect's prep school, not even an outer disciple, let alone an inner disciple. Last I read, he spends a hundred chapters trying to get his useless young master to get selected as a disciple of a sect elder, or something. Because an elder can't just pick a talented student as a disciple, he has to set up a contest and it has to involved a series of long missions and numerous obstacles and schemes (there's that word again) and tricks and adversities, and remember, it's not even for the MC, it's for his master. And of course it's also not just a simple disciple searching, it also involves SCHEMES and factions and sect politics and ideologies war and so on.
In conclusion, it's tiring and bloated, and... dropped.
So, why giving this 3 stars if I'm dropping this? Well because 1 and 2 starts are reserved for tr*shy novels. This novel isn't "tr*sh" per se, it's just trying too hard to be different by adding stuff I don't care about. It's not bad for CN novel standards, it's just not for me.
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