Similar to other reviewers, I had mildly hoped this novel would bring something new to the table
The first part where he was still in the clan was promising since we had an MC who tried to act his supposed age despite being mentally in his 30s (I'm pretty sure it did a number on his mental faculties though so not sure if it was worth it)
Now if only the author had bothered to expand on those supposedly "wild" childhood adventures that the MC offhandedly referenced when the author skimmed over how his childhood was soooo much more eventful than that of that totally not 2d ice princess who grew up in a sect filled with political intrigue yet somehow managed to come out of without a single cunning bone in her body
Yeah, as you might've guessed from the example above, the author's worldview is more than a bit misogynistic
We don't get any women readers would be interested to know the perspective of (hell we don't even get any men for that matter; we're just stuck with a generic MC whose most defining characteristic seems to be his luck since his personality changes on a dime otherwise)
I may have been a bit spoiled by TCF to the point that I keep hoping his past life as a surgeon would've been more relevant, which it appeared to be the case for a bit since we had some dreams about him remembering his past life and... that's it. For like 140+ chapters he completely forgets about it.
His past life doesn't influence him at all except to boost the numbers on his mental stats. It doesn't affect his fighting style (needles aren't exactly what you'd imagine when you picture a surgeon. a tcm practitioner maybe but not a surgeon), it doesn't affect his morals (hippocratic oath who?). It would've been better if the author showed him struggling AT ALL to harm another person due to his medical background. At this point I'm trying to find excuses for him by imagining his was an underground surgeon... but then he wouldn't have died from overwork dude wth there's not
that much demand for illegal surgeries
Not to mention how unflappable he is in his first real fight
The other kids panicked (as is normal) but Mr "presumably no fighting experience" Ex-surgeon takes command easily as if that was on the resume we never got to see, I dunno, maybe he started as a field medic with active battlefield experience or something but readers aren't allowed to know about it because f*ck us apparently
Honestly the only part of his backstory I can believe is that he had no friends or family because this guy seems like a bipolar sociopath, which makes the premise of the fic (family cultivation) more jarring. It
could have worked if the power of family was shown to visibly affect his character development but all it did was give him a smooth childhood, solid support, and the vague motivation of protecting and uplifting his family I guess. Did those affect his choices in any meaningful way? Is he more generous with people? Kinder? More merciful? f*ck no this is a xianxia after all and that excuses every morally reprehensible act that could be twisted to plausibly be self-defense (which is made worse when I know xianxia MCs stronger yet kinder, but they had the fortune of being created by decent authors)
I would
like to be proven wrong about this guy as I was about the MC of TCF but so far I see no hope of that happening
The author likes to skim over interpersonal interactions to focus on fancy names and concepts they disguise as worldbuilding (which can easily be ignored since 80% of the time whatever they bring up is never plot-relevant)
Even worse is that they
tell us about the mc's good relationships with other people but never
show us for the sake of having more word count for talking about materials that aren't relevant beyond how much they apparently cost and will never see again
One actually proper personality quirk the protagonist apparently has is liking opening lootboxes apparently, since he paimstakingly cracks open stones to take a peek inside when it's a foregone conclusion where it's gonna end up (the bottomless stomach of his cheat bestie who never talks and has even less personality than him, but can be excused because it's a tree)
He likes to refer to his pets as family but it's clear they don't rank as highly as his human birth family since when thinking about family, they're never brought up
It would be more in line with thinking of them as particularly favored tools despite him arbitrarily giving his family name with only 2 of them instead of all
Spoiler
He gives his family name to his cheat tree and calls it his sworn brother but they have so few interactions you'd be forgiven for forgetting the tree is sentient.
He gives his family name to a random horn artifact that developed a consciousness and even use the generation name for the next generation, referring to it as his child, but after the first time it's used, you may as well ignore it ever existed since he never talks to it again and treats it like the tool that it is.
Y'know who he doesn't give his family name to? His bird, the first of his pets to have some semblance of a personality. The bird gets no surname because he doesn't count as his kid despite the bird being hatched by him and viewing him as a parent
The scorpioms I can excuse because there are over a hundred of them and it's not like he has a random name generator available to name them with
The deer get their own surname, which is fine since they were already a family unit before being ens*aved by the MC (he steamrolls the stag into accepting a given name it clearly didn't like because the name "was for the mc's convenience"; I would not bet on the author being pro-trans rights is my point)
The mouse has a shitty name but it doesn't seem to care which, good on it for not caring about the mc's opinions beyond self-preservation
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Don't expect any sort of acceptable morals from him; it's too much of an ask for him to return an animal to their owner when he could toss it into the bottomless pit in his space to terrify his deer s*aves with it's dying screams and completely forgo any leverage over it's owner
sure it was risky to keep around but he didn't even pretend to contemplate letting it go home, even with available proxies right there
his respect for the dead also flip-flops; one moment he's burning corpses and looting bodies, the next he's gathering up possessions to their families, and then he destroys a set of bones and later feels slightly guilty about it because the original owner left him some very useful stuff
at this point, he may as well be making full use of the corpses and using them as fertilizer for his tree brother but he apparently prefers to cremate them when as established earlier, he had no qualms using a living thing as fertilizer
his luck stat is rather absurd since he runs into cheats like they're cabbages
Spoiler
even in the secret realm arc, his luck was s*upidly high in that he managed to witness and loot a fight where all participants were incapacitated so they were easy loot for him
this happened not once, but twice
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Either the proximity to the MC has killed their braincells or the people of this world have much lower intelligence since common sense decisions are treated as clever ones
I'm not sure if it's a problem with the author or the translator, but there have been a few notable incidents of mixing up names / promouns
