Oh, boy… where do I start with this one…
TL;DR is that it’s not bad, but various things ruined it for me, those being:
- Bad translation
- Authors’ greed and lack of intelligence
- Author’s misplaced (and too much) focus on torture, horror and revenge.
- Kind of cliché, kind of weak ending, not enough after stories.
And now for the long version.
1. Bad translation (I read the webnovel version)
At the beginning it was kinda OK, but it still had major issues like saying the same thing twice but with a slight twist, like: young youth, childish juvenile, etc.
Then towards the last 500 chapters it gets even worse and in places it’s no better than machine translation, I could hardly make out what they were trying to say, but it hardly mattered because...
2. Authors’ greed and stupidity
… because 20-40% of the text is irrelevant, it’s all useless garbage that just adds girth for no reason, stuff like: over-explanations, recaps, summaries, re-explanations, etc. All this does is slow down the pacing of the story and piss me off which also breaks the immersion, it also makes you feel like the author is treating you like an 8 year old ret*ard, who needs all the over/re explanation or you just won’t get it, this also means that there is almost nothing for the more intelligent readers to figure out by themselves, you are robbed of the joy of discovery by the authors themselves.
I even developed a kind of speed-reading technique where I just read the first 3-5 words of a paragraph to determine if it's worth skipping or not, most of the times only the dialogues needed to be read, but there were pages of trash in between them and by the time someone answered you forgot to what, even the author forgets sometimes.
And speaking of the author ruining their own story, while other authors spoil their own stories with chapter titles, this author also sometimes adds a line or two at the end of a few chapters that spoil hundreds of chapters at once.
I read a handful of these Chinese/Korean cultivation novels and for a while I thought it was just something in the water or maybe they all studied under the same idiot teacher, but I think I finally figured it out.
I’m fairly convinced now that these authors are padding their stories on purpose, either so that they can sell more volumes (40% more text means 40% more volumes which means 40% more revenue) or they can publish 40% more chapters and therefore get 40% more tokens/coins on online reading sites.
But the author forgets that this kind of behavior means fewer readers and therefore less revenue, in fact they are sabotaging their entire countries authors with it.
3. Author’s misplaced (and too much) focus on torture, horror and revenge.
Not sure if it’s true (don’t care enough to look into it) but it feels like the author is a female woman… (it’s an inside joke). I think this because while this is still a cultivation story which focuses fairly heavily (but not uncommonly) on action it lacks attention to detail, sure there is a kind of leveling up but cultivation wise there is nothing but a few words said and only for the MC, and how you travel from one realm to the other is ignored entirely, it seems like you just walk there, but then why and how is there even a separation? And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Things that I would consider interesting and important are ruthlessly ignored and instead we get an inappropriate amount of focus on torture and horror.
I don’t mind stories with killing, in fact I welcome them, but who wants to hear long details description of teenage girls getting beaten to paste, whipped until they break in 2 and their guts fall out, gang-rped for 3 days straight ? I don’t care if they deserved it or not, you still have to be a psychopath to enjoy reading about such things, and the fact the stories with female MC’s (and probably female authors) seem to have this in common is not helping the “women are crazy psycho btches” stereotype at all.
Also I thought there would be more romance in this, but instead we get an ML that in the beginning was a complete sexual harassing asshole, and knowing that the FL is gonna fall in love with that psycho looser was not a good feeling, thankfully he changed pretty quickly.
The revenge part can be very satisfying but not when it’s one after another and not when it could have been avoided easily, in fact while reading it I thought the title “I won’t save you, but I will get revenge for you” seemed far more fitting.
Instead I would have preferred more technical details and more character development, specially the side characters, which brings me to …
4. Kind of cliché, kind of weak ending, not enough after stories.
The ending felt a little rushed, certain not so small details where forgotten or ignored, like a certain group that were given just 1 job (to guard her parents), but that didn’t happen… I guess with webnovels that publish each chapter separately it’s too much work or impossible to go back and fix things so they make sense.
The last/boss fight was anticlimactic, kinda cliché and short and the after stories… well there was one and it tied 1 or 2 loose ends but left a lot open/unresolved, we were also introduced (or more like not introduced) to a few new people, it felt like we should already know them (maybe from a previous story), anyway, I didn’t like that and neither did I like the way any of the other characters in the story were introduced, there is a certain way to introduce people, but the author doesn’t know them, which makes for bad storytelling, but that’s another thing most asian authors also suck at.
Which really sucks for me because cultivation stories are my favorite, but they are told by the worst storytellers, filled with cr*ap and have the worst translations…
But a TV/anime adaptation would fix all that and add so much more to it, if done properly, but that hasn’t happened yet, for any webnovel.
