Review Detail of Rusti in Legend of the Empyrean Blacksmith

Don't get me wrong, the writing is great but the story itself has a few problems, the main being that the author can't seem to decide what he really wants this story to be. The synopsis suggests that the main focus in the story would be the mc's path toward becoming a grandmaster blacksmith while also walking the path of cultivation and going out and making a name for himself. And that's how things play out... right up until about chapter 7 or 8 where the plot suddenly goes 10 to a million out of nowhere. The mc sets off on his first journey, so now you're thinking to yourself, aight maybe some world building here, a little training and character development there and perhaps he'll take some time to practice and gain experience in blacksmithing to further his abilities. Nope, forget all that noise! The mc barely took 2 steps into his very first outing before he was immediately ****-whipped right into the center of the main plot of the story. One minute our literally level 20 mc is setting off to become a pokemon master and out of nowhere Pallet town suddenly gets lambasted with a crap tonne of level 70+ legendary pokemon and our mc is right in the thick of it, somehow fighting them all off with 2 rattatas, a pidgey and a charmander. It's like the author quickly ran out of patience and threw pacing out the window so he can finally get to show off his writing skills and now we're being constantly bombarded with endless convoluted conspiracies, psychological explorations and foreshadowing. The whole idea of the mc having a dual occupation of blacksmith/cultivator seems to have fallen completely on the afterburner. As of chapter 60 the mc has crafted a grand total of 3 proper items + 3 throwaway items and he barely uses any of them, opting instead to use items crafted by other blacksmiths. He doesn't even have to actually cultivate since the author made it so that his level naturally increases and he can gain experience through killing. And that leads me to my final complaint, the author tries to merge cultivation with game elements but fails horribly at it. The concept of levels and stats, such as attack and defense, is presented in numerical values but none of it actually matters except for the special effects of equipment and even those are hardly ever relevant in actual combat. Even with his inspection ability the mc can't actually see the stats of those who aren't even that much higher than him in level or even that of their equipment and the stats of those lower leveled than him are literally never mentioned, so what's even the point of stats existing in the first place? At the end of the day all that happens is that the mc fights and defeats those stronger than him through plot armor, a godly cultivation method and superior equipment that he didn't even forge himself. All in all it feels like the author figure out what type of story he wanted to write only after he was already invested in a certain plot and decided to just slowly morph the story into what it is now while leaving all the ideas he was already running with to slowly fade away in the background. It would have been better if the author had left the demon invasion plot for later on and spent more time fleshing out the various ideas and systems he introduced into the story at least until they actually made sense while also allowing the mc to actually grow in strength somewhat so that he can face his enemies without having to rely on plot armor.