I have read up to the end of book 1 and will be dropping this book. The author and the world have great potential but there were two things that killed it for me personally. The first was that the details of this novel just seem subtly wrong. A good example of what I mean is the response to a comet coming near earth. This happens semi-regularly in the real world and the various responses people have to it (from cults proclaiming the end of days to nothing at all) are fairly well known. In this world though, every world leader gives an IDENTICAL speech at exactly the same time to reassure all citizens of their countries. Everyone in the world stops working and hides in their house with emergency food for days before the comet comes. After the comet flies by the planet, there is worldwide rioting for days. This is insane. Why??? There are a lot of oddities like this in the novel that stand out and were regularly breaking my immersion in the story. The other issue is the tone. This book is about teenagers in high school (one of whom has super powers). Great. But our super hero straight up permanently disables his fellow students because he doesn't like them. His principal murders a man for threatening a student (even when the man has no way to carry out such a threat). The good guys in this novel are violent and dark. That is the GOOD guys. In a novel about teenage super heroes. It reminds me of books like the meta world chronicles over at royal road and that is not a good thing. It feels like if I was reading the first Harry Potter book and Harry was permanently cursing kids in Slitherin because of fights at school and Dumbledore murdered Harry's muggle family for being pricks. It isn't that this is impossible just a really jarring tone in that kind of book. That said I really liked the original take on reincarnating. Selling music, videogames, Youtube channels, etc. were all great ideas. The cultivation system was well done. The characters were fairly well developed and change over time which is great. The writing is excellent with few to no noticeable grammatical or spelling issues. I definitely think the author is talented and is doing a great job for a first novel.
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Thank you for giving it to me as it is. I'm sorry the story turned you off, it's never a good experience to invest your time and interest in something and then see it go bad. The first point you've raised is the one that keeps me up at night. As a 23-year-old with book smarts, I have little life experience, and describing events like the comet is terrifyingly hard. The speech wasn't meant to be seen as the same everywhere, btw, just an uplifting moment. I used the "2012 end of the world" event as my basis. Obviously, I'll have to go back, research, edit, make it better. On the second point though, allow me to disagree. Michael is not a teenager at heart, and he's spent the last ten years dreaming of killing a man. He disables thugs, not EIS students, and that is mostly because he's in a hurry to check up on Anna. As for the principal, for an agent with 30-40 years of experience and tons of blood on his hands, what's wrong with killing a man who's been ordered to assassinate or kidnap your own granddaughter? Also, those men were mercs of the lowest morals, basically scum. I imagine most would be happy to see them die. So, to me, those moments do seem fairly realistic. I don't know your position on violence, but I've always believed, as the Russian saying goes, "the good should be with fists." Killing villains is A-OK in my book (woah, pun). Perhaps those violent moments were sudden and jarring, but that's how I meant them to be. To break the idyllic teenage slice of life, remind the reader that this is not a children's book. Once again, I'm truly sorry the novel turned you off and very thankful for your insights into why. I wish you to have better luck with other novels. Maybe even the one I hope to write after this one is finished (in years at this rate).
Killing villains is always okay. In fact even killing innocents is okay in my book.
