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LostEra
LostEraLv152yr
2022-06-02 17:02

this is one of those novels where a decent story is ruined by horrible writing quality, inconsistencies and toxic masculinity of the author. The story is about a guy who lives around a 1000 years into the future and humanity has expanded into space, discovered the cultivation of martial arts and expanded into space. The main character, Chu Nan, somehow gets a super analytical ability that allows him to get very precise real time information about his actions and that of his opponents. He uses this ability to become stronger despite being judged to be too old. It is clear that the author barely planned the novel and as a result there is very little preparation for the next step. Add to that that it is not uncommon for some chapters to reveal things about what the mc is doing in previous chapters. For instance Chu Nan gets beaten into a coma and his body is severely injured. The chapter describing how he woke up and how he recovered his body is described over several chapters. During these chapters Chu Nan's parents are never mentioned but several chapters later you discover that he has parents, that they went to visit him when he was in a coma and when he woke up and that he even has a sister. Not only did it take the novel around 150 chapters to even mention that he has parents that are still alive but that he also has a sister (almost as if the author finally realized that Chu Nan also has a family). And there are several similar situations where the author suddenly realized that what he wrote earlier doesn't make sense and than starts to backtrack to fill in the blanks, these are signs of a badly planned storyline and the low quality reparations done to cover this up. The world building is almost as bad as the writing quality. A lot of things that in real life we know how it works are explained in a way that doesn't make sense and are based on a very simplistic view of how the world works. And it's not like they suddenly became part of fantasy and therefor it's logical they don't make sense anymore. For instance the authors understanding of muscle growth is completely wrong but doctors and athletes do know how this works and it is completely different from the explanation in the novel. When you work out you go over the limit of what your muscles can handle and you slightly tear your muscles, this is also called muscle pain and most people know this feeling well bc they experience it the day after, sometimes a few hours, after an intensive workout. The muscle pain goes away because your muscles are repairing themselves and in the proces of repairing themselves they make the muscles stronger, bigger, longer, etc. In other words muscle growth comes when you rest after overusing them. The author is working under the assumption that muscles grow by overusing them and he ignores the influence of rest. There are several similar situations where the author assumes how something works and based the story on that. I also strongly suspect that the author originally planned to write a story with a more traditional Xianxia world building but somehow decided to change his plans. Too many times is a collection of planets referred to as a country and most planets only have one or two big cities. The total population of humans from Earth is around 20 billion but that seems to me far too little given how many planets are under the control of the Earth Federation. In multiple situations I have noticed that the scales at which things happen are in conflict with each other. For instance one of the strongest martial arts techniques in the real world can produce the same kind of power that a person in the novel with a 3rd level overlord body can achieve. I know the author didn't want the difference between normal humans and overlord bodies to be too big but because the author failed to do a proper research he failed in his objective because now the people in the novel that should be stronger than people in real life aren't stronger. The story itself is neither innovative or original but it has potential to be not bad (if the writing quality was better it would have been a good story to fill your time with)

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LostEra
LostEraLv15

after reading aome more chapters the writing quality improves, not by much but is is better. This is also partially helped by that a lot of the world building was already done so that couldn't get much worse. The author is clearly better at writing dialog than consistent story building but having said that the story is interesting, although similar to other stories that play out in the future and have cultivation techniques involving cosmic energy.

LostEra
LostEraLv15

It is very frustrating to realize that this story becomes more and more interesting, especially what happens around cultivation techniques, but also the writing quality around the small details has become worse. The author clearly doesn't realize that if he just thought a little harder about how the details should logically fit together he wouldn't have written what was written. There are 2 big problems with the later chapters. The first is how the author chooses to explain things that the main character wants to know. It is in a conversation format but the author chooses to let the main character ask his questions in such a way that it makes him look dumb, there is no sense that he has knowledge or understanding about details, details that he discovered about his own body just a few chapters before. He never includes his own experiences and discoveries in his questions which will always result in answers that doesn't get him anywhere. Eventually he gets there but the reasoning behind why he suddenly gets it is often so illogical, more focussed on making the main character look smart and not that it makes sense. And that gets me to the second point, the explanation of the problem with his body or more how they finally found a way to identify the body parts that are the problem that would prevent him from advancing. It contains an enormous plothole, which is a real pity because if the author just spent a little bit more time to think about it this explanation would have been a much more satisfying explanation. For instance he could have given an explanation that would not only make it truly special that he finally found the problems with his body, and fixed them with targeted training, but also it could have elevated one of the female side character to make her far more important. The further I read the better the story becomes but also the more frustrating the small details become.

LostEra:after reading aome more chapters the writing quality improves, not by much but is is better. This is also partially helped by that a lot of the world building was already done so that couldn't get much worse. The author is clearly better at writing dialog than consistent story building but having said that the story is interesting, although similar to other stories that play out in the future and have cultivation techniques involving cosmic energy.
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Montuixote
MontuixoteLv4
Vanaxity
VanaxityLv1

Master Of Martial Arts Has An Advanced Optical Brain is a story about Chu Nan, a completely mediocre student who decided to become below-average due to useless pride/stubbornness. Luckily, God (the author) decided to save him by giving him an "advanced optical brain". This allows him to have very high calculative skills and a the ability to process this information extremely fast. I think I am genuinely becoming sick of reading Chinese novels in general. It's very obvious that there is a very severe lack of talented authors that write xianxia/xuanhua. Translation quality is mediocre. Theres many mistakes especially at the end of chapters. (3/5 stars) Story development makes it very apparent that the author only wants word count, nothing else matters. This novel incorporates two of the most annoying writing "techniques" that you'll find in these novels. First, repeating the same information from a different point of view, often taking up an entire chapter. The second is how every time the main character does anything, we are forced to suffer and read some random reaction of some random irrelevant special-ed kid who exists solely to insult the main character. Aside from all that, this story is rather directionless. The only goal is for the main character to get to a higher-tier academy. What awful and cliche settings. We go from school arc to tournament arc to another school arc. Seriously? Character design is awful as well. I feel like it's a waste to write another long-paragraph. We have the same cliche annoying characters as every other martial arts novel. (2/5 stars) World background is also abysmal. In sixty chapters, I don't even think that the author has mentioned the main character's family aside from saying he comes from a family of farmers. Aside from that, barely anything has been properly described. We are suddenly in a school arc with the main character making many improvements, and then thrown into a drawn-out tournament arc. In sixty chapters, aside from introducing more useless and cliche characters, as well as providing a very superficial understanding of the world, we know next to nothing. Very poor attempt. (1/5 stars) Overall, it's yet another novel where the author solely cares for word count. The only positives in this novel are solely coincidences that I doubt the author meant to happen in the first place. I give this novel 2.4 stars out of 5.

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GoldenStache · Sci-fi
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