webnovel
Duenteverde
DuenteverdeLv41yr
2023-09-26 04:06

One of my favorite things of this world is how much age matters, it's so refreshing for a story to have a reason for characters to have a reason to go until the end of their current realm's longevity, and be rewarded for doing so, just a simple thing that as a veteran reader really surprised me and i hope to see in more novels, but i'll probably depend on this author to deliver more of this in the future. Overall the story has great wiring quality, relatively few mistakes that don't break immersion, the story is complete so that's a 5 on stability for me, the development is pretty unique as we see shang turn into a true monsters by the end of the novel, the character design is fine if a bit bland, mostly due to how we only have a handful of side characters at a time, and the world background is amazing, aetherium has very clear rules that are always followed. One minor gripe i have with the world is how much the world incentivizes people to stay at the peak of their realm, while it does make sense in this novel as it helps improve comprehension it removes most options people have to increase their realm, which gets stale pretty fast in this world where you need that mana to go to the next realm, it removes too much agency from the weaker realms when the only way forward is joining a organization. Now is my biggest gripe with this novel, which is the ending, i heavily advice you stop reading here if you haven't seen the ending yet, the story is still worth reading. Man, this ending sucks. I've been pondering over this for the last 2 days, and the more i think about it the angrier i get, so follow me as i describe why i think this is a major narative fail. 1. Show don't tell, we had very high stakes until this point, but all that is suddenly ruined, why? because from the start of this fight we knew shang was just going to play with the emperors, and the lighting emperor also knew. Come on you could have ommited that for better story telling, would it cost so much to make shang an emperor first at least so us readers are at edge, or at least make him seem weaker, let him beat the weaklings emper who barely have 2-3x spirit sense and then show his true power on the archivist, by removing all the tension from the fight the fight wasn't satisfying. 2. The ending of the side characters is unsatisfying, they get mudered by Alex, which should be the good shang, and then sudenly you realise: shang didn't really have an impact on this world anymore, godamit just make them slowly be forgotten in the small eterneity it takes for shang to explore a way to escape the chaos, and even so it sucks that shang fails the promise to the lighting emperor. 3. Suddenly this story is connected to another. I didn't read LitOW, the people that read seemed to like the epilogue, but i hated it, sudenly the universe takes a diferent scale, a guy sudenly comes, frees Alex of his eternal curse, says he took care of millions of gods before and instead of the ending of a novel we have a season 1 finale lol. It could have done both, introduced the world into LitOW cosmos with that immortal without ruining the ending, give alex a hopeful future without ruining this novel, also take away the part where he talks about treating millions of other gods & immortals and say that there are more gods & immortals out there. 4. This frase "The most common problem is setting power as your goal instead of as a means to an end." beautifully misses the point of shang, first of all the common way to say this frase is power without a goal, who ever sets power as a goal? It may be to be the strongest, for freedom, for protection, etc, losing their goal is one thing, but power for the goal of power is very unique of shang and he's clear of his goal, he will become the most powerful, live for a while to see if something more powerful can come and then probably commit die, this comment was so... meta it took away my immersion and threw it in the bin. These are my grievances with your story, author, i am sadened by the ending but still excited for what is to come, maybe i'll read LitOW but probably will wait for your next novel, take care.

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Replies2
Duenteverde
DuenteverdeLv4

Man, i took 20 min to format this comment to be easy to read just so webnovel could ignore all formating and turn my comment into an ugly wall of text. Thanks Webnovel.

Ace_of_Blades
Ace_of_BladesLv3

I have to agree with this, I loved the novel, and still do but the ending made me almost drop it then and there, I think that connecting his two novels like that was a very bad idea because now it makes me not want to read his other novel, also I remembered him saying that his two novels aren't connected, so I guess that was a lie, which again makes me want to drop the rating I have if this novel.

Other Reviews
Copperhawk
CopperhawkLv2
Cobra03
Cobra03Lv13

Review as of chapter 630. Might include minor spoilers but I'll try to keep them to a minimum. Short Version: Stop scrolling through reviews and just go read the novel! Long Version: I'll start off by saying that this novel is simply amazing. Stories like this are what keeps me from just deleting the app due to the sheer number of unreadable nonsense it has. Now for an actual breakdown: Writing Quality - The quality is simply top-notch. No grammatical mistakes, clear and concise sentences that flow into each other beautifully, as well as smooth transitions between different points throughout the story. It's obvious that the author has improved in this regard by quite a bit, compared to his first novel (Lightning is the Only Way), which was already incredible by Webnovel standards. Story Development - The novel is slow-paced for the most part, and especially at the beginning, but I find that positive in this case, since we get a better look at the struggles Alex (later Shang) has to go through to adapt to a completely new reality where his life is constantly on the line. There are eventual time skips in the story, which are unavoidable simply due to the fact that you can't become a Sword God without hundreds (quite possibly thousands at this rate) years of training. Character Design - This is the biggest reason for this novel's success. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, is fleshed out in such detail that it wouldn't surprise me if the author one day revealed he has been studying the human mind for over 100 years. As for Shang himself, the many hardships he has gone through and the eventual revelation that he is, for reasons I obviously won't mention here, the enemy of the world (Opposer vibes 😉), have made him resolved to do whatever it takes to reach his goal. He will sacrifice anything and anyone for power. Updating Stability - Not much to say here. 2 chapters a day plus the fact that the author is an absolute legend. Broke both his arms at some point and somehow still pushed out chapters until he was eventually forced to take a small break. World Background - We get a basic understanding of how the world works and how the mages have complete rule over it early in the story and get more and more pieces of information in regards to the powers they wield, as well as the nature of the world itself, as the story progresses. Admittedly, there have been a few instances where the author goes into too much detail about something that isn't really relevant, but that isn't nearly enough to make the story less enjoyable, at least for me. Overall, this is truly an incredible story and I highly recommend it. Truly impressive work so far, Heat. Can't wait to see what you come up with next!

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