I feel seeds of potential in this novel. Hope, it will continue to be interesting for me to read, and author will build plot without too much dwelling into level-ups, even though dungeons exist and are kind of foundational thing of the world (it seems). Disclaimer: I'm interested in kingdom building part of the story, so I'm kind of biased against gaming elements like dungeon floors or rooms.
I didn't like start of the story to be honest, the whole situation seemed a bit forced to me as main character background and world are not explained well yet (or may be I'm just a bit slow in reading behind lines). But it is written better than average novel, somewhere around 5th chapter I caught myself enjoying reading, actually. Some scenes are pretty lively.
Story so far is not that complicated: main character (who is basically aged national hero) is thrown out of kingdom cause there is some sort of conspiracy, magically becomes younger and even more weaker than at peak form, yet still more powerful than dozens of bandits. Kingdom needs to develop a buffer territory in a sneaky way to oppose neighbour country, thus our main character is forcefully and in not a pleasant way given this task which he wants to use as opportunity to revenge death of his pupil and punish all bastards as main characters usually do. Political structure of kingdom is not quite clear yet, world has magic and such related stuff, a couple of countries were mentioned, but balance of powers is difficult to grasp, IMHO. One of key concepts of the plot are Imortalis (you can guess what is it about, but it has somewhat unusual flavour in this novel), it is "dark horse" concept, in fact, that can be a very good story driver or just a gimmick, only further story development will tell. Main character's approach to building kingdom is also not explained in details yet, there are some directions but devil as always is in details, which hopefully appear in later chapters. For now it is not ******** stereotypical grinding story, novel's genre sits somewhere in between mild-litRPG, martial arts in fantasy world and kingdom building.
Pace of updates is slow (if you care about it), but give it a chance between reading other stuff, you might like it.
