TLDR – it’s a decent cultivation story about an everyday guy. Not the hero of the land or even the hero of the block.
If Tolkien had written about the 572nd most interesting Hobbit alive while Frodo was off on his adventure, you’d feel a bit about that story as you do this one – only Tolkien didn’t write this one and he picked the right Hobbit to focus on.
Not to say the MC isn’t interesting. He gets up in the morning and does his 9-5. He is sub-par in nearly all aspects of his life and has been dealt a bad hand. He makes the best of his situation but stumbles from time to time like anyone. Yeah – he takes a few beatings but that’s what happens in a world of high-powered martial arts when you’re mediocre in all but determination to get back up.
The author made a few mistakes in designing the world.
In a world of learnable techniques there must be an air of mystery to them. You must travel to find the one teacher who knows them and convince him or her to teach you. In this world the internet exists, and techniques are generally internalized easy to master *apparently cause this char reads them and has them down in like 2 days* techniques.
Internet undermines every single aspect of mysterious martial arts. When every technique could be quantified and broken down into builds – there would be an ideal build website up in about 2.4 seconds and everyone would be cookie cutter replicas.
It doesn’t work and that undermines the entire design of the plot and everything that goes with it. The rest of the story suffers because of Wikipedia – I kid you not. There is a wiki page for martial arts techniques and yet the MC who spends every moment of his life teaching and learning martial arts is somehow ignorant of this readily available knowledge.
Big no no. World and system designs need to be obscure and air tight. This is porous.
The writing was good. The narration was excellent. The world design is poor.