Where the first 3-4 books felt like a wonderful side story in a world we are already familiar with… something went horribly wrong with the transition into CAL’s soul space.
With minimal spoilers, I’ll start with the fact that the story reads like an unedited or disconnected thought stream. Like the author has a whole bunch of cool ideas they want to do all at once, but no real idea on how to tether them to a narrative which makes the book feel like 13 hours of non stop exposition.
Unfortunately the problems only really start there… because of Artorian’s deal with CAL and his relationship with all the most powerful people in his new world there is no real sense of dramatic tension or conflict, and even the tasks he spends most of the book doing come off as feeling mostly hollow, arbitrary or kind of dumb.
For some of the book its made out like he’s taking on a role of a deity or something for the world, but it feels hollow because the little “World Building” he does is done with his sarcastic undertones, the author keeps as much of the writing as possible from getting into the details, and hand waves/time skips any world building he would be doing… and since there isn’t really any conflict of interest to hold the rest of the narrative together the book feels honestly jarring to read.
I’m not really sure how the author can fix this problem in the future books though, so long as Artorian is CAL’s right hand man, and intimately involved with the most powerful person other than cal in their little world, unless the writing changes so Artorian is essentially another dungeon core and treats people like numbers (Something that is anathema to his personality), there really can’t be any meaningful conflict going forward…