An interesting and fresh take, but not done very well.

This is a classic cultivation book with a fresh, if somewhat odd spin on it. We follow a classic naive hero and his former best friend who turns into a ‘monster’. We know this from the beginning, but slowly go from present to past as we follow the two in their different paths. We mostly focus on the monster as the author attempts to justify his wholesale slaughter of an entire worlds population. It’s a new take, but the past to present is fairly jarring and the persistence of the justification of the ‘monster’ and the increasingly sad sob story for what forced the slaughter etc etc. It just gets a little obnoxious listening to the morality contest after the slaughter of a planet. I’ll finish out the book, but I doubt I go for the sequel.