Derek A Yau

Meandering and navel gazing.

Revisado: 09-14-24

Read more like an anthropology assignment where the author only remember at the end that it’s supposed to be a bobiverse book and shoehorned a token amount of conflict in there. The anthropology parts are also completely uninteresting and lack sufficient alien characteristics that they don’t feel simply feel like derivatives of earth-based life.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas

Utterly boring. Save your money.

Revisado: 09-14-24

Plot is largely uneventful and there’s almost no progression. First half (in the cave) is especially bad. It’s hours and hours of the MC fighting various bugs.

The second half seemed promising but was still a huge let down. He encounters people once leaving the cave. After hours of boring cave spelunking, this should be a cathartic point. Unfortunately, the characters are laughably shallow, resulting in an even larger disappointment.

Lastly, the author sets up some mysteries that will presumably be explained further in later books. Nothing comes close to being resolved in this book, making it a very long tease in addition to its poor execution.

Don’t waste your time and money/credits on this.

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas

Most idiotic MC in all progression fantasy

Revisado: 09-02-24

This author has two other series with very intelligent MC’s. I highly recommend those titles (Keiran: The eternal mage and Ascendant).

I bought this audible after thoroughly enjoying those other series and wanting more.
Unlike those titles, this MC is so stupid, it’s like the book was written by a different author. His stupidity is obvious to everyone around him too, so I suspect the author is intentionally making him frustratingly dimwitted.

This makes the story incredibly unenjoyable. The protagonist of this story is the equivalent of the blond girl in 90’s slasher movies that chooses to hide in a corner with no escape route and is the first character to get killed off.

Unlike those horror movies however, the MC skates by despite his dumb decisions either thanks to sheet luck or plot armour shenanigans.

I’m disappointed by this series and will not finish it.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

Boring and preachy

Revisado: 06-23-24

Main character espouses simplistic ideals about the world that are basically the author preaching to you through him.

The world is simplistic and the characters mostly serve as a backdrop to set up specific events so that the main character can save the day and preach his simplistic “truth bombs” to you.

He literally even calls it “truth bombs” in the book. I can picture a high school kid writing that line with a smirk on his face, thinking that he’s just helped his audience gain enlightenment. Ugh.

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Delightfully funny!

Revisado: 05-29-24

The hilarious story is augmented by the absolutely brilliant voice cast. This book is heads and shoulders above the first book, which was also pretty entertaining. Can’t wait for the third.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

Childish with half-baked world building

Revisado: 05-26-24

Main character is constantly saying things like “you bullied me” or “it’s not fair”. He doesn’t otherwise whine, but these choice of words make the conflict feel less like an underdog against the universe and more like a fight on the playground.

The plot and “insights” into the dao are also derivative of other better works. Machine translated chinese cultivation web novels offer more interesting views.

Any sense of profundity that the author attempts to convey with dao navel gazing is betrayed by the reductive “+1! +1!” level/rpg system that he tried to combine. It is a jarring mismatch. On one hand, the dao system is about increasing your understanding of reality so that you can bend it to your will. On the other hand, you have a video game system that let’s you pick which stats to level up based on exp. Killing also gives experience even though it has nothing to do with the book’s rules of how dao works.

Ultimately the doa system and the litrpg system are diametrically opposed. The author wanted to integrate both but his ham fisted attempt resulted in an inconsistent, cliche ridden world where arbitrary power ups happen when the author needs them to.

If you can overlook all that, or if you’ve never read a cultivation story before, the book is otherwise entertaining.

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Audible volume is uneven and poorly produced

Revisado: 11-25-23

Volume constantly goes up and down, varying from obnoxiously loud to whisper quiet, even when the narrater is speaking normally. Unpleasant listening experience.

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Boring and uneventful. A let down after the previous three.

Revisado: 06-25-23

Majority if the book reads like filler. The MC is building binds with his friends but not really accomplishing anything or facing real problems. The only time there are real stakes is in the last hour of the book and it ends on a cliffhanger. Overall, a disappointing entry. If the next book doesn’t progress the main plot in any meaningful ways, I’ll drop the series.

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas

Terrible. Grade school writing level

Revisado: 06-10-23

Villains are cartoonish, as are supporting characters. None of the twists are surprising.

The book looks like it wants to be wish fulfillment, but it doesn’t even do that right, given how imbecilic everyone is.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Predictable, with frustrating protagonists

Revisado: 08-01-22

“THE” plot twist can be seen coming from book 2 and its incredibly frustrating watching all the protagonists be so willfully blind to all the hints until it happens. As a reader, you get to “enjoy” the band bumble their way through 4 books of failures despite the solution being clearly obvious from book 2.

The prose is good and narration is good. The story itself and the characters’ intelligence is slam-head-into-wall levels of frustrating and the frustration drags on and on for 30+ hours.

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esto le resultó útil a 10 personas