A twelve book series, a binge all at once, mix and match of the east and west, integration into a larger world, an active social media community, meta, this series has it all. It’s a lotta books, but the only way to begin is by beginning.
To begin, lets just talk, broad concept. And the first book, Unsouled, takes awhile to get you behind the true goal of the story. The world is your classic, chinese cultivation story world. All the best and most classic tropes, that you love to see, are there. Art specific techniques, a breathing and refining technique to grow stronger, internal energy, rankings of power, a deference to strength culture, elixers and pills. And so the story starts as the best chinese cultivation stories do, with a main character (henceforth known as MC) who is unremarkable. More than unremarkable, actually way below average. They have low energy. Very not Big Dao Energy. And so the first quarter is about our MC learning a secret, hidden technique that only he can use. The Soul Crushing Strike (not really what it’s called but iykyk). And he uses this to win a tournament. And then, we get our big, glorious, series long goal vision. We get our teases of the overall world, with the dropping of the names of super strong people. And we get MC getting the command to go West. Along with what is genuinely, a fantastic extended fight and flight sequence for all the characters involved. One of the great things about this book is that it works as a standalone novel, as well as a beginning to a larger series. The hooks are there, but they have a immediate payoff in addition to being a hook. The foreshadowing is in place, and we get a good vision for the future of the series. It does a good job of rewarding the MC with items and abilities they will need, while balancing the scaling.
Balancing the scaling. Yeah book one is the last time you can really say this until book 6 or so.
Book two begins with my single favorite cultivation story trope; the MC leaves the ‘hidden last fortress of humanity’ only to discover that not only do humans exist outside, the strongest power from the original home was super weak compared to the rest of the world. Except, this book kinda blows that way up. The best way to explain this is to just say the relevant rankings. There is Base, Copper, Iron, Jade, Lowgold, Highgold, Truegold, and Underlord. Now, with this many power levels, you might expect that it’s somewhat pyramidal in distribution. NOPE. This book just decides, everyone in the world exists between lowgold and underlord. And our MC, who is still at the Base stage, now has to grow from that. There are problems with this. Number one, the premise is built such that, the next level up is significantly more powerful. Like, each level is a log order stronger than the previous. But by doing that, MC has basically no ability to contribute to the story without a really dedicated training arc. And that’s basically what happens, with a few random scenes, followed by the MC in essence being locked in a room and told to train. It makes for an interesting premise, but the random blasting of the power structure makes a lot of the scenes just poor. The MC beating someone 3 levels higher than themselves. It’s just, like, not great story writing. And at the same time, the story of the book is basically a tease for the larger plot, and for the next book. It’s definitely one of the weakest books given that.
Book three, blackflame. Here we start having the true power scaling and special MC powers introduced. The biggest problem with this book, is that it is written (and ends) as if it was half a book. We get what amounts to a very very extended training book, that ends with the MC never actually completing their training. The training, I should mention, which is meant to help prepare them for a fight in a years time. But then the ending of this book is, whoops half way through that year there is actually an ambush of the family, and that’s how the book ends. Part of my frustration with it is, because…
Book four just fast forwards to the fight, and skips over a lot of the previous timeline. The other half of MC’s training is skipped, we don’t collect $200 and we see the fight. And that transitions into the rest of the story. again it just feels like they wrote themselves into a corner and decided they didn’t like the year after fight, and instead wanted to just skip to the next part. Which is actually pretty fun. We get a bunch of fun training montages, but truthfully, this book is kinda boring. It teases the wider conflict of the demon beasts that they have to seal, and introduces us to the other factions that exist (and exist to blow out the power scaling we already had). The demon beasts also present the same problem from two books ago, which is, they are *so* much more powerful than MC, there isn’t a great way to make the MC win/survive.
Book five is definitely the standout of the first half of this series. To start, this is where all the other factions from the world, the real factions, the one that won’t get power scaled into oblivion. And they’re *cool*. I mean, it’s mainly the dragons, there is a dragon faction. It’s cool. And we finally get the top of the power scale. That’s cool. And we finally get a power scale where our MC starts along side everyone else. That’s the best part. Now that’s not to say we start there. Nooooo, we start with MC once again, a bunch below power level. But the twist of this book, MC is in a pocket world, and there are *super* elixers in this world that MC uses to get stronger. We get MC to True Gold, and he can fight the other true golds in the book at an even level. Really great. We get some cool fight sequences, we get a super powerful new tool (Cortana), and something I actually like, we get rid of the turtle. iykyk. There’s a lead in to the next book, where we star teasing the other great trope of scaling narratives, the *world tournament*.
The next two books, Six and Seven, are basically your typical World Tournament Ark. Group Stage, Knockout bracket, book intermission at top 8, big training arc during the intermission. But more importantly, we get some true power scaling, where finally our MC’s aren’t constantly getting little brothered by everyone. This is also where the power scaling finally realigns. They take what was good power scales from book one, and just added X to everything, with the MC’s finally starting slightly above average. That way they actually have a chance against their enemies.
The next few books cover a bunch of broad parts. The big world ending fights, the big secret of the world. They get very engaging. We get the MC going back to his home town, and opening a can of whoopass on the assholes from home. We get him getting a super anime arm. We get a twist that our mentor friend is actually a Judge.We get a cool epilogue that goes through each character.
All in all the books are fantastic.