First of all this is a review by someone not used to chinese novels/wuxia (it was my first try). Read it until chapter 270.

The story is about a woman - who is a genius doctor - suddenly waking up in the body of the Jun Family's Miss, whose (bad) reputation was of being a tyrannical, overbearing and selfish girl, in a "new" world, that is basically old China with contractual spirits and such (nothing overly magical). The mc had a horrible grandfather, but her grandfather in this new world is loving and doting (her uncle too), so she decides to protect and cherish this new family, that was in a tight spot when she arrived.

What I liked the most about this novel was her relationship with her family: it is the only moment where she appears to be a human with feelings. The category "cold female lead" couldn't be more fitting, she is ice cold. While I like cold female characters, it got too much, to the point you couldn't relate to her at all. Unless she is dealing with her family, she never shows happiness, sadness, surprise or any other feeling (besides annoyance). Once a plan she devised was sucessfull and her ally got happy and celebrated; when he asked if she wasn't happy she thought "why should I be happy? I devised it, it went accord to planned and that's it, nothing to be happy about". I could only think of a robot when I read this. lol She only reacts when people step on her toes/threat the Jun Family, which in turn makes her bring hell for her enemies. Aaaaand repeat. Truth be told, many times I thought the original miss would make a more interesing and likeable character, with her fiery and domineering personality. Pity a robot hijacked her body.

There is no surprise in the story either, really. I don't mind the mc always defeating their enemy and whatsoever, but here it is like a loser teenage (or petty adult) decided to write a glorified version of themselves where none can hurt their feelings (bc "cold female lead who couldn't care less about anyone"? and they can defeat their enemies with a flick of their finger. The mc, besides being a genius in medicine, also has uberpowerful allies: a black cat that can transform; a kind of demon lord who for no reason at all keeps following her and her contractual spirit (whose strenght doesn't match her spiritual power). WHATEVER problem she encounters will follow as this: [big problem] > she: this is beneath me. *blinks and everything goes her way*. If there is fighting involved, a handsome man will do it for her. In the Qing Yun Clan arc (nothing over spoilerish since I dropped at the beggining)

There are no surprises, not even one funny moment, almost no romance (which in turn is kind of unsettling since she is this petit young girl of 14yo and the main love interest is a pushy demon lord whose looks is 20+ and actual age even more), no drama/tragedy, nothing that stirs your emotions. It is filled with action, blood and gore, to the point one questions if it isn't the mc who is a psycophatic monster, but even those moments are boring.

Well, there are many more other inconsistencies and errors, but I already lost too much time for this so that's it, I hope my next chinese novel is better.

... Last updated on August 20th, 2018, 2:31pm

The novel is over 400 translated chapters in and quite entertaining I must say. The lack of comments and mention is a little puzzling so I feel compelled to leave a good word for it.
While the novel is nothing earth-shattering it managed to keep my interest for such a long time ( I started reading with around 100 translated chapters). The heroine is likable despite her Mary-Suiness and her typical chinese sense of justice. The side characters are interesting but a little flat as well - they are put into two types - handsome boys that will temporary help the MC in her matters and very one sided, corrupted and self-indulging small time villains that are usually killed by the end of each arc. That is exactly the point that makes the novel a little weak story wise :/ But the novel never pretended to be overly serious or heavy so even with the drawback it is still a solid read for a quality past time. The characters from type 1 - the handsome boys make for a pretty big harem and it is quite entertaining when the main male lead starts taking notice but the female lead is too dense and does not pay any mind to such matters

... Last updated on December 20th, 2016, 2:10pm

Oh, boy… where do I start with this one…

TL;DR is that it’s not bad, but various things ruined it for me, those being:

1. Bad translation
2. Authors’ greed and lack of intelligence
3. Author’s misplaced (and too much) focus on torture, horror and revenge.
4. Kind of cliché, kind of weak ending, not enough after stories.

And now for the long version.

1. Bad translation (I read the webnovel version)
At the beginning it was kinda OK, but it still had major issues like saying the same thing twice but with a slight twist, like: young youth, childish juvenile, etc.

Then towards the last 500 chapters it gets even worse and in places it’s no better than machine translation, I could hardly make out what they were trying to say, but it hardly mattered because...

2. Authors’ greed and stupidity
… because 20-40% of the text is irrelevant, it’s all useless garbage that just adds girth for no reason, stuff like: over-explanations, recaps, summaries, re-explanations, etc. All this does is slow down the pacing of the story and piss me off which also breaks the immersion, it also makes you feel like the author is treating you like an 8 year old ret*ard, who needs all the over/re explanation or you just won’t get it, this also means that there is almost nothing for the more intelligent readers to figure out by themselves, you are robbed of the joy of discovery by the authors themselves.

I even developed a kind of speed-reading technique where I just read the first 3-5 words of a paragraph to determine if it's worth skipping or not, most of the times only the dialogues needed to be read, but there were pages of trash in between them and by the time someone answered you forgot to what, even the author forgets sometimes.

And speaking of the author ruining their own story, while other authors spoil their own stories with chapter titles, this author also sometimes adds a line or two at the end of a few chapters that spoil hundreds of chapters at once.

I read a handful of these Chinese/Korean cultivation novels and for a while I thought it was just something in the water or maybe they all studied under the same idiot teacher, but I think I finally figured it out.

I’m fairly convinced now that these authors are padding their stories on purpose, either so that they can sell more volumes (40% more text means 40% more volumes which means 40% more revenue) or they can publish 40% more chapters and therefore get 40% more tokens/coins on online reading sites.

But the author forgets that this kind of behavior means fewer readers and therefore less revenue, in fact they are sabotaging their entire countries authors with it.

3. Author’s misplaced (and too much) focus on torture, horror and revenge.
Not sure if it’s true (don’t care enough to look into it) but it feels like the author is a female woman… (it’s an inside joke). I think this because while this is still a cultivation story which focuses fairly heavily (but not uncommonly) on action it lacks attention to detail, sure there is a kind of leveling up but cultivation wise there is nothing but a few words said and only for the MC, and how you travel from one realm to the other is ignored entirely, it seems like you just walk there, but then why and how is there even a separation? And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Things that I would consider interesting and important are ruthlessly ignored and instead we get an inappropriate amount of focus on torture and horror.

I don’t mind stories with killing, in fact I welcome them, but who wants to hear long details description of teenage girls getting beaten to paste, whipped until they break in 2 and their guts fall out, gang-r*ped for 3 days straight ? I don’t care if they deserved it or not, you still have to be a psychopath to enjoy reading about such things, and the fact the stories with female MC’s (and probably female authors) seem to have this in common is not helping the “women are crazy psycho b*tches” stereotype at all.

Also I thought there would be more romance in this, but instead we get an ML that in the beginning was a complete sexual harassing asshole, and knowing that the FL is gonna fall in love with that psycho looser was not a good feeling, thankfully he changed pretty quickly.

The revenge part can be very satisfying but not when it’s one after another and not when it could have been avoided easily, in fact while reading it I thought the title “I won’t save you, but I will get revenge for you” seemed far more fitting.

Instead I would have preferred more technical details and more character development, specially the side characters, which brings me to …


4. Kind of cliché, kind of weak ending, not enough after stories.
The ending felt a little rushed, certain not so small details where forgotten or ignored, like a certain group that were given just 1 job (to guard her parents), but that didn’t happen… I guess with webnovels that publish each chapter separately it’s too much work or impossible to go back and fix things so they make sense.

The last/boss fight was anticlimactic, kinda cliché and short and the after stories… well there was one and it tied 1 or 2 loose ends but left a lot open/unresolved, we were also introduced (or more like not introduced) to a few new people, it felt like we should already know them (maybe from a previous story), anyway, I didn’t like that and neither did I like the way any of the other characters in the story were introduced, there is a certain way to introduce people, but the author doesn’t know them, which makes for bad storytelling, but that’s another thing most asian authors also suck at.

Which really sucks for me because cultivation stories are my favorite, but they are told by the worst storytellers, filled with cr*ap and have the worst translations…

But a TV/anime adaptation would fix all that and add so much more to it, if done properly, but that hasn’t happened yet, for any webnovel.

... Last updated on April 2nd, 2023, 3:47pm