This one is really great. The protagonist is actually smart, and so are his enemies, and the story is full of fun, intelligent surprises.
My two little criticisms:
a) First of all, at the point in the story where the MC is strong enough that he can potentially leave his sect under his own power and survive, the MC could in fact do something more intelligent than just aiming to be the strongest, IMO - for example, he could leave with the aim to create good things and synergize with good people (something extremely complex and very rewarding).
Still, the author is very smart, so he quickly poisons the MC, and at that point it makes more sense for the MC to really be trapped into his fate as a 'cultivator' (aka bully in a world of bullies), as he desperately seeks the antidote.
b) the MC makes the mistake of torturing his enemies at a few places that really don't make sense. His enemy will have just wasted his chance to kill the MC by sadistically trying to torture him with a slow death, only to have the MC suddenly gain the advantage and then claim he 'learned his lesson from this', only to still torture his enemy before killing him, in spite of the reasonable risk that his enemy might have an ally show up (or whatever else could reverse things again).
Later on, when his potential-gf is almost raped, the MC again tortures instead of just killing his opponent, which doesn't make any strategic sense: the guy is about to be murdered by the MC, anyway. Torturing him at that point does not serve any intelligent purpose and again only increases the risk to the MC (he was after all in an area under the control of the rapist's sect).
I honestly think that only passive-aggresive losers feel the need or desire to torture people. Healthier individuals can see far past that, and thus behave in more strategically sound fashion, way beyond what resentful people will be able to do.
Anyhow, those relatively small quibbles aside, this fantasy novel is like a breath of fresh air. Finally an intelligent MC in intelligent, coherent scenarios + etc. It feels like going from stuff written by/for an IQ of 75, to something by/for an IQ of 130+. Actually, I bet people would get smarter if they were to spend more of their time reading coherent stuff like this, instead of the broken logic that gets used in most movies and novels.
The translator in charge of this project is also a lot of fun, which makes the daily releases even more entertaining. It has been a very absorbing distraction!
Update: The series only keeps getting better! For me, even greater than chaps 187-189, was one that followed soon after, where the MC shows how truly different he is: unlike the others who are seeking to submit in order to game the system (and thus are vastly limited, reduced to only the choices the system deigns to offer them), the MC sees these same rules not only as being optional, but as being things he should seek to break primordially!
The MC really is different from his competitors - it's not just that he is more lucky or more powerful. In addition he is quite a bit smarter, with a far deeper meta than they can even imagine.
His independence makes his life harder, but that only makes him stronger!
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