I saw potential in the early story, but in the end what really killed it for me was how terrible all the characters and dialogues are. All of them felt flat and uninspired to me.
The romance was terrible as well. It is all so picture perfect yet fragile, needy and awkward if not autistic. Furthermore, his idealized woman doesn't feel like a real woman at all - she feels like a wounded man's ideal: a creature that exists for him, when in fact real women exist for themselves, first and foremost (as well they should).
But then none of the characters exist for themselves and truly live and struggle in the story: instead they are all just awkward plot devices. Even the MC is obviously just a device to satisfy the author's and readers' haphazard desires for gary-stu fantasy, rather than a human being.
Also, the magical fight scenes are terrible. There are simply too many categories of attackers (mage, priest, assassin, summoner, warrior type A or B, knight type A or B, + etc.) and each has a frikkin' ton of special magical attacks (ex: a defensive-type knight has a MAGICAL shield bash power that depends not on physical mass, density, hardness or momentum but on magic), so when the author has them fight against one another, you have hardly any tension because you have no idea what powers are stronger than others or how they should complement or trump one another (because they are all IMAGINARY, 100% bogus martial arts).
In these confusing fights, the author will sometimes even wait until the following chapter to explain why the protagonist won his fight - so AFTER you are all confused and lost about why exactly the MC's magical, imaginary offense/defense obliterated his enemy's imaginary offense/defense, you find out that one of the dozens of abilities available was in fact totally OP in that context and therefore there was in fact no reason to worry - LOL!
It was also weird early on, when the 10 yr old MC murders some tough guy just for talking trash about his mom. The MC is so OP that his 'duel' with the guy is completely one-sided, and then the CHILD MC has zero remorse or regrets about having murdered someone just for his dumb pride.
After all, it's not like they are facing a desperate war where all resources, including soldiers' lives, are critical, right? Good thing there is a paragon of justice around to wantonly murder people! OOps, I mean, make things better, of course!
Perhaps the only part I liked was the bonded animal, which was treated very nicely and with honor, which it also returned in full to the MC. It was really nice to see, but nearly everything else was a turn off for me.
I've noticed that, for most of these Wuxia MCs, if they aren't straight out sociopaths (brutally applying the law of the jungle, as would any mafia wannabe-chieftain, torturing, murdering, stealing and conning their way to 'success'), then they are mainly just 'good' at following their family's orders, like by being killer robots.
So the MC in this one is of the slightly rarer 'good' Wuxia MC variant. The plot gives him the excuse for deciding that the government is good (they are the only thing hold them pesky demons back!), so the MC constantly shows that he is good mainly because he follows his military orders with zeal!
In the end, what killed it for me was seeing how awkwardly the author set up the social struggles of the MC as he started to lead two teams of knights. His challenges, opponents, and dialogues were so lame I just couldn't take it anymore.
To be honest though, there are not many (if any) Wuxia I've been able to finish - they seem to be good at the start and to then become very repetitive. This one, however, feels like something created by an author with many thousand-chapter+ Wuxia behind him: he is painstakingly min/maxing ever part to make it last as long as possible, but the better moments are too few to sustain the reader, especially as more and more problems start to accumulate in the story (as per more recent reviews).
(-42)
