One of my favorite things of this world is how much age matters, it's so refreshing for a story to have a reason for characters to have a reason to go until the end of their current realm's longevity, and be rewarded for doing so, just a simple thing that as a veteran reader really surprised me and i hope to see in more novels, but i'll probably depend on this author to deliver more of this in the future.Overall the story has great wiring quality, relatively few mistakes that don't break immersion, the story is complete so that's a 5 on stability for me, the development is pretty unique as we see shang turn into a true monsters by the end of the novel, the character design is fine if a bit bland, mostly due to how we only have a handful of side characters at a time, and the world background is amazing, aetherium has very clear rules that are always followed.One minor gripe i have with the world is how much the world incentivizes people to stay at the peak of their realm, while it does make sense in this novel as it helps improve comprehension it removes most options people have to increase their realm, which gets stale pretty fast in this world where you need that mana to go to the next realm, it removes too much agency from the weaker realms when the only way forward is joining a organization.Now is my biggest gripe with this novel, which is the ending, i heavily advice you stop reading here if you haven't seen the ending yet, the story is still worth reading.Man, this ending sucks. I've been pondering over this for the last 2 days, and the more i think about it the angrier i get, so follow me as i describe why i think this is a major narative fail.1. Show don't tell, we had very high stakes until this point, but all that is suddenly ruined, why? because from the start of this fight we knew shang was just going to play with the emperors, and the lighting emperor also knew. Come on you could have ommited that for better story telling, would it cost so much to make shang an emperor first at least so us readers are at edge, or at least make him seem weaker, let him beat the weaklings emper who barely have 2-3x spirit sense and then show his true power on the archivist, by removing all the tension from the fight the fight wasn't satisfying.2. The ending of the side characters is unsatisfying, they get mudered by Alex, which should be the good shang, and then sudenly you realise: shang didn't really have an impact on this world anymore, godamit just make them slowly be forgotten in the small eterneity it takes for shang to explore a way to escape the chaos, and even so it sucks that shang fails the promise to the lighting emperor.3. Suddenly this story is connected to another. I didn't read LitOW, the people that read seemed to like the epilogue, but i hated it, sudenly the universe takes a diferent scale, a guy sudenly comes, frees Alex of his eternal curse, says he took care of millions of gods before and instead of the ending of a novel we have a season 1 finale lol.It could have done both, introduced the world into LitOW cosmos with that immortal without ruining the ending, give alex a hopeful future without ruining this novel, also take away the part where he talks about treating millions of other gods & immortals and say that there are more gods & immortals out there.4. This frase "The most common problem is setting power as your goal instead of as a means to an end." beautifully misses the point of shang, first of all the common way to say this frase is power without a goal, who ever sets power as a goal? It may be to be the strongest, for freedom, for protection, etc, losing their goal is one thing, but power for the goal of power is very unique of shang and he's clear of his goal, he will become the most powerful, live for a while to see if something more powerful can come and then probably commit die, this comment was so... meta it took away my immersion and threw it in the bin.These are my grievances with your story, author, i am sadened by the ending but still excited for what is to come, maybe i'll read LitOW but probably will wait for your next novel, take care.
