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A review by drogus
Lord of the Mysteries by Ai Qianshui de Wuzei
3.0
As far as Chinese cultivation type novels go, if this can even be called that, it has some of the highest highs I've seen in that genre. It also has some extremely low lows. I read this in an English translation, so it's possible some of the criticisms I have of it can be attributed to that fact, but I find it likely that many problems stem from the original prose.
The Victorian era setting was great, loved the general feeling of the world building (although it was greatly lacking in actual substance), the magic system was interesting, it was also somewhat nice to read a cultivation type novel that actually took its time and described the setting and details (although it goes way too far in this regard). The tarot club idea is cool, and the first volume despite lots of pacing issues was really fun. The ending of the first volume was the peak of the entire story (out of what I read), the Lovecraftian type horror was great, and every time the story dipped into cosmic horror themes later on it was great.
Unfortunately, it's extremely long, and bloated with details and descriptions that are completely unnecessary, and moves at a complete crawl. The average cultivation novel is the exact opposite, but this goes way too far in the other direction. Like all of these books, the prose and general writing just isn't great, although again part of that might be attributed to reading a translation. I gave up reading it a decent amount in, and despite wishing to pick it up again sometimes for the highs, it's far too long and has far too many large chunks of terrible writing and pacing to be worth it.
edit: went back and tried to read some of it, the writing is really dreadful. This goes for basically all of these translated cultivation (or otherwise) webnovels. Again, this is likely a result of the translation and fundamental differences between Chinese and English, but going solely off what I can read; it's bad. You have to really be in a certain state of mind to just ignore the horrendous writing in English to get to the meat of what makes this special, which isn't something most English reader will be willing to do.
The Victorian era setting was great, loved the general feeling of the world building (although it was greatly lacking in actual substance), the magic system was interesting, it was also somewhat nice to read a cultivation type novel that actually took its time and described the setting and details (although it goes way too far in this regard). The tarot club idea is cool, and the first volume despite lots of pacing issues was really fun. The ending of the first volume was the peak of the entire story (out of what I read), the Lovecraftian type horror was great, and every time the story dipped into cosmic horror themes later on it was great.
Unfortunately, it's extremely long, and bloated with details and descriptions that are completely unnecessary, and moves at a complete crawl. The average cultivation novel is the exact opposite, but this goes way too far in the other direction. Like all of these books, the prose and general writing just isn't great, although again part of that might be attributed to reading a translation. I gave up reading it a decent amount in, and despite wishing to pick it up again sometimes for the highs, it's far too long and has far too many large chunks of terrible writing and pacing to be worth it.
edit: went back and tried to read some of it, the writing is really dreadful. This goes for basically all of these translated cultivation (or otherwise) webnovels. Again, this is likely a result of the translation and fundamental differences between Chinese and English, but going solely off what I can read; it's bad. You have to really be in a certain state of mind to just ignore the horrendous writing in English to get to the meat of what makes this special, which isn't something most English reader will be willing to do.