While eating I thought about this story some more, and there is something that doesn’t feel alright with the whole premise of him losing his cultivation.
First, he clearly recognized, once he inspected his body, the cause of his weakness: not having used qi (or else) in a long while. This means that he knew if one did such thing the end result would be that of one becoming weaker.
Then, why didn’t he take precautions against that? You can counter that he had planned to awaken sooner and he lost track of time, but what he said at the beginning was that his people should’ve left him alone unless a catastrophe happened. This suggests that, no matter the amount of time that passed, once he was awoken to resolve a sect crisis, he would’ve been at full power since he had made preparations, because if he hadn’t he would’ve ended up like right now and he would’ve been useless to help resolve the sect crisis.
But while he was clearly surprised to see his cultivation had withered, he wasn’t suspicious that something had been done to him or that someone messed up his preparations to not fall into that state, as he didn’t bother to inspect his resting place at all before leaving.
This thus leaves me wondering the credibility of this setup: he knew that long periods of not using qi led to a withered cultivation, but he still sealed himself without preparations, hoping that when “someday” in the future the sect awoke him, he would still have all his powers?
Unless he was purposely trying to lower his cultivation (which can’t be true cause he was surprised it happened!), then this setting makes no sense.
It doesn’t matter if in a future chapter you’re gonna explain that actually such and such happened, and this was the true reason his cultivation got lowered, that fact that before leaving he wasn’t suspicious enough to check his coffin or whatever, is proof that either: 1, the mc was really powerful once but also really dumb, which I don’t like, and now he’s weak and dumb, which I still don’t like; or 2, the author didn’t care all that much about the setup, he just wanted some once-powerful mc to climb the ladder again with an edge over his “peers” so he can shock and awe everyone for thousands of chapters to come, which I really don’t like.
I was harsh, but I really would’ve liked the author to have put more thought in his setup.
And while true that I was harsher because it’s a genre I don’t like (yes, I’m going away after this comment), the point I made is still valid.
Sigh, I really hate stories where the mc was once strong and due to various bull**** he becomes weak again and has to gather this and that to recover his/her strength. Either start weak and become strong or start strong and remain strong/become stronger.
At least I liked the concept, so I’m giving this story a few more chapters...
Voidhood