Webnovel Author: foreverWrong - Novel Collection

I love this book so much, I really hope it comes back from hiatus Great foreshadowing

There is a beautiful book within this book. The best executed evil MC ever. I hate the chineze govment for banning this book... Author please complete in the same spirit.

it was on purpose to let him use the light of wisdom.

I was gonna give this series 3 stars since it is not complete and many of the tropes it uses are seen in other cultivation novels. But now 2000+ chapters into the book I feel this book does deserve 4 stars (barely) for its philosophy. This book's mc is the best written "Chaotic Neutral" (refer : <a href="https://i.imgur.com/gVMl8tS.png">to the DnD alignment chart</a>) character I have seen. He is selfish to the core. He has a strong will and acts very rationally. He is intelligent and has no "principles" holding him back. The story as it progresses offers a transactional view of relationships and deconstructs the institutions of tribe/sect in terms of how it offers a moral way to accumulate benefits for the ones at the top. His ideas are not that original, others have talked about it before. "Steal a little and they throw you in jail; steal a lot and they make you king." --Bob Dylan "Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god." -- Jean Rostand But he does present them in an accessible way. Many people can resonate with this since they can see how evil people often hide behind the garb of respectability. You can do a lot of harm at scale when you work within the rules, taking advantage of it. This makes it clear what morality really is - a useful tool to ensure social stability. These dangerous but true ideas are why they banned this book in China. The author was so close to finishing it too! So you will be able to enjoy 95% or more of the complete story by the time you reach the latest chapter. The story itself has plot device that lets you travel back a short while in time. So this brings in the aspect of time travel in a unique way. But that happens rarely and overall it still rides on the traditional single jump back in time trope where the mc uses his knowledge of the future to have advantages throughout the novel. But because the mc can go back and retry, this novel allows the mc to fail. That brings a fresh look to this genre because we are so used to the mc able to basically deal with anything that happens. Even failures are just temporary setbacks, we don't see a complete defeat where the mc falls into an intricate trap set up equally smart enemies. So other than the philosophy, the strong character building, this book also has a great world development. This word has a complete power system, well defined. It has the traditional idea of Dao or paths - regarding different aspects of nature. The idea of Heaven path being nature - which tries to bring balance (entropy, potential differences try to equalize, osmosis) is well developed here and later they expound on how the Human path is the one that opposes nature, seeking to bring order, accumulate benefits. This relates to the idea of how human cells <a href="https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_general-chemistry-principles-patterns-and-applications-v1.0/s22-08-thermodynamics-and-life.html#averill_1.0-ch18_s08_s04_p14:~:text=Cells%20maintain%20a%20low%2Dentropy%20state%20by%20increasing%20the%20entropy%20of%20their%20surroundings.">reduce entropy internally</a> by increasing entropy externally. This also reminds me of my <a href="https://***.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/#component-602ccf6a47f35:~:text=The%20overall%20entropy%20of%20the%20universe,by%20maintaining%20an%20orderly%20internal%20structure.">favorite theory</a> of life. Unlike other Chinese novels, there is the luck path in this novel and fate which is great because while the author did not reveal any deep ideas relating to them, I appreciate that he at least made us think about it. The way he conceptualized it was in terms of uncertainties, fate was everything that was deterministically causally connected while causal connections with uncertain or probabilistic outcomes could be influenced much in the same way the game master could force the computer to sample from a more favorable distribution when running the random number generator. But reality seems to always have uncertainties and free will does not lie in what we cannot control. So overall it is rightfully a gem among the genre of Chinese cultivation novels. I would recommend it for anyone looking for a ruthless intelligent mc in a cultivation world.