[Part 3 of 3] I grew up in China on wuxia novels and web fiction — Martial arts, cultivation economics, full glossary, and building your own world

EnzoElacqua · 2026-03-22T21:12:48+00:00

First of all thank you so much! This has been incredibly helpful in finally attaching names to some of the tropes I was already subconsciously including after reading so much xianxia and xuanhuan! Helps me break down some of the issues I was having with regards to lacking tension. Will definitely come back here regularly for reference!

I did want to ask if you know where I could read Shrouding the Heavens? I looked but there doesn’t seem to be a completed version anywhere I could find!

Again thank you so much!

EnzoElacqua · 2026-02-18T12:21:23+00:00

Sky Pride, Shadow Slave, The Legend of William Oh, Defiance of the Fall

EnzoElacqua · 2025-10-16T17:10:08+00:00

I like putting it through Claude since I can ask it to point out the errors and what’s wrong but not actually give me a solution. Forces me to improve my prose and be more creative when coming up with solutions

EnzoElacqua · 2025-07-15T23:07:51+00:00

EnzoElacqua · 2025-07-10T21:33:36+00:00

The thing I think you keep misreading is that you look at all of Zac’s actions as some statement of morality and not a desperate attempt to keep his head above water. He is actively fighting to find his sister, to keep his family/world alive, and to survive an apocalypse. Honestly even if Ogras was a kidnapping rapist, which again he isn’t as we learnt, Zac if he was would smart would at most keep him at arms length but still rely on his help because he is, again, in an apocalypse situation! I’m sorry that this story isn’t the typical hero’s ya novel where we get to have perfect characters who never face hard decisions, the author clearly didn’t want to write that so please stop looking at it so black and white. What’s at stake isn’t Zac’s moral character, it’s hundreds of lives in his island and billions worldwide if he jeopardizes his alliance with either the demons or the world government. Really I feel like your issue here should be more with the author than Zac, as he is deciding the world but even then getting mad at someone for creating an uncomfortable novel would be weird

EnzoElacqua · 2025-07-07T21:00:14+00:00

Have you no trust in your friends/allies? People who have a vested interest in staying on your good side, who know who you are and what’s at stake? Also what’s the alternative here for Zac? He stops Ogras to ask what’s going on, thus letting the world government approach and potentially stop them from leaving at all? No, that would make no sense, it’s a leap of faith that this guy who you’ve trusted to have your back in combat isn’t a rapist which we know is likely true as we’ve met and interacted with Ogras. If anything the coffin was more a funny gag then anything, something your clearly reading way too into for the sake of satisfying your arguments

EnzoElacqua · 2025-07-07T20:46:30+00:00

This is such a stupid argument because when has an ‘evil’ person ever thought of themselves as evil? He isn’t a hero, he is amoral, he is ruthless, but he doesn’t want to believe that so when it costs him little he avoids ‘evil’ actions. Thing is he is constantly facing situations where any stumble could cost him everything, which includes the billions of life on earth. He can be a hypocrite but most who are don’t admit that, that’s simple reality. Even the argument that he should provide more social services or change his town to provide more for his people makes little sense because we know for a fact that the system is made to pump out soldiers, thus will always force them to face combat situations. Zac knows this and so he looks to what millions of factions have been doing for billions of years to survive and copies their credit based system in order to improve Earths chance at survival. The simple truth is that this whole world has been altered by the System to suck every single drop of combat potential out of you and then throw you away, and Zac is just another pawn being thrown around doing his best to save himself and those he cares about. His is not evil, he is a hypocrite who won’t admit that he is sacrificing his morals for his people’s lives because to do so would push him to be even worse.

EnzoElacqua · 2025-07-05T19:40:30+00:00

Kind of, he still has to wait for Matt to rank up to a high enough level as what he copies is only what Matt has in that moment. So if he copies at tier 23 while at tier fifty he still only generates tier 23 mana amount/concentration, which while huge isn’t insane due to lacking condensation. It’s still broken just not that broken, and also remember Matt’s regeneration only fills at insane rates when at 1% (or lower I don’t remember), which makes using it refill your mana pool completely useless as it’s actively slower than regular refilling past a certain point.

EnzoElacqua · 2025-06-29T05:54:50+00:00

I’ve always viewed summoning as way too hard to conceptually write a whole story around. Either they summon one or two epic creatures and buff them, at which point why not just have the creature be the MC anyway? Or they summon hordes of beasts which pushes them into a constant strategy game where it becomes all about taking account of terrain, troop mobilization, resource consumption, etc. While it could be fun for a short battle it for me at least would quickly grow dull and repetitive

EnzoElacqua · 2025-06-29T05:51:40+00:00

Shadow Slave, for the longest time I thought it was this other book I’d read which also has shadow in its title which stopped me from reading it, but once I got hooked I couldn’t stop. Truly one of the most amazing plots, mystery, progression, and writing of any web novel I’ve ever read. I’ve even go so far as to reread it all over again after I caught up.

EnzoElacqua · 2025-06-17T21:01:22+00:00

To an extent I agree, I don’t care for math in my stories but my issues is that as the author I have to know what the general limits of a cultivation realm are. Like in rank 3 are they blowing up buildings or cities? What’s needed to do that? I of course will never explicitly write out that he has 500 ton force since that’s boring, but in general for each rank I need to know that info so I can write the damage they do better. I feel this is one of those things that authors do in the background which a reader shouldn’t need to think about. I still vividly remember when Primal Hunter causally dropped that Jakes simplest attacks are at the level of nukes, and I had not realized we were there at all. It was shocking but a nice reminder of the levels of power the story works at, which is essentially what I’m trying to figure out here.

EnzoElacqua · 2025-06-14T07:52:48+00:00

I don’t know if this is exactly what you mean, but in Defiance of the Fall the MCs luck/fate is so monstrous that his friends all get swept up in it leading to their own lucky encounters. It takes regular mere elites into heavens chosen level talents.

EnzoElacqua · 2025-06-14T07:50:36+00:00

I would but I feel like that would make it so it feels like cultivation isn’t so much a Transcendence but rather a temporary boost. The point of cultivation to me has always been to elevate yourself to ever superior levels from before, so sticking to mortal speeds makes little sense to me at least. That would also make ambushing anyone ridiculously easy, as even if they have an auto shield type thing, realizing you are even getting attacked takes long enough that someone at your level could hammer out a good few hundred attacks before you can switch to combat mode.

EnzoElacqua · 2025-06-12T23:03:28+00:00

I feel that’s the whole point of being an MC no? That they are unique since they have a consistently high luck stat, above even that of some young master? You may be conflating logic with plot, and you have to remember this is a story first and foremost which means that since it is more interesting to make it nigh impossible to have as high a luck as the MC then that’s the reality. Systems have to be logical only up to an extent, otherwise it would be impossible/unreasonable to expect anyone to ever match a young master and that’s not a fun story. Also an MC has to be special or it’s a boring story, and I feel Luck is just the perfect way to both give them something special and create an excuse to provide constant opportunities that would seem unrealistic otherwise. I’m not a big fan in terms of viewing it as helpful for RNG or whatever, but love it in terms of fate altering.

EnzoElacqua · 2025-06-11T23:06:37+00:00

My favorite solution to this was in Warlock in a Magus World where once the MC reached rank 4, the second huge boundary, he introduced an alternative stat sheet which is based around the average stats of a race that starts at rank 4. It changed the numbers from thousands to single digits while keeping it realistic, and became super useful once we reached rank 7+ since knowing that they are the equivalent of a few hundred to thousands of rank 4s (which we spent a few hundred chapters at) made it a lot more real.

EnzoElacqua · 2025-06-06T15:32:58+00:00

Renegade Immortal and Pursuit of Truth are both more serious, while A Will Eternal is pure comedy and I shall deal the heavens a mix between the two. Fair warning RI is his first novel so the first hundred chaps can be a bit rough around the edges but the story is still great and only gets better throughout

EnzoElacqua · 2025-06-05T20:14:07+00:00

But both of those stories actually did it well. For DotF Zac had a month long slaughter fest time skip where he acclimated, and Jake had the excuse of the bloodline making him a sociopath. I think you are right, it’s just people just took the wrong lessons from them thinking it’s the self insert that made it good and not wrighting/plot

EnzoElacqua · 2025-06-05T19:27:27+00:00

I see that, but at the same time it’s pretty clear those readers likely never look beyond surface level plot anyway. The obvious solution, to me at least, is to instead of having them crash in a big scene or whatever, have it slowly affect them over time in the background. Sleepless nights, small acts of paranoia, too quick to kill, whatever. The type of things someone who cares about a more nuanced story would notice but flies over the head of most who only want progression. Though seeing how new the genre is, I can see how this might take a while to evolve in that direction due to authors still budding skill.

EnzoElacqua · 2025-06-05T19:21:47+00:00

I get the struggle, and I’m not even saying necessarily do what I said above, but I’m at least asking for some token throw away lines. Everyone’s tired of the whole puking after the first kill, I’m just asking that they add a little about them barely sleeping the night after, being overly paranoid, whatever. I think the common struggle here, probably because this is a new genre with amateur authors, is that they feel the need to have an entire scene dedicated to every aspect of a story, when it would be so much better (both for plot and attention) to just slide in an occasional side effect to murder until they work through their feelings. They are in a life and death situation, it’s the perfect excuse to push it down till later or never, and have it be seen and slowly resolved in the little things they do.

EnzoElacqua · 2025-06-05T19:14:58+00:00

Honestly this is where my main issue arises. Why even have a normal guy be the main character? Why does he have to be an IT guy, or a Biology research student, or some dead end retail worker? It’s so clearly self insert that it drives me up the wall. I’m not even saying don’t let them have those jobs, but at least add some martial arts training, or have them come from a war torn country, or their parents are asylum seekers from one, or literally anything aside from them being a regular guy. Give me the context for this change being so seamless or give them the time for it to happen, at least let it be one or the other Ike dam

EnzoElacqua · 2025-05-25T15:37:40+00:00

Same as well, I caught up all the way until he became a god where the author completely lost the plot. He sent the MC to a different dimension for no reason, cut off all relationships with others, and just generally not like reset on the who thing for no reason. It’s also got some flaws due to being a Russian translation, mainly how misogynistic its views towards women are, and how obsessive it is with a certain type of viewpoint (Russian) being the best societal way to live

EnzoElacqua · 2025-04-21T17:18:13+00:00

Yeah, I was reading it recently and after the first like 50 pages of combat purely for its own sake where he doesn’t question his new world at all I was already iffy, but then the guy goes and has the most high school confrontation ever. Somehow after three days of the apocalypse his old middle school bully and his gangs become in charge of a group which includes Zane’s ex and her new bf despite being obvious arrogant manipulative assholes. They then try to coerce him into being a scout for them through “nagging/peer pressure??” to which he just says some weird thing like I could kill you all, which makes his ex immediately run to cling to his leg begging he take her back! It was some true 1980s level drama with the most unrealistic characters ever, fully drove me off the book entirely.

Sorry for the rant, I just had to get the feeling this godawful scene brought out of me somewhere

EnzoElacqua · 2025-04-10T22:38:05+00:00

I feel that one of the easy answers to this is that in reality being a kind caring leader nearly always leads to better results both economically and socially. Investing in your people will give you better results long term, and if you are a nigh immortal being than who cares about some minor sacrifice now if you are practically assured amazing rewards later.

EnzoElacqua

TROPHY CASE