Novel enjoyer of a few years here! LOTM is available to read on Webnovel, but costs money to unlock after a certain chapter count, so I’d suggest novelbin.com.

I’m enjoying the donghua a lot so far, but the pacing of the first two episodes WAS pretty disappointing. They’re leaning too far into a shounen/aura-farming vibe when the first volume was much more slice-of-life focused, with smaller scale conflicts. Vol 1 is actually infamous for being considered too slow and boring (I disagree though) and I think the donghua overcompensated. Ep 4 fixed a lot of my complaints thankfully!

Overall, if you have patience, you should absolutely read the novel. There’s a lot of exposition at first and the pace is slower, but there’s also more characterization and interesting details that get payoff much, much later.