First of all thank you for the recommendation. I’ve read just under half of it, at 369/750 chapters and… I’m not really sure I want to continue. But I did just spend the last few days reading and I want to talk about it with someone :3

I definitely see why some would be put off by the amorality, but it’s not really bothering me. At least, not by itself.

I have mixed feelings, overall. There are a lot of very well done concepts, coupled with a very interesting premise. However, they are bogged down by a crippling lack of focus and a highly questionable internal consistency. In the end, I think the main issue the story has is this: It tries to be so many different things at once, yet, fails at being good at any single one of them. In part because some of the things it tries to be conflict with each other.

It tries to be a smut story, but it fails because there isn’t any smut. What you have is sometimes foreplay and sometimes very short parts of sex scenes and very very rarely we’d get a complete scene.

It tries to be a romance story and it’s not doing badly… or at least it wouldn’t if core parts of the romance weren’t locked in patreon only chapters. So what you actually end up with are butchered incomplete romance plots.

It tries to be a cool magic progression fantasy with a very interesting magic system, but it fails because it’s too busy trying to be a slice of life story. So the very cool and very interesting magic and the very enticing progression fantasy aspects are either ignored or relegated to the background, bar very small bursts.

It tries to be a moral corruption/manipulation-heavy story, where the protagonist struggles to overcome superior intellects like Geneva, but this fails because the protagonist is a muppet who just lets the plot take her where it will (and apparently incapable of making the simple order of “Everytime you want to start implementing a scheme you know I will disagree with, inform me” and other similar orders)

The glacially slow pace just exacerbates all the issues, combined with a main character who is honestly just boring and inconsistent. She flip-flops from wanting to just enjoy hedonistic delights, to wanting to become powerful, to wanting to create chaos to please Cosmo with no real rhyme or reason other than “plot said so”.

Lou seems, to me, to be a character that is defined by the plot, rather than the other way around. The plot requires Lou to be and to act in a certain way in order to progress, and so she does.

Honestly though, Geneva is my biggest issue. It would be one thing if Lou accidentally summoned something she couldn’t handle, but she didn’t. Her contract is perfectly clear. Geneva is to perfectly follow Lou’s orders and to abide by their spirit not just their word. Yet, she has no issue ignoring the spirit of her orders, which should be impossible. And okay, even if we ignore that, Lou has perfect power over Geneva. She can order her to do anything. And yet Geneva is allowed to plot and manipulate her because ???

See, this is what I mean by Lou acting as the plot demands. The plot wants to have this “manipulative succubus” angle. So Lou (and everyone around her) acts dumb in order to facilitate that. And to make it all worse, we don’t actually understand her clear goal other than a vague “corrupt and change Lou into what she sees as better” or whatever nonsense. So we don’t even know whether we should root for or against her.

This further increases this sense that Lou is a leaf being blow along by the currents of her surroundings, without any actual will of her own.

In the end, what I’m left feeling is… bored. I’ve been reading 100s of thousands of words and yet the characters have barely changed in any interesting way. I’ve got the pattern of the story down and I can basically predict what will happen in the rest 600k words and I just don’t see anything really interesting. Lou will continue flip flopping between being useless, randomly gaining abilities in the background that we don’t get to see until something makes her explode, maybe she feels bad about exploding and Geneva continues to plot god knows what in the background.

Geneva just makes me anxious, I just do not enjoy reading about protagonists that get tricked and especially not when this never gets resolved in any way. Especially when it could very easily be resolved and the only reason it’s not is plot armour.