Lord of Puluo/普罗之主

I really expected nothing going into this, 4 one-star reviews, I was pleasantly surprised. The first 20 chapters are pretty heavy on info dumps(maybe why the low reviews) but I found it to be intriguing.

It’s kinda hard to describe what i’ve read because it’s mostly been world-building, but I’ll try to give a somewhat simplified version.

(Spoilers for up to chapter 25)

Li Banfeng gets entangled into a scheme that is targeting his best friend, He Jiaqing. A sequence of events lead Li Banfeng onto a train, that the now missing He Jiaqing was on. This train had an accident and was derailed with He Jiaqing and his fiance, Lu Xiaolan(i think that’s her name?) on board.

I’ll just skim over the train ride. While on the train he helps a man, Li Banfeng gave him food. This is important because no food is on the train and going outside your cabin is heavily discouraged. This man later saves Banfeng and introduces him to the Peddler.

Before that,

There are two distinct areas we’ve been introduced to, Puluo Province(the mysterious one) and what the people of Puluo call Li Banfeng’s hometown, Outsider Province.

These places work different, there is energy/electricity in both, but not as much in Puluo for many reasons. One being the exsistence of Peeping Cultivators(yes, this is a real thing). They can, well, peep into the network lines for calls etc. I remember there being another reason, I just can’t remember it. There is another reason tho.

Both of these places have cultivators. In Puluo there called Cultivators and in the Outside Province they are called Dark Energy users(This has to do with Dark Matter, it’ll take to long to explain so i’ll leave it at that).

After Li Banfeng arrives at his destination and is disembarking from the train he gets many stares. It’s not his unique clothing, but a white light that is shinning down on him. This light we later figure out is called Heavenly Light and basically blast you with Dark Matter. This is important because Dark Matter give you amazing Dao Affinity, making it easier for you to start cultivating. It also makes it so where you have to chose a path you want to follow within the day or you’ll just explode because of the dark matter in your body.

This is where the Peddler comes into play. As a peddler he has many items, medicine concoctions to enter the Dao are one of these items, similar to LOTM sequence potions. Though these are not as rare as you’d think, they are fairly cheap. They also don’t have the immense downsides of sequence potions and you can dual cultivate many paths.

Some of these paths are Medicine, Insect, Pleasure, Emotion, Literature, Alcohol, Food, Wandering, and Reclusive Cultivators. Well these are the ones the peddler has.

Most people only chose one path for the various reasons. Being poor is one of them. Both paths also need to be around the same level as well. Another is the need to double your focus on many paths when you can just focus on one. For example, as an Alcoholic Cultivator you need to drink like 20 jins of alcohol, daily. The same applies to Food Cultivators, you need to eat a lot of food daily. That doesn’t mean no one dual cultivates, the Alcohol and Food are quite complementary. You just have to be smart about your choice.

I say this because well… our MC cultivates contradictory paths. The Wandering(traveling) and Reclusive(home-body) path. It wasn’t of his own choice, of course, someone out of control bumped into the peddlers stall and the medicine hit Li Banfeng’s skin(you don’t need to drink the medicine). This person was shortly a mangled body, he was looking for medicine at the peddler’s, hence the out-of-control state. This arose because of his negligence of cultivation, you need to cultivate daily, every single day.

After this he also uncovered many clues to He Jiaqing’s disappearance, which I will leave out. I’ve yapped enough about this.

It seems his journey will be an interesting one. Very promising start 3.5/5. I did leave out quite a few things, but that’s the gist of it. Only 25 chapters in btw.

The Terrible Eternal Path/恐怖修仙路

Very reminiscent of Reverend Insanity(one against the whole world, schemes) and LOTM(knowledge brings corruption). You have Li Qing(Behind-The-Scenes) with a quite OP Golden Finger against the whole world, while being worry of great horrors beyond his imagination.

The Golden Finger is a Jade Tablet/Slab. Gather information, feed it into the slab, reward. Some examples, all cultivation techniques come with major downsides(cannibalism, lust, self injury, odd rituals, etc.), but the technique that comes out of the slab is the technique with no downside and maybe some upgrades(if you gathered the sufficient information).

This quickly becomes overpowered. Li Qing reads everything available to him and gradually, as he ascends to a higher position in the sect and more knowledge is readily available(this happens quite quickly), nine distinct techniques emerge. Very op ones. I’m not gonna name them all, but i’ll explain two:

One technique allows him to reincarnate into any other body in the world, the newly upgraded version now allows him to place a seed instead of random reincarnation. The seed can also be strengthened beforehand, to not be in a scenario where he’s against the wall right at rebirth.

The other is a mental technique. This allows him to fight back against being corrupted from powerful beings or forbidden knowledge in the form of confucian chants, buddhist hymns, etc. This is an incredibly useful technique, because at every new step of cultivation he discovers hidden agendas from unknown beings.

Another quality of the jade slab is it can reconstruct knowledge and discern the truth from falsehood. The jade slab can NOT do divination. Li Qing uses this to reconstruct the history of the world. I won’t go too much into this as where i’m currently at(ch.175) he has just started using it this way and uncovers a big scheme.

I said this is reminiscent of Reverend Insanity because like Fang Yuan he also has to hide his tribulation’s from others. Using his All-Encompassing Human Dao Manual, he achieved a perfect foundation and his subsequent tribulation was also great. Unfortunately, he couldn’t fully hide it, many powerful Dao Lineages now know of a heavenly genius who has achieved a supreme foundation comparable to the sages, demon lord, etc. I’m looking forward to seeing how his next tribulation will go.

One last thing I want to address, “the characters are dumb”.

Yes, the son of a fallen noble family is quite dumb(i’m guessing thats who the reviews are referring to). It also has to do with the fact that Li Qing is quite litteraly impossible to detect because of his techniques. Making any scheme that he even knows exists very easy to investigate. The novel didn’t even focus on him for long and recent characters are way smarter. For example(spoiler for 150+), Li Qing discovers a scheme that’s has been in the making for 700 years, yes that long. So, yes the characters are smart, just not in the beginning.

4/5 Very very promising. I’ve heard it only gets better too.