The Red Lands

Overall: A well written and amusing slice of life transmigration story with a decent "smart but not cheat-gifted" town/kingdom building type of kind but pragmatic MC. Thank god the MC is not OP or a sex crazy lolicon...instead he intelligently and mostly believably draws together an outcast team of youngsters as he seeks to not just survive but thrive. I strongly recommend this story to anyone who does not need a fast paced action packed sword and sorcery tale within the first ~ 40K words. It has comedy, adventure, sad and heartwarming and thrilling parts and the author tends towards showing verse telling which always makes me smile.

Style and Story: Do not expect kung fu action grips or lots of battles and insulted young masters. There is limited action with maybe only 1 kick-ass action fight sequence in the 18 chapters published at the time of this review. However, there is a solid sense of adventure and comradery with a backdrop of lurking tragedy and hazy outside threats. As I mentioned earlier, the pacing is slow to medium slow and so far primarily all about slice of life and team/base building. Events and characters slowly stack on each other with some sophistication. The author does a solid job of showing rather than just telling and there's some descriptive flair even if it isn't at the level of New Yorker Magazine short stories. I rate the style and story at 4 because it is good but not outrageously kick ass and there's several clear improvements and more advanced writing / plot devices and strategies that have not been deployed. There isn't enough subplots or foreshadowing. I like the good moments of comedy and I like the dark world setting. However, I am disappointed that tragedy and evil has yet to truly show all its fangs due to some semi-believable circumstantial plot armor of the MC and his crew.

What do I mean? On one level the world building is good. As a reader I felt immersed in a mostly realistic medieval hell-hole of low tech and high mortality. Slavery. Abuse. Dog eat dog + mutated rat eat starving child. Poverty lurks around every open latrine as the Grim Reaper collects the frozen dead from the ramshackled huts where the MC first appears. Likely ass-face royalty and greedy, selfish prick wealthy are shitting on everyone though honestly the MC and his group are so far away from major civilization these fuckers haven't reared their ugly heads yet. Without ruining everything with spoilers, so far the actual betrayal has yet to appear. And while clear horrible poverty is everywhere, the MC's own local circumstances  move away from it reasonably quickly.

In terms of style and story my other big complaint is that the fantasy and magic aspect of the world is still hidden behind a veil somewhere between semi-mysterious and semi-put-off-for-fucking-way-too-long. The label of LitRPG is so far totally inappropriate after 18 chapters. No clue how the author plans to introduce it in any believable fashion now that so much has happened. As mentioned earlier, without any betrayal and horror inflicted upon the MC and his team, the story's reality does not match the much hyped horrible world the author tries to tell and show us as readers. 

Grammar: Very good grammar and spelling with only a few minor mistakes that aren't worth pointing out given the Ogre level writing skills of this author when compared to most other RRL dross. Makes for easy peasy reading. 

Character: the MC comes across as pretty normal after a bit of sadness and anger at his new world. Outside of comedy slapping his teammates for being selfish idiots sometimes, he is not a richly developed character beyond I am smart and a planner and can manage my team. We don't see too many of his quirks. We don't see the MC flashbacking or relating his past to his present in any exposed or really even subtle fashion. He isn't arrogant but he is relatively confident. He is...somewhat trusting...despite claims that he seems the universe as dog eat dog. The rest of the characters are honestly underdeveloped beyond a few weak stereo-types at the moment. Perhaps the Merchant is the most well-rounded character introduced so far. Which...while not bad...is sad given the array of still unexplored team-mates. That these teammates are young kids does make it a bit harder to have them already have strongly formed personalities, I still feel the author has fallen down in terms of dialogue between the team, learning naturally about pasts vs. mini info dump intros when characters are added, and certainly there isn't much sense of growing character development yet. Not saying one could easily achieve all this within 18 chapters but there doesn't seem like too much effort in this directly. The kids are growing up...but...not really in anyway that converts to more than surface individuality and broad traits like "the cute helpful cook" or the "no doubt bad ass asian will likely be assassin but currently scout" or the "good caring girl who may or may not be the first core harem member" or the "whiny older bro helper who is serves the smarter younger bro MC" 

Yeah. I criticize hard but let me be clear. This story is damn good in comparison to most everything else that is out there. I just sense the author could do even more so I can't fork out 5s everywhere even if they are deserved by comparison.

I really liked the story, it has a nice pacing everything is belivable and the fact that there isn't an big end goal like a Demon Lord to kill or doing some gods biding etc is really really nice. i love how the mc can just go around doing whatever he wants to survive and prosper in this new world, that said i would give it 4-5 stars but the second half of the story is a mess, i don't understand the chronological order of the events and most chapters feel like they have no meaning in the overall plot, definetely worth a read though and with some work it can really shine, i could see this getting into the top 10 or 20 easily

This is a very well written story.

It's a very slow story, which is not necessarily bad on one hand since the main character started out on a really bad way. He's living in poverty with nothing to really help him through winter and with said winter on the doorstep and he's in the body of an illiterate twelve year old boy. Obvliously the cards he has been dealt aren't very good and he has a lot of problems to solve before he could even realistically think of doing anything such as adventuring.

I can see how it as reader could be really annoying and repetitive to wait for these updates only to get more of more or less the same. This was so far no problem for me, since I only recently found this story and could thus read chapter after chapter.

Also whilst no LitRPG elements have so far been shown, I must say the grinding has been very well shown. The MC has done a lot of grinding in a sense.

The MC is a guy I like. He's not overpowered and he's really forced to use his brain to ensure the survival of himself and his small group. Whilst the personalities of his group could be fleshed out a bit better and some more info about the previous life of the MC would be appreciated, I must say though that so far I like everybody in his small group. The stuff he does such as distillation are also things everybody who paid any attention in school should be able to do. This MC gets nothing free, only guts and intellect keep him in the race so to speak.

As said before so far there's been nothing worth of the LitRPG tag in the story. That said however this is obviously a slow burner and magic whilst also having been absent for quite a while seems to be finally flowing into the story, just as the magic tag said it would.

So far as far as worldbuilding goes the story is decent. You truly feel as if the MC landed in the worst period of the medieval period cracked up to eleven thanks to hostile wildlife, famine and human trafficking. That said I am cautious, because fairly little besides the small starting village has been revealed. Granted that in it's own is realistic as the medieval period was not known for rapid and reliable communication, especially for the poor people.

I do not recommend this story for people who want lots of action and a powerful MC.

I completely recommend this story to people who don't mind a slow paced story, like realistic settings, want a protagonist who needs to use every bit of intellect to stay alive and don't mind waiting a while for the LitRPG parts of the story to appear and the magic parts to develop a bit more.

I am giving this story an overal score of five stars at the moment this review was written. This story was the story that made me create a RoyalRoadL account in order to keep track of it. Make of that what you will, but chances are you will not regret the read. This story is superior to a lot of stories, including a lot of those with the LitRPG parts present from the first chapter.

Note: This is my first review on this site.

Up until chapter 77 (current max), it's pretty much just slice of life.

The characters are pretty well made, but there's a little too many of them right now, compared to how interesting they are. Which is a flag (they're so ded bruh).

Almost every battle up until chapter 77 has been what wuxia/xanxia/garbage fans would consider 'cheese'. Since they want DragonBall esque style fighting (typical cultivation novel reader).

Edit: I mixed up the summaries, this has nothing to do with cultivation, I'm gonna leave the point though, since it's still somewhat valid.

In regards to how the world is constructed, it seems to borrow heavily from 'magic' found in Cultivation novels. There's some kind of clan/noble counterbalance to an emperor and each other. Demonic beasts being rare is new and the lack of conventional cultivating is odd, but welcome. The 'city' is so far from sustainable that I'd like to call bullshit, unless there's a mine, huge fortress or other natural resource nearby.

The MC is far from a Mary Sue, albeit his plans aren't very good, but never seem to fail horribly (like plans normally do IRL). It'd be great if he'd have to fall back on a plan B sometimes. There's also a lot of suspension of disbelief during his interactions with the merchant(s). This is medival shit. Nothing easier than to just beat every answer out of him and dispose of him afterwards ('golden goose' my shit up, only works when the person in question lacks the manpower/experience, but if someone from the slums can do it... well the merchant would've just gotten the information and sent his goons instead of some little homeless shit with a big ego. It's more efficient bruh!).

Grammar is great.

Style is... normal? Like... nice titles... I guess?!

Story seems very slow, but is actually pretty fast (In universe time), watch out that the MC doesn't die from old age tho and don't fuck up the 'immortality' mechanics, like so many cultivation stories do. The MC tends to take very stupid/risky choices and they end up working out for him, watch out, shit's getting old. Don't Mary Sue his luck up m8, or I'm gonna solo the Jedi last (ha, get it? I'm so funny!).

Honestly, I think the goblin invasion is gonna be a slaughter, because if the MC  doesn't get a reason to get his ass in gear, he's gonna die from old age, before we even get to visit the mythological capital.

Yea, I think it's pretty good, I'm gonna dickslap anyone who thinks it's bad for not sticking with the repetitive cultivation tropes. Fite me!

Btw, I was drunk when writing this... meh it's close enough...

It's definitely a story that has a different flow to it than other reincarnation stories and the MC isn't too difficult to like & follow in his actions.

Besides a few spelling errors that could have been fixed by an additional read-through or two I don't really have anything to say about the writing either.

The only thing that bothers me are that some of the tags are very much non-existent so far (I'm 85 chapters in). Have yet to see any actual adventuring, no magic or harem plot so far (the demons and serens or the casual mention of a mage tower do not count as far as I'm concerned). And I'm not even sure why there's a school life tag in this.

Unlike in many similair "another world" settings, there is no wish fullfillment that i've read so far, which is very refreshing! some words are wrong and some editing could be done, but i like the characters and the direction of the story so far. The story is slow developing but i am enjoying the detail put into the chapters, sure it may seem like some things are a little repetitive but i feel that adds to the setting and story. 

I cant use your wordpress link...mind giving a new one?

By the way...this is a nice read...a refreshing tale...4 and half star...only because is still short

There will be MINOR SPOILERS in the THOUGHTS section. Skip to SUMMARY to avoid them.

STYLE: Mostly told from MC's perspective with frequent P.O.V. changes.

STORY: M.C. reincarnated into somebody else's body and proceeds to climb the economic and social ladder from extreme poverty. Theres a magic system that hasn't really been explored. There are quite a few times I've become confused in this story because I just couldn't follow the author's thought process. Most of the time that confusion was cleared up in the next chapter, but there are times I had to say "Fuck it" because it didn't really matter. But it should be noted. Author has done a pretty good job with his use of cliffhangers.

GRAMMAR: I've only spotted a couple of misplaced words, but it was easy to understand what the author was saying.

CHARACTER: Definitely above average, but nothing awe worthy. Theres a lot of them too, so it's easy to mix up who is who. I still mix up young master wu with fatty Tian after re-reading the chapters and with the authors note helping me out.

THOUGHTS: I like this story. I binged it this week. I'm sad I have to wait for chapters. But there is a noticeable drop in my enjoyment from the first book to the second. The first one kept me immersed, the p.o.v. changes served a purpose, the m.c. wasn't a Gary stu (Mary sue). Now, that's seemed to have changed. He's an inventor now. Even if he's getting lots of help from others, it just seems like the world settings have been cranked down to easy mode. His ability to crank out inventions seems to make light of how difficult it is to invent stuff. I just find it hard to believe a society that's in constant conflict didn't already come up with some form of artillery or repeating crossbows. I mean, people are pretty good at killing people. I found the farming inventions unbelievable, but the military ones felt like bullshit. All of the strongest enemies (deer, bear, wolf demon) were killed by luck. Now we try to make the m.c. seem competent by what appears to be nerfing the world. However, I do like that he still fucks up. When he commanded the battle against the goblins, it didn't go as far planned and still highlighted what he lacked as a leader. That was great. But I still found it hard to believe a species could be so dumb and survive in this cutthroat world. Why would they attack the only place that seems to be highly defensible? Seems strange for a group of opportunists to ignore all the nearby defenseless farms. 

And the friggin p.o.v. changes. Why in the hell would we go to a p.o.v. change to a goblin. All that's done is humanized them and made them into little green people rather than their own species. It didn't help the plot whatsoever. It provided a little bit of foreshadowing that could have been done better elsewhere.

SUMMARY: As of chapter 122, this is still a good story. But there are some red flags being raised that are worrying. If the story continues in the trend it's going, this story will be average or sub-par at best. However, as of yet its definitely a SOLID read. This is a slice of life reincarnation story, so if that's not your cup of tea move on. But if you're looking for that next read, while waiting for chapters to come out from your favorite story, you wont be disappointed. 

Or maybe I'm just a biased sucker for these kinds of stories:) 

amazing start. Greatly readable. And then comes the end of first arc and it becomes wish fullfillment in kingdom building. The shift is unnatural, hasty and forceful. 

It's definitely not another typical reincarnation story. No cheat and no reincarnation into young master.
Statistically what is the chance that you will become royalty or nobility, there is much bigger chance to become a peasant, and lets not even discuss plot cheat.

Mc in this story was experienced business negotiator, and like most of us dont remember much from chemistry or technology (let's be real - who of us know how to make, for example Gunpowder)

Despite the lack of fireworks and flying dragons (at least for now), the story is intriguing, showing a brutal reality without falling into pathos and exaggerations.

there is not much of magic or martial arts for now (there is action, definitely not boring), but Mc start as poor homeless in the slums and magic is obviously for rich and noble, but the story is just beginning :)