Street Cultivation - a modern wuxia/litrpg hybrid

I never took the time to write a review before, so hear me out, please.

I read a shitton of wuxia/xianxia, but honestly, the genre is saturated with so much garbage that most of the time I feel like a goddamn pig slogging through mud and shit trying to find a truffle. Thing is, this story is a goddamn truffle. A juicy one with earthen and smoky tones.

The characters feel real, the problems are relatable, MC isn't OP, at all. It's wuxia without all the bullshit.

This is a truffle, people. Enjoy it while it's here.

Alright, I am going to be the Negative Nancy. This series started off fantastic, from concept, to world building, on to characters. All great. Then... then the story kinda loses the plot.

As best I can tell, the MC is supposed to be prideful. That seems to be his consistent problem. But his chacter flips from pratical to prideful at the convience of the story. It seems that, whenever the author needs the MC to do something that is fundamentally against the established chacter, he is threatened. And he just meekly complies with being threatened. Need to get him into a tournement, just threaten him, need to get him to fight someone, more threats. The character is a brave coward. Brave, up until the author needs him to do something, than he is meekly cowed.

This bipolar characterization would be fine if the story takes even a second to acknowledge it, but the MC never broods on it and no one ever comments on it.

This is one of the few novels I have earmarked for push notifications.  I always run to read an update when they are published.

The author has written a very good Wuxia type novel.  Qi.  Cultivation.  Inner Energy.  But he has done it in a futuristic setting instead of the past.

Spirit Energy has been 'farmed' and commercialized.  The MC has a few strikes against him right from the beginning.  He's poor.  His parents are dicks (sorry but they are).  His sister has a problem with her dantian that has nearly bankrupted them.  And he has problems generating enough lucrim (inner Qi that is monetized) to survive.

Give this a try.  It's worth your time.  And the author does a great job of responding to comments and questions.

I'm rather picky, but found this series to be very worthwhile. Keep up the good work. 

The writing is excellent; definitely professional quality, and the world building is fantastic. It's a joy to read, and I'd love to see more stories set on this world.

Just be aware that the protagonist starts in a bad place, and his life gets worse... and worse... and worse...

No happy ending here, folks.

The grammar is fairly good, the writing is nicely paced, and the story is a blend of modern and wuxia that feels like it could happen if wuxia came to the modern world.

That out of the way, this story is one of those that goes from bad to worse for our MC and those he cares for. You can feel it in your bones that every action he takes is only going to get him into deeper shit. The small blessings he gets only ever drag him down, and the small blessings that are stolen from him could have changed the outcome of his desperate struggle to survive for the better, but they don't so it's pointless to think about them. Every chapter brings you the hope that his life and his sister's life will get better, but deep in your gut, you know it won't at least for a long while. This is one of those MCs who is going to get screwed by life in big ways before being able to screw it back.

Well, since I gave every other metric five stars, I think I'll focus more on the story score, which I only gave three stars to.

Now, there's a good reason for that. I just don't find the story quite satisfying. That isn't to say that it's a bad story. No. It's basically just if someone decided to, let's say, horizontally stretch a movie so that it goes slower, and that the story beats are further from each other.

Don't get what I'm trying to say? That's okay! I don't, too!

The story starts with a young man who works in a martial arts Dojo. That doesn't make him strong at all, though. In fact, his job is to offer himself as a sparring partner to Dojo members. He could become stronger, but unfortunately, due to the artificial scarcity of lucrim (or Qi as you'd recognize it) caused by megacorporations, he can only afford so much to make himself stronger. He also has a younger sister who has a disease and the only available treatment is to pour lucrim into her body so the disease doesn't cannibalize her completely.

You can see how our main character isn't quite capable of focusing all his endeavors on the martial path, now, can't you? That's okay, though. You expect him to somehow rise up in the first few chapters. You see the chance of that happening when three scions of large-scale corporations come knocking at the Dojo door. These Young Masters were just following their prime directive: bully the MC.

And bully they did, until the MC somehow receives a special core from the fight. You think "this is it! He got this power and now he'll become a real contender in his setting! This is the first true step on his Martial Path!"

SPOILERS AHEAD

But those hopes come crashing when you realize that the whole 'special ability' thing was a sham, anyway. To make matters worse, he's inheriting the debts of his deadbeat parents, he can barely follow up on his younger sister's treatment and his job is STILL being beaten the shit out off on a regular basis.

[SPOILER END/]

The plot is literally designed to kick the ever-loving sh<3t out of the main character. He doesn't seem to be winning, even a little, at least for the first fifteen chapters.

What I realize, after having written this so far, is that there's not really much wrong with the story, inherently. It's just not MY cup of tea. I'm a romantic, and this story is DECIDEDLY unromantic. In fact, it brings a new meaning to realistic. It's the realism of knowing that you're nothing but a bug in the face of higher powers, powers that can decide the entire course of your life on a whim. This isn't even just true in this story. It's true in real life, too. In real life, the small guy doesn't just rise up out of nowhere. He works hard. He works hard enough to break out of his mediocrity, and he needs help from big guys to do just that. His own effort is drowned out by all the contributing hands pushing him towards success. The story of the little guy who climbed up to become the big dragon looks like a fairy tale compared to this realistic fiction

I have faith that in maybe fifty or so chapters, maybe more, the character will truly become a contender in his setting. Maybe not strong enough to touch the actual experts, but strong enough to no longer be pushed around by some snot-nosed Young Masters. 

It could even take more chapters than that, all things considered. Maybe the point of the story ISN'T to reach the martial peak. Maybe the MC is content with just saving his sister's life one day at a time while affording rent and paying off his literally soul-sucking debt.

It's a story that doesn't quite grab hold of me, but it's DEFINITELY a story that I'm going to see through til the end. I'm twenty-FIVE chapters into this depressive clusterfuck, and I'm too emotionally invested to leave before I see some more developments.

Keep writing, author! You're doing great :)

Awesome and enjoyable.

Street Fighter, Big Trouble in Little China, Kung Fu Hustle come to mind thinking about this story.

The Will of Heaven is there for the taking, and it can be yours for 5 small payments of $99 each!

Modern urban setting, cultivation with litrpg style tracking of ones progress - the better for the corporate overlords to quantify you with, my dear.

This story possesses a wonderful mashup of elements, and solid character building rooted in street level, understandable struggle.

To be honest, I tried liking this story, but I really couldn't manage. Basically this story is set in a "modern" Xian'xia setting where the rich are cultivators and cultivators are the rich. The middle class also gets to cultivate and has power and the poor get fucked. A bit like real life in that way.

Now the protagonist starts out as an "undeserving poor" as the author calls it. But as I said, starts out, as the story progresses he does everything to deserve his poverty. He has no wealth, more pride than a king, a sister that's very sick and a healthcare system like the US. Basically he starts out rather fucked.

The thing is this is an aversion of Xian'xia. Meaning instead of heavenly encounters or just plain luck, he's got encounters with assholes, bad luck and bad decisions. I don't think there's one chapter after the first where he doesn't get fucked over. Being beaten up, inheriting his parents debts, joining an underground fighting ring, getting crippled, ending up effectively a slave, then gaining a billionaire heir as his personal enemy.

Honestly that's the latest chapter and where I stopped caring about this story. The MC is an overly prideful fuckup machine and the story so far has been how he stumbles from bad encounter to bad luck to fuckup to bad luck to bad encounter. Basically the MC is a classical authors chew toy. Where a normal Xian'xia protagonist would be an author avatar that has more luck than brains this one is the very opposite.

And to be honest, where classical Xian'xia gets boring because you just know the character will get the next OP thing for certain, this one gets boring because you just know a new chapter a new torment. And it won't get better because the MC is just the kind of never-do-well that has enough intelligence to fuck himself over where a dumber or smarter person would have just done nothing and coasted along.

I've only read the first five chapters, but I like the story. It's fun, the characters are likeable, and the MC has actually reasonable motivations. However, what I've seen so far doesn't paint a cohesive picture of the world the MC lives in. It's a ?capitalistic? system in which power equals money and money equals power. You settle legal disputes by fighting. This basically means you settle legal disputes by seeing who is richer. Such a system is more feudal that capitalistic. 

*spoilers* When the MC and his uncle fought over the inheritance - what about other next of kin? What if they wanted to make a claim for the inheritance? The law firm just immediately gave it away with no procces or documentation. They didn't even confirm identities. After that they forced a mana leach on the MC without explanation or the offer for him to pay voluntarily. That is in any capitalist system illegal. Bodily autonomy is absolutely integral to the maintainance of a capitalistic society. If the MC had somehow, after going through a court system, been found guilty of a crime (even if that crime is not being able to pay off his parents debt) and then had mana leeches forced on him then maybe it could be feasible. But, independent actors can't just do whatever they want to you without a contract, or it's not capitalism, it's just anarchy. 

The author would have needed the MC to blindly sign a contract without reading\comprehending it that gave the law firm the right to force the leech on him. That would be out of character, but still better than a badly built world.

I've decided to stop reading the story. Although the writing is good and the MC likeable, a coherent world is just the most important thing for me to enjoy and immerse myself in a story. I could ignore the strange fight over legal rights, I could ignore the lack of proper inheritance laws, I could ignore debt being inherited from relatives, I could ignore the MC being ignorant of what would seem to be extremely common knowledge among poor citizens(inherited debt). But, I can't ignore all of this together with a lack of contract law in a 'capitalist' society. 

To the author: you're a good writer, and I like what you've done here. However, what's holding you back is your world-building. You're a five star worthy writer; you could limit the amount of times you make world-defining statements/plot points to make things easier on you. You quickly built one of the most fleshed out worlds I've seen on RR. Your problem was that that fleshing out didn't make good sense. ?Spend more time crafting your worlds, or make them simpler?

 Most importantly though, spend time thinking about the implications every plot point had towards your story's world!