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Notes -
which xianxia would you consider one of the good ones? My faves are anything from Er Gen unironically.
I still don't know if people say Er Gen is good unironically or not, though your comment updates me towards the former.
I would say Reverend Insanity, even in its unfinished state, is a 10/10 novel. Contender for best novel I've ever read in fact. I'm trying to hold off re-reading it until my memory fades enough for it to feel fresh again.
Forty Millenniums of Cultivation is a good one, an 8/10 IMO. It was good enough for me to get frustrated reading awful MTL and then track down raws and translate them with modern SOTA LLMs that do a better job.
I never got very far into Lord of the Mysteries, but by all accounts it's supposed to be very good.
I tried Reverend Insanity, and even allowing for a rough translation, the writing was crap.
But this has been my experience with almost every progression fantasy/wuxia novel I've tried. I didn't like Cradle either. I think they're just not for me. But I don't understand how people aren't bothered by tedious exposition about Gu levels written in head-hopping inconsistent tense.
Junior, you dare? Kowtow and break all your limbs, and I will leave you with an intact corpse.
Ahem. There's no accounting for taste, but I still think you missed out, or just didn't hold on long enough for the story to get its claws in you. It's an unfortunate Xianxia meme that people will tell you to stick to a story for a hundred chapters because then it gets good, but if memory serves it was around 30 in that RI had me leaning forward. I really can't recommend it enough.
I dunno, maybe I'll try again, but I hate books/series where the fans say "Oh, the first few hundred pages are mediocre but then it gets good." Any other Wuxia/progression fantasies to recommend?
Had the same experience with Jim Butcher's Dresden Files. I read the first two books and was underwhelmed. People say it gets good around book four, and my reaction is "So I have to read 2-3 crappy books before I start enjoying it?"
I recommend "Beware of Chicken", here's a royal road link. It's kind of a parody of the genre, so should be a lot easier to get into.
Edit: Nvm, the author had the brilliant idea to hide the novel behind a paywall. You can use the wayback machine to view the old chapters but it's a huge pain in the ass and probably not worth overall.
BoC is now stubbed. Chapter 4 up to book 5 are gone from Royal Road.
My bad, I didn't realize. I've edited the original message with a link to the wayback machine and won't be recommending that author in the future.
That's a rather harsh assessment. Removing a book from its original free location after publishing it on a paid platform is a common practice. I think it's explicitly required by Amazon's self-publishing terms.
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