The story starts off with Chu Mu being weak and under pressure to find his first real soul pet. He soon discovers a small fox that is capable of continuous race mutations, making it stronger by an entire class each time. With this small fox, which he names Mo Xie, he progresses through the story in a very Xianxia-like fashion: he has troubles, finds lucky chances, spends lots of time training, finds some love interests, gains allies, fights in tournaments, and ends up becoming one of the strongest existences in the universe.

The actual soul pet aspect of the story is pretty fun; it's basically like Pokemon for an audience that likes grittier, more violent stories with actual consequences. The premise and development of the world is a great strength for the story, because it's unique. The variety of soul pets is fairly big, the soul pets have many abilities and learn new ones throughout the story, and they can even pseudo-evolve into stronger versions of their race. There are different types of soul pets, and they grow in different ways, at different rates, and using different items.

The supporting characters are also not left behind; for most of the story, we have supporting characters that are at similar power levels as Chu Mu, or have special powers which keep them relevant. The characters are dynamic, especially Chu Mu, and there are side stories for many of the supporting cast, some of which get resolved along the way. The love interests and family relations in the story are intermittent but well-developed, and they make it a very Xianxia-esque read.

The strengths of TCOSP, however, don't hide the problems. At several points in the novel, events that happened previously are either completely ignored, or retroactively waved away. Many times, the wrong names are used for people, or events are recounted differently, and there's no way to explain it away, other than by calling it a plot hole. Sometimes, new explanations or problems are given, but are then swept away with a few sentences, or are completely irrelevant and end up wasting space on page.

The leveling/power system is not well-defined, and the faction system is actually one of the most confusing hierarchies I've ever seen. The main character always finds a way to level up his soul pets, even if he needs items that are considered rarer than the rarest things the world has ever seen. This is not to say that the main character doesn't suffer losses, but the overall gains are almost always higher than the losses, even in situations where they have no right to be. The main character is also extremely hypocritical with his decisions, and sometimes makes plain illogical decisions, that somehow work out.

The ending is a mixed bag: it's actually a very apt and original ending, but it also invalidates basically everything that happened in the story. While I did enjoy the last chapter, and feel that the ending was a strength in itself, the 200 or so chapter leading up to it were confusing, rushed, and average at best. In fact, the beginning hooked me and the ending left me content, but the in-between chapters varied in quality, as did the story arcs themselves.

hes every planning to mu*der the entire yang clan to get revenge.

I had the displeasure of reading volume: 2, chapter: 191 of this novel. I might be dropping this...

There's already been several times where contrived BS happen, the MC is usually pretty smart and proactive, but at times the author have the MC make bad or extremely poor decisions arbitrarily.

Fortunately it's negligible for the most part and it can be overlooked—e.g. MC acting a bit weird with women—so I ignored it, but this time it was different.

First of all, the MC knowingly walked into this whole trap even though he could have easily backed out, he completely gave up the initiative and just twiddled his thumbs while waiting to either A) walk into an ambush, or B) wait for someone else get ambushed first, and then get chased down and fight to the death anyway (with no escape route since the ambushers would be behind him, the location is within a mountain with only a single entrance) as they'll come for him afterwards to get rid of any witnesses. (If they get found out about what they did they're dead meat so they HAVE to kill the MC with no way out of it.)

He's pretty much certain that either A or B will happen, but it could be completely avoided by just turning back. The person leading the MC (either into the trap, or away from the trap that was meant for someone else, depending on who is the primary target) couldn't do anything to stop him from returning. If the guide took the imitative to attack MC, then MC could easily just kill him and at that point he would know with absolute certainty that they plan to kill him so there's literally no other way out anyway. (He doesn't wan't to fight them because of their backing—though not any bigger than MC himself—and either way, it's not like he can just let them kill himself because he doesn't want to fight... That's quite literally asking for death.)

Anyway, it turned out that the first target was the other party, and when the fighting broke out, MC even let the guide go away and "check on the situation" even though MC know that in reality he's going to help the others clean up the first target, potentially prevent any escape in case he somehow survived and escaped from the trap, group up and then they'll come together for the MC for their next kill.

But alright, the MC didn't know for absolutely 100% certainty (just 99.99999999%) that they were going to attack, even though with his otherwise very proactive personality he should have returned and/or killed the guide depending on how it escalated without caring about it, so much for all the talk about "not knowing how to not kill" from his 3 years experience of constant slaughter on prison island where he's the sole survivor out of 3000 people.

What happened instead was that even after the fighting broke out on the other side and MC knew that there's no way to avoid the upcoming fight (since he just kept going and wait for them to spring the trap), he didn't even kill the damn guide and gave himself even more future trouble since it's obviously going to be more difficult when they can group up together and team up on the MC. Them fighting against MC and his companion 4v2 is already bad, but now he didn't even take the opportunity to 2v1 the weaker guide and just waited for them to gang up on him 5v2 instead...

And of course, to rub into the face of the readers exactly how big of a mistake it was, the author just had to make it so that the target would have been able to get away if not for the guide intercepting him on his way back... (Making the MC indirectly kill a powerful allay from the same faction as himself.)

For the most part the novel isn't bad and it can be an entertaining or at least a time waster, but at points like this it just ruin the mood for me and I lose the interest to continue...

(If at least the guy getting killed would have been just a nobody then I could have pretended like this is just some s*upid filler and acted as if it never happened, but this will have some impact and presumably influence the novel further down the road so it simply can't be ignored...)

MC run away and get them all into a fight against a 800 big group of neutral soul pets/monsters, stuff happens, MC eventually win while one guy get away, and ofc MC has to also get a monarch rank pet (Ghost King), because there can never be a time when MC doesn't profit...

Anyway after this, he return to the city and use his status as 'young master' of "Soul Palace", one of the largest factions in the world or w/e, and eventually get the behind-the-scenes perpetrator aka mastermind imprisoned there. But of course not even half a day pass before he get out, even though he was arrested by the 10th young master, and f*cking killed the 7th (the target of the trap) from one of the greatest factions—which apparently mean nothing at all.

And this guy who was supposed to be a sly and scheming type who just use his wits, as soon as he get out he attack the MC... And challenge him to a fight 2 months later...