It's so satisfying when Xu Yang kills off the as*hole who abandoned her in her last life. Also her summons just get more and more interesting.

It's a reincarnation end ¯⁠\⁠_⁠ (⁠ツ⁠) ⁠_⁠/⁠¯. I thought it was super unsatisfying and make their whole journey kinda of pointless ahhhh. The extras make up for it though... I still really love this story 😭😭😭 Just a heads up.

The main initial hook of the book revolves around Xu Yang's mindset after being reborn back to the start of the apocalypse. Xu Yang is portrayed as being cold-bloodedly rational and extremely distrustful. Lu Huixue is portrayed as being, well, a more normally adjusted human being. The relationship dynamic can be separated into clear parts over the course of the story. Early on, Lu Huixue is attracted to Xu Yang immediately, while Xu Yang doesn't push her away as hard due to her pre-knowledge of Lu Huixue being a good person, and in fact mistakes her for a foolish saint. This arc ends with Lu Huixue losing control in what is later shown to be a berserk state due to her disappointment at how little Xu Yang trusts her along with other compounding factors at the time, and the two briefly separating.

This is mostly an interesting concept and acceptably well executed, but parts are a bit rushed. While it makes sense when looking at the story analytically, it still felt that there wasn't quite enough establishment for why Xu Yang had the original misunderstanding of Lu Huixue being a saint, and the scene where Lu Huixue briefly loses control also felt like it was somehow lacking, in setup or in-the-moment emotions. After reuniting, Xu Yang takes advantage of Lu Huixue's infatuation with her to bring her along as a helper. In theory, this could be an interesting relationship dynamic to untangle, but ultimately nothing much really happens except for the status quo being maintained until Xu Yang realizes that she had actually fallen in love with Lu Huixue. It would've been nice to have either a more clear progression, if the idea was for Xu Yang to be slowly melted by Lu Huixue (this is the case to some extent, as it's mentioned that Xu Yang feels more and more like she can trust Lu Huixue as time accumulates with the two of them working together). It's probably intended to be somewhat abrupt though, as Xu Yang herself found that it happened without her realizing, but considering how complicated the relationship was, it feels like a bit more self-reflection on how her thoughts changed or something similar was needed. Worth noting is that Xu Yang accepting her personal feelings immediately is fine, since it's explained by her decisive personality.

Another thing worth noting is that while it makes sense for Xu Yang's heart to be infiltrated by Lu Huixue over time, and it makes sense for Xu Yang to be attached to her summons as she views them as 'her own' power, later in the book Xu Yang is shown to get attached to side characters as well, which makes sense from the perspective of Xu Yang changing over time to maintain her cold rationality but ease up on viewing everyone else as at best fair weather friends, but it felt like that change wasn't really shown well.

Most side characters, especially early on, are not given enough personality to stand out. It isn't until the last fourth or so of the book that a handful of characters were given an interesting enough personality and enough time to develop or simply demonstrate that personality for an attachment to form. Summons are a bit better off in this regard, as they mostly end up having some aspect to latch onto (even the non-verbal elementals develop a sort of plushie vibe). However, they have their own issues.

Summons suffer from being introduced too abruptly when it usually takes much longer for their personality or trait to solidify into something that can be latched onto. Most summons are introduced with little to no fanfare, and it usually takes two or more whole battles until their 'role' in the combat arsenal becomes fully clear. This means that it's hard to get immediately attached in any way whatsoever, which can cascade due to the importance of first impressions. This isn't helped by the backstory blurb format, where summons are given dedicated segments in which Xu Yang experiences their backstory. While some of these are alright in concept, the format makes the personalities of the summon feel incohesive with the main story, as if the main plot paused randomly for a bit and shoved in a brief side story. This further aggravates the issues with how summons can be hard to get attached to.

I won't go too into detail since I don't consider myself to be capable of offering insights in this department, but an issue both important on its own and preventing attachment to summons is that the battle scenes are not very good for some reason? Something about the way they're written makes most of them feel rather undynamic and unengaging. This means that as 'battle techniques', summons never make you go "oh, now she's going to bring out the awesome technique/summon".

Finally, in general the plot feels like it kind of meanders at the start, without a super clear goal besides getting stronger. It also somewhat feels like concepts are thrown before the ideas can fully settle, going from zombies to mutant insects/plants to human threats to intelligent zombie threats to aliens, etc. This is helped by the fact that the relationship is at its most interesting early on, but there is a period of time where the relationship drama has settled down and the main plot hasn't yet given a direction where the book feels somewhat aimless. As weird of a turn as it seemed at first, the introduction of the aliens did help the book regain momentum after it was established, although it mostly follows a predictable pattern from that point on. Worth pointing out, the alien planet arc seemed a bit too rushed for my liking. It would have been better served diffused out over a bit more of the book, as the revelations and emotional beats felt a bit too fast paced to really work for me.

though some parts are a bit annoying, like how the MC and FL basically spent everyday outside fighting zombies and mutants yet there are still other people stronger than her, but the ending was great, despite the last villain became overpowered, the MC managed to summon her last summoned beast which was a demon king 🤣, that poor villain... was quite surprised that the MC's system could reset the apocalypse and return time back to before the apocalypse happen, though I wish they all could retain their memories rather than just the MC