Chinese Gantz (author admitted he was "inspired" by Gantz) rips off all the worst movies and anime in the past few decades, including all the worst tropes. Characterization is garbage with rampant sexism and characters ripped straight out of battle shonen. Story was 2nd rate to begin with (peaking at Vol 9 Alien: Resurrection), then went to sh*t after Vol 10 Resident Evil: Apocalypse (didn't finish it but heard the ending was just as sh*t as Gantz's). Writing is 3rd rate throughout - serviceable but none of the lines are quoteworthy.

Take a look at these gems:

>This message is not coded using 0 or 1's. The source code is not a computer program. It's created with characters and symbols. When a computer breaks through the limit of 0s and 1s, artificial intelligence will develop.
>the latest genetic studies show that this evolution only took 120 years. Not several million, not even several thousand, it's merely 120 years. Humans evolved from dryopithecus to the early man, australopithecus. Our evolution exploded only for 120 years, then it was sealed off due to various unkonwn reasons. It has nothing to do with biological evolution. Our evolution has come to a stop.
>The era was after World War 1 and before World War 2 started. There weren't any silencers in this era so they don't have to worry about people noticing the gunshot.
>this city has a diameter of six hundred kilometers. A normal big city is only two hundred kilometer square, but this city is several hundreds.
>Have you seen the map of the distribution of the bugs? Why do they surround three directions and leaving one open? Because they are giving us a hope of escaping.

So the context of that last quote is that they're in starships and the bugs have surrounded them IN SPACE. How the f*ck do you get surrounded in 3 directions when there are 3 other directions to escape to? You can tell very little thought went into the factual accuracy and realism department. The author apparently just loves blatantly making sh*t up that does not make any sense. You don't even have to check it to know that pretty much all the "facts" in this series are completely wrong and nonsensical. What would have been good is if the author simply left out all this bull that was inserted for absolutely no reason, because it makes it look s*upid and breaks the immersion. Lots of fantasy novels don't bother with any scientific explanations and they work just fine. It's when you try to add science but you don't actually know any science, that you end up making yourself look like an idiot.
The biggest problem with this novel is that it stopped being exciting about halfway into the story, which was where everyone got resurrected after getting wiped in Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Before then, there was tension and excitement that came from knowing that anyone could die at any moment, and that death was REAL and happened to your real physical body. There was actual tension and feeling of danger in the Grudge, Resident Evil, and Final Destination because important characters were getting killed off left and right. I consider Alien: Resurrection to be the peak of the webnovel, from where it just went downhill. The beginning of that arc was so amazing and exciting start that it can't be compared to the rest of the webnovel - it was original, interesting, creative, exciting, tense - it was all of those and more. I don't want to spoil it so you can just go read it for yourself. Unfortunately the story went straight to sh*t thereafter. Immediately we got Resident Evil: Apocalypse which was an utterly illogical arc, with everyone getting wiped. As soon as everyone on Team China got killed I realized there was no way to salvage the story anymore. It was not like when Xuan sacrificed himself for the sake of the team in the Grudge, there was no way out of this hole that the author dug for himself. At the point there were 2 ways to go - either the author made their deaths permanent or he resurrected everyone. Unfortunately he chose the latter option, turning it into just the same as the Pain arc in Naruto. Everyone died and then got resurrected just like that. See, the problem with resurrection in a SURVIVAL STORY is that it removes the one and ONLY source of excitement and tension in the novel, which is the sense of impending doom. Not only does resurrection make all the characters sacrifices pointless because they can just be revived, it takes away all suspense and tension because once you know that characters can be resurrected you know that whenever an important character dies the author is just going to resurrect him again. This was the definitive point from which the novel went to shit. All the plot exposition, chapters upon chapters of rehashed movie footage and talking about some evolution bullsh*t or how Imhotep is actually a good guy that just wants to revive his wife. Yes that was boring too, but the fatal mistake was the mass resurrection. Once that was done, there was no longer any sense that death could come any time and therefore no longer any source of tension or excitement. The Mummy, Jurassic Park, Vampiric Mask (literally shamelessly ripped from Jojo's bizarre adventure), Starship Troopers and Lord of the Rings arcs was pretty much just standard battle shonen garbage, basically consisting of punching enemies until they died for points, it was either that or plot exposition. It's boring since you already know that nothing bad's going to happen to anyone. Once that is established in a survival horror there's no sense in reading anymore.
The characters are overcliched as f*ck. Zhao YingKong is literally Killua. She's edgy. She came from a clan of assassins. She can harden her nails too JUST LIKE KILLUA like holy sh*t dude you literally cannot make it more blatant than that. Oh and also she's super moe and has big boobs too. First of all why the f*ck would assassins clans exist in real life. I'm not saying you can't rip anything off other works of fiction, but at least make it believable. YingKong is supposed to come from the real world, like 21st century Earth, not some parallel universe with assassin clans and shit. What the f*ck. And why are there so many f*cking assassins in this story? There are at least 3 assassins in the story from the various assassin clans somehow. The author has obviously watched too much anime. Secondly why the f*ck is her backstory so cringy. Her best friends got killed by her "brother", who is some stereotypical "I want to destroy beautiful things" cardboard cutout sadist. She's normally calm but loses her mind every time she sees him. So basically Sasuke/Itachi in a nutshell.
You can describe all the characters in a single sentence. Zheng is "moralf*g MC", Xuan is "devious smart guy", Lori is "MC's s*x relief toy", Zero is "that guy who's good with a sniper rifle", WangXia is "patriotic guy who's good with mines", ChengXiao is "pervy comic relief medic", Kampa is "hairy Russian mercenary dude". They are not developed beyond that and that is actually very sad because survival type novels hinge around having solid characterization to make up for the unoriginal (in this case entire setting ripped straight from Gantz) and frankly unbelievable setting. When literally every single line spoken by the characters is just plot exposition, it's not interesting or fun to read. The characters are about as fleshed out as the mercenaries in Predator. Even if characters don't talk you can still flesh them out by examining their expressions and subtle actions which reveal their state of mind, at the very least you could reveal their inner dialogue like in Reincarnator, but this is not done in this novel except for very few occasions like Xuan vs Neos, and there it's not done sensibly. The lack of a Psychology tag for this novel says a lot - it really does not explore characters' psychologies at all. Very lackluster compared to Reincarnator and Dungeon Defense which are both excellent in the characterization department. There's also the pervasive sexism where all the females in Starship Troopers are described as being cowardly medics which is completely contrary to what actually happened in Starship Troopers where women served on the front lines in combat roles just like the men did (the message that all are equal under military service is actually a central theme in ST, something TI's author seems to have missed). All the female characters are written like shit. At the beginning Lan is supposed to be some analytical type, later on she defaults to just fawning over the MC all the time; also they all have big breasts as we're constantly reminded by the author, maybe that's his fetish.
I think the author tried to make up for his lack of characterization skills by resorting to forcing in slice-of-life-y scenes like Xuan agreeing to go fishing with MC even though that was completely against Xuan's character (the author even said that Xuan would never waste his time doing something like fishing when he could be poring over weapons designs or producing weapons instead). Then the fishing scene that he forced in consisted only of Xuan beating everyone else at fishing and that was it. I was like WTF am I reading, is this some shitty Japanese light novel. Let's get this straight. This is a survival novel where each character only gets 10 days to prepare for the next movie. He could be spending his time cultivating Qi or practicing blood energy or studying weapons designs or building weapons or practicing combat drills or working out possible side missions or how to counter enemy tactics or what to do when enemies are immune to sci-fi weapons and so on. Instead they are fishing and just chilling out. A productive use of time. I can understand the others doing something like that but Xuan, well I'm sorry but characters need to be consistent and the author seems to just completely disregard that. Also, they keep doing this even after they get wiped. And the slice of life scenes don't even flesh the characters out either. We didn't get to know the characters better at all. They could have at least told us some stories or any lessons they learned or anything, but no, it's literally just comic relief moments like people competing to pull up bigger fish and ChengXiao getting slapped for staring at the girls' boobs.
Characters often act in the MOST PSYCHOTIC WAY POSSIBLE even where it's not realistic. A college student, faced with danger, chose to blow his hostage's head off so that he can get killed by people who are chasing him, instead of, say, pushing her away and running around a corner to give himself a chance. Why the f*ck would he take a hostage if he was just going to kill her off without benefiting himself in any way. He never met them before and they did not know each other, so he literally had no reason to act like that at all other than to be edgy. In the Alien arc the guy who was told to be the bait chose to blow himself up along with everyone else over having a chance of survival. Not very realistic.
Let's talk about Xuan. Xuan is the only person who actually acted realistically at the start of the novel. He explored the limits of the lifeform creation system, he looked for recipes to build equipment out of cheaper materials instead of buying them directly from the system, he looked through all the possible options and determined their advantages and disadvantages. THESE ARE THINGS ANYBODY WITH COMMON SENSE WOULD DO AND YET NOBODY OTHER THAN HIM DOES IT. This is because the author wants to set him up as some kind of super mega ultra genius and had no way of doing so other than by resorting to making all the other characters act like complete ret*rds. As someone once mentioned you cannot write a character smarter than yourself and Xuan is the best example of that. Plenty of times Xuan makes s*upid plans like having the useless guy act as the bait, and then the useless guy blows himself up injuring several people. Another time Xuan gave the MC a dagger to take back to the real world with his tracking device on it in order to get data back to the real world, without telling the MC. If the MC didn't take out the dagger, didn't get caught in time, or destroyed the tracking device, or did any of a number of things his plan would have failed, and the MC only managed to get back because he was lucky. There was about a million other better ways of doing that, for example he could have asked Zheng to send an item somewhere whilst hiding the tracker inside the item, without arousing Zheng's suspicions. I mean let's be honest Zheng is not the smartest tool in the shed if he couldn't even recognize that was a tracker blatantly tacked on the knife. Plus with this method he could continuously relay information back to Earth by not arousing Zheng's suspicions whereas with his method, not mentioning the extremely high chance of failure, even if Zheng got back he wasn't going to take back anything given by Xuan ever again and everyone else would be cautious of him, so he just blew his chances of communicating with Earth ever again. Later on he starts making implausible deductions based on zero evidence, which turn out to be wrong, and yet everybody still thinks he is a genius. And also, God should definitely have wiped both Xuan and Zheng, there was no way it would have allowed such an obvious loophole to exist with its advanced technology. The author appears to treat his statements as canonical fact because nobody rebukes his random "70%" estimates which are based on literally nothing, and anyone who questions his estimates are answered with "you cannot possibly understand my plans with your mortal intelligence". It's obvious the author has no idea how to write an actually intelligent character. Xuan either says things that are COMPLETELY OBVIOUS to everyone or deduces things that absolutely cannot be concluded from the available evidence, and his reasoning process does not make any sense either so I strongly suspect the author simply wrote the story backwards to make the events suit Xuan's predictions. Most notably, the characters do not engage in critical evaluations like - why did we fail that last team fight, what could we have done better, etc. They do not form and test hypotheses that even 3 year old children would do, they just assume things are as they would expect and just act as what they think is true without bothering to do any tests. For example, everyone thought killing the brain bug in Starship Troopers was a bonus mission, but it wasn't. Then they concluded that there were no bonus missions on starship troopers based only on the fact that killing the brain bug wasn't a bonus mission. How can they be so certain based on such flimsy evidence?
Characters do not act realistically. For example in a lot of movies they did not even consider really simple ideas like in Lord of the Rings they could have asked Gandalf to just ask the eagles to fly them to Mordor. But nope. They didn't even consider these really simple ideas that could have saved them going through a lot of danger compared to going to Morder the long way. They could have told the guards in Resident Evil about the laser defense system so they didn't get cut in half, this wasn't forbidden by God, but instead of that Zheng just says "there's something wrong with this corridor" and gets dragged in with them. Also, when it was obvious that Zheng knew about the laser's scanning patterns but didn't tell the mercenaries about it, instead of getting angry One regards Zheng as his savior. WTF? He should at least have gotten suspicious about how Zheng knew about the laser. And how the f*ck did Zheng manage to get 10s of thousands of points under the noses of the other Devil team members, especially when he was only in the first unlocked stage? And why did God match Team China against Team Devil when China practically got wiped in Final Destination and required Jie's sacrifice just to get out the few remaining members out alive?
The way the points are rewarded is really inconsistent as well. Killing a bug using a gauss rifle gives points but using a tactical nuke doesn't? On one occasion Xuan stated that you get points for being clever, well in that case why didn't they get points for killing the pygmies by burning down the entire forest only for killing pygmies by shooting them with a gun, clearly burning down the forest was smarter. Why does it even matter whether you kill monsters by shooting them with a gun or by burning them anyway? It shouldn't make any difference.
I hate how the author just makes sh*t up, even in-universe. What the f*ck is a "creeper" (original text 爬行者) supposed to be in Resident Evil, there are only lickers how did he translate that into creeper, what the f*ck. When he mentioned "艾罗格斯金属" I Googled it and nothing came up. Who the f*ck knows what it's supposed to be. From the description it sounds like something he just made up - I couldn't find anything in the original LoTR that corresponds to the description. I can understand making monsters stronger than usual or changing a few plot events, but treating completely new minerals that he just made up as if it's something that was in the original story is just wtf.
4 stars for the solid first half of the story, it was fun while it lasted.

The main trick is that once you survive the movies, you gain points which you can use to upgrade your body and mind. Think of stuff like vampire bloodline, Qi, magic, mental powers.

Resident Evil, Alien, The Grudge, The Mummy, Final Destination, Jurassic Park

Although I had my suspicion a long time ago, especially since those ancient "Saints" were thrown into the work. But everything after RE2 confirmed my worst fear.

Terror Infinity, from a somewhat enjoyable mature work went into 3rd-rate-shithole-that-could-only-be-written-by-a-fenqing.

Lord of the Rings, Starship Troopers, Transformers, Independence Day are "horror" movies? What kind of a ret*rd would write that, instead of writing a forced but still acceptable explanation? Who is dumb enough to destroy your own setting, huh?

Remember how the author said things like Gundam, NGE, Mummy, Lord of the Rings, Transformers...... are actually creations of those "Saints"? That all the movies and animation series we saw are nothing but fractured memory of the past?

Funny stuff? Those "Saints" of the East are originated from China. The author heavily implied that everything is ORIGINALLY belonged to and only China, and everyone are nothing but copy-cat whores who made a mockery out of the real stuff. Doesn't explain why Japan, Hollywood, etc had those first, but not China.

Then, came the arc where Mummy at WWII. Honestly, this sh*t is nothing but a big ass display of typical m*sturbation behavior of a fenqing. Worse, this sh*t is about as bad as the God of Devil System WN. Not only I saw a sheer amount of fantasizing and but also a big speech from the author telling how much a c*nt he is in every aspect, from knowledge about his own country to being a jerkass racist.

The whole cast went from "somewhat decent" to "sluts, whores, bastards, ret*rds and c*nts" for me after this arc not only their action, but also their questionable acceptance of the "this is another world so we can do whatever we like".
Inspired by Gantz. Yet trying to obliterate Japan. The smartest character became a full-blown fenqing. Despite the fact anyone with average IQ and considerable knowledge would see how s*upid is fenqing. Saying the Qing Dynasty is why China became so pathetic despite their large territory and abundant resource are legacy of the Qing and that the Qing Dynasty is when China at its peak of everything (not counting population, of course). Claimed to be "fair" and "guest". Yet ravage the world, eliminate other superpower countries, giving extremely advanced technology to the Communism Party and do everything to give China an edge and a foundation to rule the world, even sending out a hidden threat to their former allies in the Mummy, etc

There was so much to list. In additional of those bullshits, the part Xuan tried to awake that loli assassin is....... quite cliche and generic that it made me puke. Since I remembered that part from a manga or an anime I saw in the past, as expected from a Chinese.

First off, the MC and the rest of the characters bar Xuan seems to be unable of think for themselves. While is plausible that they cant hope to grasp the lvl of calculations that he is able to do, at least, they 'should' be able to think at the lvl of a normal person but, alas, it seems that that is too hard for them. So either Xuan have the ability of suck the inteligence of the people around him or they became just that complacent. The MC is pretty much one big idiot that only seems to know how to lose the reason a go ahead in berserk mode against the enemy. The MC live fearing about Xuan can screw anybody involving them and want to know a way to figure them out to not go blind with them but it seems he forgot he have the ability of simulate Xuan' mind around of a 60-70% since he unlocked the third lvl of the unlocked mode.

Second, some characters getting less and less screen time for s*upid reasons. I will be sincere, the best character out this ragtag bunch of misfits in this novel is Lan by far. But since she was revived her screen time begun to decrease and the best thing the autor could do was to give a s*upid reason related to stupiest action made by the MC to the date, aka, ask the 'god/system' to create a copy of his deceaced love interest (this bugs me every time I think about it). So because Lan doesnt want to get in the middle of that, she decided to fade to the lvl of a background character... I was very disappointed when I read that. And not like the rest of the cast is getting a better treatement, in the transfomers movies the were relegated to do mostly background work.

Third, the dead of the mecha dude was incredibly s*upid and the odds of him coming back as a super monster seeking revenge in the Devil team is so big that I will be impressed if the autor only did that to mess with his/her readers but if not, then that was a very bad handed way of giving the team another revenge seeking enemy. And the less I say about his dead the better. The Oppai loli suposely tried to rescued him from some ramdon decepticon that catched his helpless mecha without energy but instead of rescue him ASAP with some overkill move if it was necesary, she only did some half-assed efford that resulted in the death of the dude while he was cursing their names and swearing vengace against them. Later the same loli used her Excalibur plus some other tecnique to move super fast to pull out a Balmung (Fate/Apocrypha- FGO) like blast... Couldnt she have used that tecnique to move fast to save him? nope. Later Xuan said that the team was getting c*cky and due that someone ended up diying even when at the end of the last movie (The Lord of the Rings) he himself said to them that the probabilities of getting a wipe in that movie had been around the 80-90%... Seriously, that mecha goy could have been someone overpowered with the right set of skills but they prefered to let him die. They could have give him the Spiral Enery (Gurren Lagann) and some customized parts to use said power in any mecha and he would have been set to go and become a powerhouse, but alas, they wasted that potential into nothing.

Fourth, I know the xianxias arent the most detailed of the novels (bar when they are explaining about the local way of getting overpowered) but this one during the Transformers movie was hitting pretty low and some of the explanations about some powers, like The Mystic Eyes of Death Perception (Kara no Kyoukai-Tsukihime-Nasuverse), were wrong and even the usage of said power against a giant decepticon was wrong. The autor keeps forgiving some of the powers that the people have, like the already mentioned ability to simulate the mind of others, between others thing.

After 17 volumes the main character Zheng had the following:

Intermediate Qi, Volume 1.

Vampire Baron, Volume 1.

Progressive Knife, Volume 3, bought for him and lost in volume 8.

Red Flame Blood Spell, Volume 4.

Nameless Movement Technique, Volume 7, could have gotten earlier in Volume 4, plot hole.

Advance Qi, Volume 9

Chaotic Unity Qi, Volume 13, not mentioned past Volume 14.

Tiger Soul - Sword, Volume 14, upgraded in Volume 17.

May not sound like a few things, but remember its 18 volumes and the store ends at 23.

He gets the Book of the dead in the Mummy. According to its description it contains dozens of black magic spells where you only need 1000 points to learn a spell, or if you know the language you can exchange them for free. The main characters don't do either vety much, but it doesn't matter. Latter in the story they barely use it, and the author changes it to that you actually need the Book to cast any spells at all. Well, thinking about it having the book to use spells isn't that bad, but still mad they barely use it.

They later get the Golden Book of Revival from the Mummy. It's original description was the Book contains multiple spells and not just revivals, but the author only writes them using it revive comrades.

The MC Zheng gets the Spear of Osiris. It's incredibly powerful, but he forgets to use it. In a latter volume the Author wrote that if you infused refined energy into the Spear it grows ridiculously powerful even with just a small amount, but not only did the MC only try doing so in the middle of a battle when just before he took almost a year to do self training, he forgets about it later.

They also get the scorpion king bracelet which can summon undead soldiers. It's a great item that's barely used even when having extra fighters around would help a lot.

The MC obtained The One Ring. It has the ability to refine energy or convert it to another type of energy. The MC only uses it to refine energy, completely not considering the various ways to use any other type of energy.

First Stage that bestows combat instincts is okay.

Second Stage physical and reaction speed buff is okay.

Third Stage skill copy is okay, but is later weakened and rarely used in combat.

Fourth Stage is game breaking. Its like going from level 1 to level 100, and destroyed the idea one needs to train and challenge themselves to become strong. In one instance it allowed the MC to rival a much, much stronger player who reached end game stage enhancements and who is the embodiment of talent and hard work.

Its original explanation was pure genetic manipulation, where you just adjust your mutations and body to suit the user, but the more we learn the more s*upidly broken it is. You don't even need enhancements in a sense long as you reach 4th stage. The story actually shows one character without enhancement reaching the fourth stage and having strength to rival the MC in some ways. It even gets more broken as it allows a MC who never trained his magic to gain high level magic powers outside the system.

Around volume 14 his plot armor kicks in and any guess he makes ends up true even without evidence. In addition he makes Zheng look bad. They would originally have conflicts over plans and methods, Zheng is the human side of the argument and Xuan is the extreme logical side of it. It was interesting to see them contrast with one another which is good writing, but then author writes Zheng to be a spineless bit*h and Xuan ignores rank and acts as leader whenever he likes. And people allow him to do this because it's too hard to think for themselves. Xuan also lies or stays quite for no reason. He may give a reason, but I can argue and win against him.

He also gets actual power plot armor latter on. Xuan somehow without going through much danger reaches the fourth stage. It s*upid since he only experienced 1 minor battle and 1 major battle after unlocking his constraint.

At the Alien movie, I prefered xuan decision better (even if it failed :P) because it's rational, wise, and I support the idea of vote for any decision, including own sacrifice.

The zombies and Lickers from Resident Evil going down to easy to be a serious threat? Then the T-virus will mutate to push those mobs to the next level.