- MC is (mostly) not ret*rded. It pains me to list this as a pro, but the fact is that most xianxia MCs are pretty ret*rded. They act on anger and rush in to kill an enemy without thinking things through. They react to events rather than proactively making things happen. They don't plan things out. The MC in this story is mostly not like that. When possible, he tries to find excuses for knowing things he should not know, and if he cannot find excuses then he simply doesn't let other people find out about his knowledge.

- MC is not pe*verted. Again I hate to list this a a pro but in a lot of stories the MC is pe*verted. At least for the first 100 chapters he didn't even have a single le*d thought or comment. None of his actions are ever motivated by lust, at least not initially. Case in point: In chapter 125 an angry female cultivator was chasing him to cripple his cultivation because he accidentally offended her (by unintentionally releasing some killing intent at the entrance of her sect). She wouldn't let him go so he made her fall unconscious with his killing intent. At this point he could easily have r*ped her or done something to her, but the thought didn't even cross his mind. Instead he just lets her go because he doesn't want trouble. Again with the female cultivators whose minds he broke because they tried to kill him. He turned them into puppets but didn't r*pe them or anything. Just ordered them to cultivate instead.

- MC has actual reasons for cultivation i.e not just becoming strong for the sake of becoming strong. Again, this shouldn't be a pro, but the fact that so many xianxia novels have MCs whose entire motivation is just to get strong for the sake of getting strong is quite depressing, though usually this isn't an issue with reincarnation novels. I'd say MC's reason is fairly decent, but the execution is poor.

- Few coincidences. Treasures generally don't fall into his lap, he obtains most of them logically (e.g from his past memories or from the gods he executed). Few if any deus ex machinas (his teacher was saved because one of the goons chasing her was actually a spy and didn't want her to get captured).

- The MC's enemies have actual reasons to oppose the MC and are not just because they're sadistic rapists or something. Their motivations are well explained and make sense, ranging from greed to loyalty to a hostile organization. This is fairly well done.

- Cultivation scenes are too f*cking long. Early on there was something like 20 chapters describing the refining of the heaven seizing pill. There are cultivation scenes later on as well, which are just as long. These cultivation scenes COMPLETELY POINTLESS AND BORING, describing the control of fire and circulation of spirit power and all the other boring stuff. And this gets repeated over and over. Every time the MC needs to add a flame to his furnace (and he adds a lot of different flames to his furnace) or refines his flying swords (and he has to refine these a lot) you get a multi-chapter long description of how he adds the flame to the furnace or refines the sword (the MC mainly increases his cultivation level by refining pills or treasures so these are equivalent to the cultivation scenes in other cultivation novels). You can skip them without missing anything in the way of plot as none of it is relevant to later developments. It's like reading about someone grinding in a shitty RPG or reading about some kid doing his homework as a reviewer once aptly put it. It is a pretty serious downside because the novel could be maybe 50% shorter without missing anything important or interesting. You could probably fit everything that happens in the first 100 chapters into 40 chapters once you cut away all the pointless cultivation.

- The timeline is f*cked up mostly due to the cultivation scenes taking f*cking years. Refining a pill or furnace takes years at a time. Absorbing a single flame takes years and MC has to absorb hundreds or thousands of flames. Once a Da Cheng cultivator chased him 5 years into the sea literally flying non stop until MC luckily found an even stronger monster to eat that guy. This is pretty f*cking ridiculous. The timeline is messed up due to all of these little events that take months and years adding up without the author keeping track of the time for the audience.

- Lots of random slice-of-life-y moments like brewing alcohol and taking pointless bets and going shopping with his harem. Just as boring if not more so than cultivation scenes. This is actually the reason that I dropped this.

- A lot of major world-shaking events happen without any hints beforehand so makes you think it just came out of the blue. This is because the author didn't ever explain the previous timeline at all so you have no idea what to expect even though the MC knew about it. I don't think this is particularly good writing. It's not like Reincarnator where the MC clearly explains what happened in the previous timeline and how they f*cked up and how he's going to fix it.

- It was mentioned that Sun QingXue had spent 34 YEARS cultivating after being rescued from execution but she still acts like a kid sister in front of him and not at all like a mature adult.

- He lets Sun QingXue enter an unexplored area of an abandoned sect that he knew was going to be dangerous without exploring it himself first, with the result that she was immediately attacked and almost killed by the monsters inside. Her protective treasure was destroyed in 3 hits and one more hit would have killed her. His justification? "I knew there were monsters but didn't think they would attack without asking first". F*cking s*upid.

- Members of the MC's harem appear to have no motivation other than to serve and protect him even though they had other motivations and interests before.

- MC has lived for 10 thousand years and yet acts like a dense harem protag to the extent that he keeps his arms straight down when a girl hugs him. He says "I've lived for 10 thousand years but I've never experienced romance so I don't know what to do when a girl proposes to me". Bull f*cking shit. He has read literally millions of random books and none of them talked about romance? F*ck you for thinking readers are that dumb.

- MC acts irrationally whenever someone badmouths his teacher, going to the extent of killing them (he says in the story that he will not allow anyone who verbally insults his teacher to live). Whenever someone tells him that his teacher got injured, he releases his killing aura regardless of the fact that no enemies are present and he is only hurting his allies. Yet he allowed his teacher to go to the ten-thousand mountains alone to buy ingredients for his flying sword without sending anyone to protect her nor give her any protective treasures, with the result that she got seriously injured. What does he do after he finds her seriously injured and unconscious? He gives her some pills and allows her teacher to take her back, and instead of accompanying them he goes off to avenge her, with the result that by the time he finished his revenge and he gets back his teacher is still unconscious and is almost braindead and would have permanently lost her mind if he didn't come back in time to save her. This is illogical and doesn't make sense. If the MC loves his teacher so much why would he prioritize avenging her over making sure she is recovered first? Secondly why did he even allow her to go out alone in the first place. I just cannot believe someone who has cultivated for 10 thousand years would act like this.

- Unimaginative setting. Most of the treasures seem to be based on Journey to the West. Majority of treasures used are of the physical variety: flying swords and protective treasures that function essentially like armor. Cultivators fight by throwing their flying swords at each other. Up to the chapter 266 the most interesting power described so far was turning braindead people into living puppets, and I don't think even that's particularly interesting. It's very much a vanilla xianxia setting with the typical powerlevels Yuanying, Da Cheng and so on. Nothing new or interesting compared to the powers described in say Reincarnator, or even f*cking Elf Tensei. Hell I think even LSG had more interesting powers than this.

- Excessive repetition. Example:

>The most important thing was that Yang Chen wouldn’t even have been able to comprehend this method, if he hadn’t cultivated to the third layer of layer of Three Purities Secrets, let alone cultivating the method. But fortunately Yang Chen had received the cultivation method of the Three Purities Secrets from the Greatest Supreme Elder, and he had also already cultivated it to the third layer.

The second sentence could be cut down to just the first 5 words. The story is full of this kind of repetition. It is not unusual to find the same thing repeated 5 or even 10 times even within the same chapter. Very annoying.

- The crucial plot point of WHY Li QingChen wanted Yang Chen dead was only revealed in chapter 126, when his attempt to kill Yang Chen had started at the very beginning of the story. It would have been nice to know that from the start since the attempts to kill him had covered most of those first 126 chapters. The fact that he did not discover the reason behind it for like 10 years makes me think he's incompetent. You'd think someone who lived for 10 thousand years would probably be able to find out the reason behind all the attempts on his own life right? Nope, it was merely revealed to the MC by accident. If not for that then he might have never found out. F*cking useless.

- Multiple "minor" plot holes. For example in chapter 171, where the corpse of the cultivator that Yang Chen just killed (by cutting in half with his sword) has no blood in it and nobody bothers asking why. I'm pretty sure Yang Chen couldn't have came up with a good excuse for that. And high level cultivators were looking at the corpse so they would have definitely noticed it, but they didn't ask why it was s**ked dry nor get suspicious about it. I think that counts as a plot hole as they definitely should have gotten suspicious and asked about it. There are other places in the story where you would think the other characters must be completely ret*rded to think that he discovered the locations of ancient treasures from browsing the library.

- The achievement roll integer overflow. Apparently even magical tools use bounded integer types. F*cking s*upid.

- The writing isn't great. Entire paragraphs are made out of a single sentence. They don't flow particularly well and aren't sharp or biting. You get the gist of what he's trying to say, but there's not anything memorable or quotable. It just barely passes as functional.

Some reviewers have said that they are confused about what happened in the first chapter so here I will clarify what exactly happened:

So, when the chapter began, Yang Chen was in the devil punishing battlefield in the immortal world (I believe it was during the battle between the hundreds of thousands of celestial soldiers and the devil Yi. It was not clear whether Yang Chen was fighting for or against the devil Yi or if he was just passing by or whatever), and was dying (it was not explained why Yang Chen was dying). The Greater Demonic Body Exploding Technique was devil Yi's final suicidal technique that took out hundreds of thousands of celestial troops and also Yang Chen apparently. Before devil Yi exploded himself, the dying Yi told the dying Yang Chen some cultivation techniques. As Yang was dying, he recalled 4 events in his past life (he apparently lived for over ten thousand years), which were Yang Xi's speech, his master's death, being "locked up" by the sect master for thousands of years, and finally his master giving him the sword (the events are clearly not in chronological order). While recalling the fourth memory, which was his master giving him the sword, he was presumably hit by the explosion and suddenly woke up and found himself in the past, standing before the spiritual root test which was probably thousands of years if not over ten thousand years before. It was not explained why exactly Yang Chen was on the battlefield, nor how he got reincarnated thousands of years into the past, neither of these were explained in the first chapter (nor in the first 200 chapters as it happens).

I want to recommend the translation by Blue Silver Translations over the one by LordOfScrubs, at least for chapter 1. LordOfScrubs described the "young master" as female when he was actually male (Blue Silver Translations got that part correct. Well, sometimes the original text will get the character wrong too. Lots of same-pinyin but wrong character typos. For example sometimes Yang Chen is referred to as a "she". But in this instance there's no reason to believe the young master was a female). In another passage where Yang Xi explained that it was him who accused Yang Chen of coveting the fruit, the LordOfScrubs translation got that part completely mangled whereas the Blue Silver Translations got that part correct.

I have a minor issue with how Blue Silver Translations translated that particular sentence though. Whereas they translated it as:

>"I accused you before the Greatest Heaven Sect, said you coveted the young master’s Vermillion Fruit, and assassinated him."

This sentence is ambiguous. One interpretation is that Yang Xi first accused Yang Chen before the sect, and then Yang Xi assassinated the young master after making the accusation. Obviously this is not logical but it is a bit confusing.

I would translate it as:

"I accused you before the Greatest Heaven Sect. I said that you coveted the young master’s Vermillion Fruit, and that you assassinated him [for it]."

A minor nitpick perhaps but I'd support any change that reduces the scope for confusion.

Anyways, between the LordOfScrubs translation and the Blue Silver Translations version I would definitely go with Blue Silver Translations. It is much more accurate and faithful to the original text (though a bit too literal in some places leading to the kind of confusion I described above).

The weletransations translation is also a bit too literal in places (e.g one of the lines was translated as something like "if three people say tiger" - the translators wrote that they didn't know what this meant. It's a well known Chinese idiom https://en. Wikipedia. Org/wiki/Three_men_make_a_tiger). If you had no knowledge of Chinese idioms you might get confused at a lot of the lines since few of them are explained. Otherwise it's a competent translation. You'll just have to live with the unnatural phrases such as “This! This!” which abound in the translation. I'm not sure how best to translate it but it doesn't sound like the kind of thing a native English speaker would say. It does sound a bit s*upid and it's one of the reasons I don't think highly of the writing.

Especially nice was our MC on the Immortal Executioner Stage. Very unique when I read it and slowly made me love the development...

Here’s hoping our MC manages to become his master’s disciple again...

The beginning of story started out well enough, but as it moves further and further, it falls apart, but I suppose most of you won't need to worry about that until like chapter 700 or so.

Minus the ones that were kind of thrown in, most of the love interests were well done. I like how the MC actually marries his love interest, with a ceremony and all that. That's kind of rare with these kind of story. There are a lot of big moments here and there. If you like seeing an MC who consistently find extraordinary treasures and expand his immense wealth with the spoils of his fallen enemy, then you'll like this one. However, that said, there's very little excitement in the story.
After the first few hundred or so chapters, you'll realize that there's very little in the world that can actually threaten MC. In fact, most villains are either terrible with their jobs or have been schemed into destruction by our MC. Later, you'll find out that he was never in any danger in the first place cause there's a certain desu-ex character who's literally behind most of MC's success and prevents him from actually dying before he's supposed to. So, even when MC destroys his greatest foes or finding an incredible bank of treasure, it doesn't feel very satisfying.
After a while, I started to become jaded cause the story was no longer fun to read. By 1, 100 chapters, I personally found it hard root for the MC at all so I dropped it there.
Also, let me name off a couple of deal breakers that the story has that very few people have mentioned.
MC has to destroy his power and restart his cultivation from the start around chapter 900 so take note of that.
Yang Xi, the man who destroyed his MC's first life, doesn't die until near the end of the story. So a sin for stretching out a plot point that should've been solved in the first three hundred chapters. Yang Xi is a very annoying character.
The Mortal Realm and the Spirit Realm takes up about 90% of the story, which I assume leaves about 10% to the Immortal Realm. When I stopped reading (1100/1300), MC was still pretty low in the official power heirarchy, as in he's still at least five level of reaching the end. So I'm going to assume he never reach the final ranks.
Also, MC becomes quite an ass later on.

I'm not going to give details, but it was the ultra-standard "I am the strongest evar" ending. Where our MC flies majestically into the sunset, with his harem and buckets of loot. This is in spoiler tags for people who don't read a lot of CN novels, since this is a painfully typical conclusion. It's better to judge them by the journey and not the destination if you don't want this to drive you nuts.

The female Gosung Ling or whatever. Her development unsettles me a bit. It seems a little too smooth. A little too simple. The MC gave her advice to go through a competition and she passed it well b/c of it. Ever since then, things went a little "uhh what?" for me. B/c of the advice, she gains an immense amount of trust in him to the point where she doesn't question him much even if he says he wants to do the "seemingly impossible task for a person of his level". Way too fast.