Review: The First Law of Cultivation

The First Law of Cultivation by KrazeKode
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

I almost need another tag stronger than "seriously needs editing" for this one.

Look, I can put up with some errors for the sake of a good story. If I couldn't, I wouldn't enjoy reading much; most authors these days make the same ten types of errors at least occasionally, because they haven't been taught not to. But by the time I abandoned this at 4% I'd marked about 40 issues, most of them to do with the fact that the author has no clue, absolutely none, about how to write a narrative in the past tense. I'm used to the occasional missing past perfect tense when referring to something happening before the narrative moment, and the occasional "may" when it should be "might," and even the odd slip into present tense, but this book makes those errors constantly, on practically every Kindle page (which is smaller than a print page). Not to mention frequently writing something as two words where it should be one, and occasionally the other way round, and the usual excess coordinate commas between adjectives that don't need them, and some sentences that are phrased so awkwardly it's hard to figure out what they mean, and most of the other common errors. It's a constant barrage of bad mechanics, which distracted me so much that I couldn't get into the story and see if it was any good.

The opening is extremely reminiscent of Beware of Chicken Volume 1 : person from our world is suddenly dropped into the body of a young cultivator in a xanxia world who has just been beaten to death by more senior cultivators, who use "sparring" as an excuse to bully the weak. (I'm not sure if it's directly ripping off BoC or drawing on a widespread trope of the genre, because BoC is the only other such novel I've read.) But where the protagonist of BoC was a farmer and wants to be one again, this protagonist definitely does not want to farm; he was a chemistry student, and takes up the study of alchemy (or Alchemy, since it's capitalized for some reason). He apprentices himself to an old alchemy master with that goal in mind.

That's as far as I got before the terrible mechanics drove me away. Reading other reviews convinces me that I made the right choice. The quality of the mechanics doesn't absolutely predict the quality of the story, but there is a strong correlation.

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