Fates Parallel

Blurb

It’s easy to wager everything when you have nothing to lose.

It’s a hard life for a young mortal girl, living on the streets. After Lee Jia narrowly escapes a fate worse than death, her last ditch effort to flee her pursuers and survive the winter finds her accidentally enrolled in a brand new academy for immortals. Now faced with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Lee Jia will have to survive a violent roommate, arrogant young masters, and—worst of all—social hierarchies in order to carve out a place for herself in the world of magic, martial arts, and cultivation.

Join Lee Jia in a progression fantasy adventure about friendship, self-discovery, personal growth, and of course magical martial arts!

Thoughts

As of writing this review, I’ve read the first two books in the series.

This series came up in discussion a few times on discord, and given I do love my some magical academy / sect settings, I figured I’d give it a shot.

So the premise - Lee Jia, in a bid to escape a life of slavery, becomes a thief, steals an entry pass, and ends up almost accidentally enrolling a three-nation-joint-venture cultivation/magic school. She’s bunked with resident psycopath Eui, who introduces herself by yelling at Jia and throwing a knife at her. Obviously, this is best friend material.

While Jia is the main character, Eui comes close enough that you could almost think of this as a dual-MC story, just mostly told from Jia’s point of view. Heck, the two of them even practise, to use Eui’s words, the non-sexy kind of dual cultivation. The relationship that grows between them is initially a highlight of the book, but then I turned off it slightly when it became pseudo-romantic, which comes down to one of my disliked “Please just communicate better” tropes.

Outside of the main two vagabonds, the academy is filled with characters from three nations. Chinese-inspired Qin with cultivation, Japanese-inspired Yamato, and the country Jia and Eui hail from, which is filled with half-spirits (notice in the cover the cat ears and tail). The academy was built as a political response to tensions between the three nations, and so there’s set up to be a melting pot of cultural clashes (which happen immediately) and political struggles. For all the talk about the presitage, the amazing formations, the hundreds of students, there are unfortunately only three staff members (one from each nation) in the entire place. A few more come in later, but the sense of scale is a bit muddied by the conflict between “important academy providing a unique exploration of the fusion of each countries arts” and “there are three staff members.” On one hand, it would allow each staff member to be well-developed, but Jia actively doesn’t engage with two of the three, so the opportunity is a bit missed.

For a politically-important academy, the staff members are incredibly lax about discipline and behaviour, which I guess is needed for some of the conflicts in the plotlines to advance, but it does make points feel a bit contrived. Spoilers for book two: A sect loses track of an incredibly valueable artifact after one of their scions die. To recover it, they send a power-hungry moron, a woman who immediately kidnaps the MCs, and a powerful disciple as an instructor who does pretty much nothing. The whole plot point could have and should have been solved by using just asking the staff members (who are very powerful and effectively aware of everything happening in the campus at all times), or by just talking to Jia and saying “Hey, we think you have X, could we have it back?” Instead there’s this long misunderstanding-filled plot where Jia sells 100 years of service to someone for a bit of protection (where again she coulud have just gone to talk to any of the staff members) and a big fight. And I don’t know, but this irks me. Plot lines shouldn’t have so many obvious resolutions that get ignored.

If I look past that, the technical writing is decent, the dialogue not too bad (though I realise I have a tic where I hate “hehe”), and grammar is good.

For those who really love magical academies with a blend of slice-of-life dual cultivation with the sudden violence of cultivation worlds, you may enjoy this. I’d say to give the first two books a shot and depending on how you feel about the global plotline’s development, continue on or put it down there.