Martial Peak

As of writing this review, I have read >1500 chapters of the manhua.

Blurb

The journey to the martial peak is a lonely, solitary and long one. In the face of adversity, you must survive and remain unyielding. Only then can you break through and continue on your journey to become the strongest. Sky Tower tests its disciples in the harshest ways to prepare them for this journey. One day the lowly sweeper Yang Kai managed to obtain a black book, setting him on the road to the peak of the martial world.

Thoughts

This is my first proper manhua and I thought I’d bounce off it. Well, hundreds of chapters, tens of thousands of pages later, I’m still going. It’s addictive.

If you thought stories like DotF or HWFWM are about popcorn, no no, they have fluff. Fluff called writing. Remove all those big paragraphs, get some great art, and every new chapter has a new realm, fight, pill, artifact, breakthrough, waifu, or mysterious master.

There’s been so much content I don’t really know how to summarise it. In general, larger arcs follow the pattern of:

1. Wow look at these cool new places
2. Oh no, Yang Kai isn’t the strongest, let’s start fixing that
3. Accumulate artifacts/resources/pills.
4. Look at this woman with giant tits. Let’s wife her.
5. Breakthrough as many times as needed.
6. Oh no, there’s a realm above this one? Can’t have that. Go to new realm. Repeat from step one.

It is both a bit derivative to have the same overarching structure, but each realm and the problems with it are different enough that I didn’t get bored. For example, the Yang family war as a means of securing resources is very different to Yang Kai constructing space teleportation arrays to join worlds together.

Yang Kai is himself a pretty good protagonist. He’s not a complete murder hobo, but he does murder when he needs to. The concept of ‘face’ is everywhere (as is normal in more traditional works), and Yang Kai is no exception. Or to quote the translated novel:

He wasn’t addicted to killing, but some people were addicted to courting death.

Outside of Yang Kai, most reoccurring characters are his wives. There’s no NSFW content (apart from revealing outfits). It’s not like some web serial harems where woman throw themselves at the MC, instead Yang Kai forms relationships (often entirely without the sexual side being shown or implied) over the course of a realm arc, which if we convert to “page count” would be in the thousands of pages. At that slower pace, things feel a little more natural, especially given Yang Kai ends up being >10k years old. The multiple romantic interests does provide some humour sometimes as well.

Going with the multiple women, the sexual conservatism of many eastern works comes through, where women are routinely slut shamed, which is perhaps my biggest annoyance with the series.

To refocus on the good, the art style is amazing. The translations are above average, and then pacing is almost always extraordinarily fast-paced. So head over to whatever place you normally use to read manga, and give the first few chapters a shot.