Infinite power, infinite danger.
Growing up mortal, I only knew a few things about cultivators. They like their hierarchies, they hate disrespect, and if you leave one out in deep space long enough, they’ll go homicidally insane.
It turns out, there’s a reason for that. Away from all the gravity wells and biospheres that generate natural energy, things get just quiet enough to notice the infinite ocean of qi entirely incompatible with our own.
I should know. I’ve seen it.
Only difference is, I didn’t go mad. I wasn’t a cultivator. Technically, I wasn’t even alive.
But now I can sense it. I can touch it.
I can cultivate it.
As of writing this review, I’ve read the first published book, To Flail Against Infinity.
There are generally two kinds of Progression Fantasy types of books: those where the MC has to claw their way up the ranks through painful hard work; and those where the MC starts out with a broken trait (or a system exploit, cheat code, etc), and goes nuts with it.
Cal (our MC), manages to be both. While other cultivators have to scrounge up the mana to cultivate over long time periods, Cal has the infinite void to draw from, supercharing his cultivation speed. Of course, having lots of mana available is only one part of cultivating, and so he has to learn the others the hard way.
After an initial setup, which I won’t spoil, Cal finds his way to a sect, and the book becomes a more common magic school styled plot. There are the petty drama and intruige common to the ‘face’ cultures that we all know from traditional cultivation novels, but now things have a sci-fi twist to them. I suspect that, as the MC grows stronger and eventually moves past his small sect outpost, the sci-fi elements might come more into play, but right now they’re just flavour to the setting and you could swap out the sci-fi setting for an ancient Chinese one and nothing in the plot would really need to change (barring our MC drawing from the ‘void’, of course).s
Alright, onto the meat and potatoes. I’m rating this well above normal cultivation stories for two main reasons:
