Lio Aetos is the Young Aristocrat and heir apparent to a legendary Greek sect, a prodigious talent born and bred for glory.
Solus is a slave, a disgraced patrician from the fallen city of Rome with nothing to his name.
They’re as different as the East is from the West. Yet both of them hunger—to cast off the threads of Fate they’ve been given. To reach for a higher purpose.
In this world of ruined empires and long-forgotten gods, the Young Aristocrat and the Son of Rome share an unyielding conviction. As brothers, they will face tribulations and climb the divine mountain of Olympus.
It is a mad thing. It is utterly against the will of the Fates.
It is cultivation. It’s the mark that every philosopher bears plainly on their soul.
Ingeniously combining xianxia and cultivation elements within the world of Ancient Greece, Y.B. Striker brings a fresh take on progression fantasy that is brimming with wit, adventure and larger-than-life characters.
This was very nearly one of my favourite reads of the year. It was super enjoyable, and I have only one quibble, which I’ll get to later.
To start things off, I normally try to link books to similar works. It’s hard to do that here, and in a great way. Not since Carl and Princess Donut have two characters ever felt so right together, but the story is nothing like Dungeon Crawler Carl. It’s not quite Cradle, nor Bastion, nor other cultivation books. It inhabits a place on its own.
As alluded to, we follow the journey of Griffon, the Young Aristocrat chafing at the bonds of his position, and Solus, the son of Rome, who is chafing more literally at his slave collar. The collar doesn’t last long, and the pair head out off their island and into the wider world. Griffon is an arrogant and witty young master. The passion of Scorio from Bastion with the wit and sass dialed up to eleven, and reminds me of Locke Lamora. Solus is more reserved, deliberate, and fighting with the horrors in his past. The two have a strong love-hate relationship as they work together, disparage either other, but ultimately would dive into the river Styx for each other.
Characterisation for the secondary characters is done just as artfully, and has to be the greatest strength of the series. There are frequent jumps in perspective, sometimes outside the main pair, but for me this only added even more depth to the characters and the world. I have read a few reviews complaining about this, but honestly, I don’t think it’s an issue at all. Each chapter lets you know what perspective we are reading from, so it’s not like you’ll be caught unawares.The world-building is, of course, top-notch, and you can feel the amount of research that went into everything. It fuses real aspects of the ancient cultures with the sect-based focus of many cultivation stories.
The only thing I wish was done a bit different is something that is entirely personal prefence. I like hard magic systems. Explicit rules, things concrete enough I can theorycraft and ask “I wonder what I’d do if I was in this world?” The progression of cultivation in Virtuous Sons is well done, the gulf between realms of cultivators is large, but at the same time, it’s also quite ambiguous. The revelations and similar being ambiguous, I can get. Especially for cultivation stories, the earth-shattering revelations about oneself or the universe can come of trite, obvious, or corny if made too simple and direct. However, at some points, the ambiguous nature of the writing left me genuinely confused as to what was happening.
For example, at one point Griffon and Solus are ravens hunting crows. I was unsure if this was literal shape-shifting, if they were people and had ravens, had spiritual ravens, if the section of writing was meant to be allegorical or spiritual. At the end of the chapter I got that “Yup, they did indeed kill some crows,” and just kept reading, hoping at the specifics of how this happened weren’t plot-relevant. I later checked in with the author and confirmed it was allegorical, not actual shape-shifting. Of course, I might have missed some obvious clue that should have clued me on properly, and this is just a case of reader stupidity. Then again, I also got confused when Griffon was in his Tribulation with the revelations, and with what was being implied in the Lefteris chapter. With the last point, I expect once things get revealed everything will click into place.
Perhaps chalk this one up to me being a very simple man and needing simple writing. On that note, the prose is great. It’s elegant, rich, and numerous times had me resolve that I need to improve my own writing to match the quality I was reading.
Look, let’s cut this off here. If the idea of Greco-Roman cultivation with an amazing character duo has any appeal to you, just start reading. You’ll get the character dynamics after the first fight between Griffon and Solus, and if you’re not grinning at that point, I’ll eat my hat. Spoiler: I don’t have a hat.
