Full disclosure up front, I'm the translator for this one. Still, I've read all current 1000 chapters of it more closely than anything else in my life, so take this as a review from someone who knows exactly where the bodies are buried.
The story: Reincarnated guy gets the ultimate cheat: a complete library of every cultivation technique, pill recipe and formation ever written. Then he lands in a world with no spiritual qi, so none of it works. Ten years of grinding gets him to the lowest possible stage. Then he shows up at the wizard academy exam and counts over 180 staff at the gate who could each flatten him. So he shuts up, enrolls as an apprentice, and spends the next thousand chapters quietly rebuilding cultivation from scratch using wizard theory as his toolkit.
What it does well: The research. This is the closest thing I've read to Warlock of the Magus World in how much of the plot is experiments, failed experiments, and the MC slowly building a system nobody else has. The difference is he's not a sociopath, he's a nerd who'd rather be left alone in his lab. The wizard world itself is the WMW/LotM mold, levels, academies, planes, factions, and the author sticks to the rules he sets up, which matters a lot over 1000 chapters. The power scaling is great as well. It starts at academy politics and ends up at wars between civilizations, and the MC gets there without becoming a god by chapter 200. I'd say it's kind of similar to Swallowed Star in that aspect but not fully.
What it does badly: It is slow. The MC fights when he has to and then goes back to studying. If you need a fight every chapter you will bounce off this hard. The author can set up very elaborate plots of leave you hanging and begging for more chapters. The early chapters also read rougher than the later ones, partly because the author was finding his feet and partly because so was I. I've been going back through them to fix terminology, but ch1-50 is the weakest stretch either way.
Who it's for: People who finished WMW or Lord of the Mysteries and wanted more wizard-world stuff with a protagonist who thinks before he hits. People who like progression you can actually track. Not for people who want harem, face-slapping, or a tournament arc every 30 chapters, there's basically none of that.
Status. Raw is 1000 (as of today) chapters and still updating. All 1000 chapters translated, always fully caught up (paid readers are 20ish chs ahead), free chapters can be found --> here, NU page ----> here. There's a Patreon for advance chapters but everything lands on the free site after a delay.
Ask me anything about it, and if you've read other good "cultivator in a magic world" novels, I would love to hear about it :D
