The author’s use of cliffhangers is effective, I’ll give it that. The ending of each section is always a reveal: "A living woman in the tiger’s cave!" or "The Mountain God is here!" It makes you want to scroll down. However, the payoff is often weak. The "Mountain God" is just killed off screen in a scuffle. The "living woman" just becomes a submissive wife. The setup is great, but the execution is underwhelming. It feels like the author is better at creating hype than resolving it. I hope the later chapters are better at following through on the promises they make.
The prose quality is okay for a translated novel. Some sentences feel a bit stiff, like "In the room, a passionate scene was happening." That's a bit robotic. Also terms like "impatient" and "heart even hotter" feel slightly off. But overall it's readable. The dialogue especially – Han Qianxue's taunts and Su Chen's rage come through clearly. The translation doesn't kill the flow, but it also doesn't add any poetry. It's functional. I've read worse translations. The action scenes are punchy enough.
The visual imagery when Lin Du cultivates is really pretty. The spring breeze swirling around her, the sense of merging with nature, the expanded perception of the forest, it all feels very poetic. The author clearly put thought into how cultivation feels from the inside, which adds to the immersion. I could almost feel the warmth and the wind.
1 The pacing of this story is perfect so far. It starts slow and atmospheric, then gradually introduces weird elements. The floating corpse, then the hanged body, then the dead guy in the leaves. Each discovery raises the stakes without feeling rushed.