I'm curious about the East and West gates. East Gate led to the apocalypse. Will the West Gate lead somewhere else? The fact that there are two keys suggests more worlds or maybe more pawnshop branches.
The narrator's journey starting from a poor village feels like a classic underdog setup, but it's told with a modern casual voice.
1 The scene with the Elf women recruiting the bow user was funny but also sweet. He was terrified at first, but they were just extroverted and friendly. It shows that even in a diverse world, first impressions can be wrong.
The part where Xing Xing tries not to cry because she thinks crying is annoying broke my heart. It’s such a small detail but tells you so much about what she’s been through before. Someone must have yelled at her for crying. That kind of conditioning at three years old is rough.
Okay, the description of that little ghost's scars looking like "writhing earthworms" is seriously creepy. The author didn't just say "he was tortured," they painted a picture that makes your skin crawl. It makes you feel bad for the thing, even though it’s supposed to be a threat. That kind of mixed emotion is rare and well done.
I think the best part of this excerpt is the family division negotiation. It's tense, and every line from Song Hexiu is a countermove. The way he forces the grandmother to give him eight hundred copper instead of two hundred is a tiny victory but feels huge because of the buildup.
The emotional tone in the first few chapters is heavy on anger and injustice. Ye Feng is constantly fuming, which fits his situation, but I hope we get some lighter moments soon. A little humor or friendship could balance out the bitterness.
The ending of the excerpt leaves things on a cliffhanger with more bugs incoming, but also introduces a clear reward system. Qin Jin-Nian wants more stat points, which gives him motivation to fight rather than just survive. It's a great way to transition from pure horror to progression fantasy.
I’m not fully sold on the writing yet. The sentences are sometimes choppy in the translation and the dialogue has a stilted feel, like some lines were lifted from MTL or script notes. For example, “Carry me! Carry me!” sounds more like an anime subtitle than natural English speech. The pacing of dialogue especially feels off, with characters repeating short lines unnecessarily. If this were smoothed out, the book would already feel ten times more professional and immersive.
2 I’m not a fan of the forced nostalgia when Miejue sees the MC standing “straight with a back like bamboo” and instantly thinks of “Senior Brother Gu Hongzi.” It’s such a cliché of Chinese web novels – the apprentice reminds the master of a lost loved one, so she treats them specially. But the author hasn’t even built up that past relationship yet. It feels thrown in for drama. If we get flashbacks later that develop this, I’ll forgive it. For now, it’s a weak plot device.
I'm a bit tired of the constant system messages interrupting the narrative. Every time the protagonist spends money, we get a "Ding!" and a description of the rebate. It's necessary for the power fantasy, but it also breaks the flow. Especially during the massive gift-spamming, where we get repeated system prompts. The author could have summarized them instead of repeating the pattern. "Ding! Spent X, received Y rebate." It becomes repetitive after a while. I appreciate that the system messages are part of the genre, but maybe they could be condensed. On the other hand, some readers love seeing the numbers increase. It's a trade-off. For me, it got a bit monotonous. The sequence from 2000 to 200k to 9 million was exciting the first time, but by the third cycle I was skimming.