Look at my little brother. All grown up and bein’ a man, learnin’ how to take care of his own farm.” Yun Ren wiped an imaginary tear from his eye, Gou Ren snorted in response. Bi De prayed that the basis for this dance was not sinister, that the history within the crystal would not tarnish this beautiful image before him. Hmm, the more I write this the more negative things I have to say. Positive stuff comes in the form of character interactions and side character growth. The dialogue is pretty good and the world-building is good enough for what we've seen so far, not that we've seen much. The various animals' shape-shifting was an interesting development that I think should have been focused on more. Their connection was saturated with all the pitiful dregs of power they had in that area. Some leaked, it was inevitable, but they needed it now. To give their all, for each other.

What I liked a lot was that the characters are good-hearted people, including the ones who are animals, even the arrogant ones. They mostly have some kind of significant progression during the book, too, and that progression is different for each of them. The characters are distinct; they have different voices and different personalities and different conflicts and aspirations and abilities, and you'd never confuse one of them for another. I can think of at least one Hugo-winning author who could take lessons from this book in writing well-defined characters. I absolutely loved this story! It's even better than the first with some great developments and more of all the things I loved. I even loved the PoV hopping that normally breaks pace and makes me disgruntled (though I still hate villain PoV which is thankfully a very small part of the hopping). The author has a great hand at putting those breaks in the perfect spot for the story and continuing with them to natural conclusions.Well… that was kind of easy, wasn’t it?” Yun Ren asked his brother as they stared at the corpse of the deer. This is probably my favorite story from the "cultivation" genre - a genre I want to like, but can't really recommend any particular stories from it because they're all poorly written. This story is a surprisingly healthy fish in a polluted pond. The surprise on his sister’s face was short lived. Instead her grin turned radiant, as they continued their match. WOW" you might say "Good thing it doesn't get any more complicated than that". Well, I wish you hadn't said that because now it does thanks to your hasty words.

Overall, I found this book OK. If you are into slice of life, with a lot of focus on romance then I would certainly give this book a go. They were still mustering their strength, reaching out over it's length and breadth to bring in more, when the enemy was cast down, and defeated. The feeling of violence faded, and their power relaxed once more.Everybody else was still waking up—they got treated to the ear blasting sound of Bi De’s morning wake-up call.