Transcending Dreams

Transcending Dreams, Book 1

De: S. C. King

Narrado por: Kyle Tait

He thought death was the end. He was wrong. His death was the beginning of a path with the potential for infinite power.

One moment William was at work, and the next, he was surrounded by lunatics wanting to sacrifice his soul.

He had never been a man who believed in the fantastical, but he had no choice after he found himself in a much younger body in another world. A world that had things like soul extraction and demonic cultivators, and if nothing was done, his soul was next in line to be reaped.

Thankfully, a man with a special hatred for demonic cultivators saved William at the last second.

The man also left him a tool. A system that would guide William to the heights of cultivation.

©2023 S. C. King (P)2024 Tantor

Amazing for a cultivation series

This was a blast! This reminds me of nano machines web novel because it’s also a cultivation series and the mc has nano bots that recreate a system to help him cultivate just like this one. Looking forward to the next book!

Love the character and the Story

This was a great cultivation novel! It really scratched my itch for a good new cultivation novel. Sects, cultivation, alchemy, martial arts skills and more.

The main character is fun to listen to.

The narrator did a fantastic job.

AI Voice

This entire book was ruined because of the AI voice, zero inflection, zero emotional tones and mono tone voice. I had to speed up to 1.2 to tolerate it. The story is a big miss when you have a kid from the modern world bring tossed into random cultivation world. The kid starts to bow and scrape like the typical novel. He has no backbone , doesn't correct anyone about his name or even tell the back water people to stop talking to him like he is an idiot. (he is). He definitely doesn't ask enough questions and he is in a long line of protagonists that pick the very first city /country they run into to, to settle down in.

How not to do a litrpg

So, I'm torn on this review. I really did want to like this book...and its an okay pop-corn litrpg if you turn your brain off especially when it comes to stats...which is where I have my issue. The book is inconsistent in its own system to a vast degree. I can handle suspension of disbelief and some minor things here and there but this was just too much. For example, when the user gets experience, the next level is progressively harder and harder to get. Additionally, each level adds 5 health to the MC. By level 10, he somehow has 800 hitpoints. And he goes from 5 to 10 in one sitting. The damage he took during this encounter should have killed him. There wasn't even mobs for him to have made this much progress given the increase level requirement and decreasing xp gain for the same enemy. Yet...its not a problem for our MC. Because. Plot armor.

Also, the primary issue for the MC is his soul damage where his stats can be reset to 1 anytime they increase before lvl 10. That sounds like it'd be super hard to overcome, right? Actually, it turns out to be super easy; barely an inconvenience.

Lastly, the stat fluffing is absolutely maddening. Every time there's a stat increase and even when there hasn't been, we get the stats read out...again. Couple this with the odd narration that really does sound like AI when the narrator talks, but the voices are decently done. This really, really baffled me because I ping-pong between "this is AI?" and "no, that's definitely being narrated" depending on if narration is happening or a character is speaking. 1.2 speed helps, but this thought never goes away.

P.S. None of this even takes into account the character himself. He's okay, but I'd like to see some development. Right now, he's comparing everything to the web novels from his world and using that as a guide, which gets really annoying because he doesn't treat that as a hypothesis, but just assumes that's the way it will be and gets mildly aggravated when its not that way.

Final verdict...it might be okay for a $2 sale or something if you have nothing else in your queue.

Good one

Honestly I liked the book and found it entertaining but there were some really annoying things with the MC like how we are told repeatedly that he is am adult on a 13 years body but he keeps acting and thinking like said 13 years old instead of as an adult then there's the thing that he assumes that all the fantasy stories he read about cultivation are firm truths now that he is on a world of cultivation and a few other things but overall I enjoyed the story