Corrupted Crimson

Painting the Mists, Book 5

By: Patrick Laplante

Narrated by: Adam Verner

Length: 13 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

Some debts are never forgiven. Even in death...

When Cha Ming goes to help his friend Wang Jun’s ailing business in the capital, the last thing he expected was to compete with a seer. Their opponent is always one step ahead, and it’s sink or swim in this devil-infested marketplace.

To make matters worse, the king has been poisoned. Cha Ming is barely keeping him alive. If they don’t find a cure, a fight for succession is all but certain....

But the Song Kingdom’s issues run deeper. Evil spirits have sown deep seeds of resentment. Cha Ming and his friends must pull them out by the roots, because if they don’t, a civil war will be the least of their worries.

©2019 Patrick Georges Laplante (P)2020 Podium Audio

this is pretty good

some of these other reviews seem to picky. this is a pretty good book. can't stop listening

What a great story!

If you are picking up this series for the first time then I highly suggest starting with book 1 Clear sky. If you are a returning reader then I highly suggest acquiring this book in the series. If you have enjoyed the series so far then you will enjoy this book as well. *Spoilers* We get to follow Cha Ming and company go head to head with demons in a battle for the kingdom. We also get a glimpse at the challenges that our main characters will face in the future. I can't recommend this book enough.

I'm confused

How do you have budisum in a world where buda never lived otherwise I really like the series so far

Good listen

The pace and story was good a bit sad tho I can wait for the next one

i do not like the plot device in this book

the constant negative atmosphere is a terrible plot device and the stupid main character is awful in this book. i love the series but so far i hate this one. update better by the end still my least favorite so far.

Wow looking forward to next book

love the depth of world being displayed, plots being resolved while new one's are created it deepened.

Getting Good!!

This book was a bit of a game changer in this series. I was coasting along for the 1st few hoping It would get better. This book did not disappoint. Well written and engaging and I'm looking forward to moving on to the next one. I just hope it doesn't reverse to be like the first 3.

Another mediocre narrator

I love the story. The story has a lot of great characters and a really fun storyline.

But... you pay for the narrator otherwise just get a book and let the text to speech read it for you. Like a lot of narrators, this narrator has a great reading voice but he is horrible voicing the characters. Often, you can't recognize who is talking or even if the person is female. So frustrating. So hard to find books with good narration on audible.

Does the author hate the MC and his friends?

Whenever anything is going well, the author will find the most petty and unbelievably ridiculous way to throw a wrench into things for them. It will be a tiny thing that is forced to effect the whole story. And to aid this, the characters who seem smart are made ridiculously dumb and oblivious just to make some VERY obvious ploy seem mysterious and subtle. So I don’t give away the story, I’ll use an explanation. Imagine someone is shooting a gun 10 ft away while someone else is standing next to you is going: “what’s that noise? What’s could be causing it? It’s loud, I wonder what the source is.” The story’s about as dumb this person.

not so great

ok, I'm going to assume most readers are at least familiar with Xianxia and Xianhaun webnovel translations and have read a few.
first off, this is not Xianxia or Wuxia. this series started out closest to a westernized version of a hybrid Xianhaun novel and while it hits a lot of surface cliches found in all three genres, it misses many of the underlying tropes and deeper issues inherent in the genre. it also had some fairly big grammar problems and repetitive wording, ("quickly do things very quickly" and other redundant sentence structure). the cultivation systems are vague and depend a lot of the readers' prior knowledge from other cultivation novels and systems, leaving out some of the basics.

despite all its faults, the early part of the series was entertaining, though it's lacking depth and the author doesn't seem to understand the underlying issues regarding hierarchy, face and the 'death before dishonor' attitude prevalent in the culture, nor the true importance family (a child would never ignore a summons from his father like that, especially not the eldest son). on top of that, the MC is way too nice and gullible, even this many books into the story he's so easy to fool, and he acts more like a shounen hero with the power of friendship rather than a cultivator. on top of that, the underlying political propaganda is kind of nauseating. a cultivator has to sever his worldly ties, not serve his country (he wasn't even from that country to begin with, it took him a year to get there at the start of the story).

in the last few books, the focus stopped being about immortal cultivation/going against heaven and has been partly about crafting, which is a little boring but ok, but mostly its been about mortal politics and court intrigue, and the series has devolved into a mortal martial art story with a few fantasy elements. everyone's cultivation is very low and the only people we've seen above core formation are "transcendent beings" and we have no idea what realm they are in.

in this last book, the MC barely cultivated at all, is still only at the initial/early foundation stage, and has yet to go into any kind of long term closed cultivation (a few months to a year does not count as long term in a cultivation novel, where experts can be in closed-door cultivation for decades, or even centuries). the MC goes from calm and methodical to impulsive and whiny, which is annoying.

there are also way too many POVs. I don't care about the bad guys or the other random people who show up only to die three chapters later. I certainly don't want to read all this detailed political crap, (I thought it was a cultivation novel and I hate political intrigue so you can imagine how not thrilled I've been in the past couple of books). the few times the pov was on the MC in this book he was acting like a moody teenager with anger issues rather than an actual grown-up, who should be mentally in his 40's about now if you count both lives. he spends a good deal of time feeling sorry for himself and then had yet another power downgrade, which was, quite frankly, irritating as hell and made me want to throw the book across the room.

at this rate, he will take another five books just to get to core formation and then five more before he might (might) transcend to the next realm. of course, we don't even know how many higher realms there are yet, so this series could drag on forever. I have the patience for maybe one more book, then I'm probably done with this series.