Blurb: (From Book 1) Sacred artists follow a thousand Paths to power, using their souls to control the forces of the natural world.
Lindon is Unsouled, forbidden to learn the sacred arts of his clan.
When faced with a looming fate he cannot ignore, he must defy his family's rules...and forge his own Path.
Review: This is westernised Xianxia. It's progression fantasy to a tee, with massive inspiration from Asian culture. The series has two parallel stories that will eventually intersect. The first follows Lindon, a young man who is a powerless outcast, and his journey to become strong enough to save his valley from destruction. This takes part in a well built fantasy world, rich in spirits, remnants, elixirs, progression levels, and dreadgods. The second follows a larger level of conflict, which takes places over multiple worlds and timelines, and follows a war between the Abidan and multiple rebel groups.
I demolished this series while on holiday, and was in the perfect mood for it. It is light reading, with an interesting mash up of concepts, following a cool main character as he progressively gets stronger and defats stronger people. I could never get behind the larger story however, and this became a problem as the two levels of story started to head in the same direction. I was simply uninterested in the larger conflict, and didn't enjoy the style of writing when that set of characters had their perspectives. I was a fan of Lindon and Orthos muttering to each other about 'the dragon advances', but not worried about Iterations collapsing. As with many progression fantasies, the enjoyment of the progression also lessened as I felt over saturated with the same style of content.
I will end up putting this as a non-recommend, even though I enjoyed the first few books and was happy at the time I read them. The story simply got less enjoyable, and there is no midway stopping point that would have given me satisfaction. So not my cup of tea in the end, but it is spoken for very highly online.
Update: I ended up coming back and finishing the series! I was worried for the reasons above, and the start was a bit rough because my memory of the exact ending of when I had stopped was murky, but I am so glad that I did. I'm still unsure if my taste in tea has simply changed or if I just needed a break from the series. Regardless, I have now changed the series to recommend.
To give some points on what I think this series did well: The ending felt complete and planned out, and I was grinning ear to ear while reading the epilogue. The scaling of the story for the last few books was also handled much better than I anticipated. The stakes continued to be real, with meaningful consequences, and I did not end up disliking how the wider story merged with Cradle. I am sucker for a wholesome team dynamic too.