Cultivating Chaos: VeilVerse: Cultivating Chaos, Book 1

One of my favorite cultivation and dao novels. I really like a lot of William D Arand’s writing. The main character has growth and aptitude which is what I like from my characters. This novel reminds me a lot of Battle Through The Heavens or Martial God Asuka. I feel Arand has taken inspiration from these novels, well except the MC being an alchemist of course lol. Good read.

This is an interesting book. It's full of action and potential romantic entanglements.The characters are good and each has something to add to the team.I would recommend this book.

this is a wuxia written by a native english speaking westerner, he did an excellent job of it. if you like wuxia's, but the chinese culture and translations sometimes baffle you, try reading this. He manages to avoid some of the worst (to westerner eyes) tropes, and pokes good natured fun of others. Alll while paying homage to the genre. the characters are well-written, the plot is good. I sometimes read machine translations of LN's (light Novels) on sites such as LNMTL - Machine Translations as the fan translated ones are seldom complete, and slow to update new chapters. they seem to typically run to 1,000-2,000 chapters, with a lot of filler material that doesn't actually do much to advance the plot or character development. while I do find it interesting in that you can learn a lot about chinese culture, grammar, and sentence structure, it can be confusing for a native english speaker with no chinese at all, and the machine translation is not always correct. certain words get consistently mis-translated, as chinese seems to be heavily dependant on context and other cues in what a particular symbol means.Example:气 Trad. 氣qìgasairsmellweatherto make angryto annoyto get angryvital energyqifor instance, one I just finished consistently used "maid" instead of "mother" which was confusing given the context, but not jarringly so, so it took me a bit to see a problem and look it up.the machine translation doesn't always pick the correct meaning in all cases, so it's slow going sometimes. This is so much better for a westerner.

Good book enjoyed reading it so much and I enjoyed reading it again too. Enjoy reading those book reviews suck to have to write 15 words

I was about to restart reading the massive body of work Mr. Arand/Mr. Darren (the latter pen name for his spicier offerings) in the so-called SovereignVerse universe. But that there was a shared universe, the VeilVerse universe, that Mr. Arand also writes in along with another of my favorite authors (Blaise Corvin -- just caught up with his Delvers LLC series). So glad I took the time to start this smaller series before re-reading the longer one, as this book is great fun.This book has a cultivation magic system, which is a different approach for Mr. Arand. For those not used to these kinds of books, the magic system might take a little getting used to, but that passes quickly. Now, off to book 2!

I have purchased and read all of the books this author released (on both pen names) and i enjoyed ALL of them (including this one).BUT, this book in my opinion is not on par with the author's other works or with other wuxia/reincarnation books that i have read.Sometimes when an author feels a part of the story is too minor and slows down the pace he just skips the entire thing all together, usually i have no problem with this because it's not used often, in this book, it is used all the time!There is no "in between" or "in transition" sections here, the story just keeps jumping and skipping forward (especially at the first half), as a result the book feels disjointed and worse then that, the author forgot or neglected parts of the story, some would say minor parts, but still...The MC's progress is very fast at start but feels none existent later on, he just "skips" levels with time but nothing is said about his progress, how he reached it, what are the results, or what does it even means being a "peak 8 cultivator" instead of the "peak 6 cultivator" he was previously.This is something that was very missing in this wuxia, there is no clear definition between the power scale, i got the impression that from level 4 to level 9 it's all pretty much the same, i imagine there is a big leap after 10 but who knows? it's barely mentioned.These are the two things that hurt this story the most in my opinion, but it's not all, i have more examples.SPOILER ALERT:In the start of a challenge it was promised that the winners will be rewarded with 3 treasures from the sect vaults.I remembered a similar reward from the first book in the Cradle series, the MC in cradle won and we got to enter into a vault filled with rewards and relics with him, reading the description of all the different relics, getting a glimpse of what power means in this world and the MC's thought process about what to pick and why.In THIS BOOK, the MC's group won and the entire part of the rewards was forgotten and ignored, i don't even know if they got the rewards or not because the author just skipped it.Later on there is no mention to anything related and no reward makes an appearance.Almost the same exact things happens later on, again, someone in the MC's group wins a reward from the sect's vault, this time it IS mentioned that he did indeed got the reward but we don't get to know what it was, ever.Another "minor" thing that majorly irked me is losing a big (or what i thought was big) character in the group with no other explanation then "they packed everything and left us, but it's ok, they wrote a farewell letter".The character was a part of the group and a big part of the MC's life and goals up until then, but the group goes to a tournament and when it ends there is just the letter and no more character.Again, the entire in between thing, and the thought process has been skipped, all that we are given is a result.It just feels like too many of these little things have been gutted out for some reason or were planned poorly...

Not his best work, a lot of gaps in the story.

Nothing less than i hoped. Looking forward for the next one. And hoping that it's a longer series and not a trilogy like his other wonderful works 😁

A great start to the story very enjoyable and entertaining to be able to read a cultivation novel without the endless pain and usual drivel

I really enjoyed reading this book and I am looking forward to reading the next one right after this now.

I generally find cultivation novels difficult and tedious, but this is certainly a refreshing change. I would strongly recommend it.