This is a sad review for me because its mainly my closure review more than being written for the actual purpose of a review.

TLDR: The author had good ideas but failed to stay true to them. The character-driven idea slowly just changed to character-exposition. Even if a story is more character focused doesn't mean its okay for it to stall as long as the stalling is done by characters. 'Driven' is still a key word in that term and it seems like the author no longer has plans to uphold that part of said term.

Now Savage Divinity as a concept, especially given what the author put in the synopsis was exactly what I was looking for when I started out and at first, it delivered.

A character driven cultivation story. Characters are usually the sacrificial lambs in cultivation stories and many times even the MC is left with no actual character. In Savage Divinity that wasn't the case, all the characters were interesting and likeable, with a lot have more realistic worries, trails and triumphs than what is usually seen in cultivation stories.

Similarly in cultivations novels the world is also usually left behind and seems to only appear as necessary in the MC's journey and is erased when said MC leaves.

Now while the characters were always well developed, SD took a more slow revealing approach to world building but all the same it was there and was strong.

The story wasn't highly unique but it was fairly so by the different story tropes it weaved together and how it did it.

Now as you may have noticed a lot of that is in the past tense, and that's the sad thing that has led to this 'closure' review.

While the grammar has not slipped much, pretty much everything else has.

The story, while still providing tibits of its direction has stopped seeming meaningful because instead of being character-driven, it started to be character-stalled. I mean this in many different ways.

The common one you will see in the newer reviews are based around the MC and his constant monologues of self-doubt, that in itself is a big blow to the story's progress but has many facets.

It's not just the character being thrown back into the same character plotlines he was supposed to have conquered, it's also the fact that due to this repeating character stumbleblock the other parts of the story have been pretty much ignored and not explored beyond the occasional side PoV or small mention.

Things are happening but they're not expanded on or explored in terms of their relevance to the overall story or even their fellow characters. Now from where I'm stopping (415), other than the war the other facets of the story seem to be playing out in a background instance that doesn't affect most of the characters in the story. This is because while the impetus for the war may be due to these happenings the war itself is more similar to just a zombie apocalypse and the 'human' side battling against it. This is made worse by the fact that the reason it had to play out like this is barely even hinted at and the characters within said situation are too busy stalling the story to question the reason for their current circumstance, so everything interesting about the story is wasted.

This stalling is even present in the style of the ficiton as the PoV's are often random now and don't serve that strong a purpose in the story because everyone is too much in their own head and don't interact properly with each other so the point of view changes don't actually serve much purpose beyond a slight exploration of present characters, therefore not contributing to the overall story or even the development of other but related characters.

Now for the characters directly. Other than the MC they're quite good though just like everything else the character quality drops as you go over a certain amount of chapters. In the early instances they were very diverse and the interactions between them enlightening even outside their PoV chapters. Now though, a lot of the newer characters that are focused on are mirror images of previous ones and even the MC with a good few fellow self-doubters. All the other characters that would bring balance have been pretty much phased out or shoved to the background. Lin for example being probably the only truly positive and happy character almost never has a PoV but is still constantly in the story and the lives of the other characters who have many PoV chapters.

Now what really saddens me about this fiction is the author, as even with all these problems if the author was more open to trying they could all be fixed, he has the writing skills for it as his earlier chapters showed.

Unfortunately it seems the author has discarded this outlook from his synopsis: "It's my first story, constructive criticism would be appreciated.". Instead, currently any criticism is returned with snark remarks or passive aggressive dismissals, with the constructive criticism seemingly being lumped in with the haters in the authors mind. That or he just doesn't care anymore.