Street Cultivation is a modern day, westernized adaptation of the Cultivation genre. In this world, all of the Qi in the world is harvested by giant corporations and used as currency. These are used as pretty straight forward financial analogies. There's a credit score analog. Demonic bonds substitute credit cards. There's "investment" cores. All in a cutthroat capitalist world where the poor get taken advantage off.

The analogies are interesting but not subtle. Even as a giant critic of capitalist society the metaphors were so obvious that I could flinch at the unsubtle political subtext. The same applies to the style of the prose. It's utilitarian and curt. It avoids the pitfalls of overly purple prose by being overly restrained and direct. This stylistic choice is one I applaud, for it completely sets the tone shift from traditional Chinese Wuxia, filled with beautiful introspection in search for one's Dao to the "by the numbers" capitalist bastardiation depicted in this novel. Yet boring, even when poignant, is still boring.





To this point we get to the characters and the story. Here too, this story steps aside from genre conventions. In Easter fantasy, the protagonist usually has a set goal, traditionally set by a journey, and improves himself along the way. This story falls more in the usual western archetype where the villains decide the plot while the protagonists merely react and go with the flow. Personal taste plays a part here: the reason I so enjoy progression fantasy, be it cultivation or leveling systems, is that they tend towards protagonist agency. In this, Street Cultivation disappoints.

Richard, the main character, combines an overly bleak view of everything at complete odds with his rapidly improving circumstances with an incredibly dogmatic point of view. If there are too axis, where one has "sense of adventure" and the other has "rationality", Richard would fall squarely in the third quadrant (both negatives). The plot only happens because he's desperate enough that the plot is the less risky option. When a character gives him a cure to his sisters chronic illness, he never thanks her, or even mentions if it worked? Why? Because the character is a shady criminal and he wants nothing to do with them. When he meets someone willing to change the system he despises, who makes a very good offer to help him with a life threatening situation with no commitment necessary from Richard's part? He runs the fuck away and changes the plan to a dumb one. Why? Because he's fucking scared of associating with a bad "rebel". He's even stupidly afraid of making a demonic bond he can cover with just the interests of his investments if overthrown. Richard is the sort of person that would vote Biden in the primaries, because Bernie is too risky and we definitely can't have Trump.

Richard, in a way, is a product of his environment, and his failings are also an accurate depiction of some poor American people. Specifically the ones with enough of a head on their shoulders to escape the poverty line. However, these are left unaddressed and unmentioned. Honestly? I'd much rather focus on his sister. Or Emily. Or Damien. The secondary cast is well characterized and quite brilliant and engaging, which leaves me with no doubt that everything I'm describing is a conscious characterization, if a dull one.

A young woman with a life threatening chronic condition in a magic university. A magical engineer with a vendetta against a South African Warlord. A young man with an excentric persona plotting a socialist uprising. Those are characters in this story... yet we're following the 22 year old jobless average joe that was forced into a sports career because no other job would take him. He isn't even passionate about sports, he's just doing it to make ends meet.





There's no spirit. No glory. No love. Just the dull capitalist struggle up the ladder. Poignant but uninteresting.