Zenith of Sorcery

it's a 5/5 even if it's early, the quality is there.

Truthfully, Mother of Learning, the author's previous work was just too good, so good I read it three times. So as a very biased reader, I want to support the author and this new work. But clearly, with one long chapter a month, the quality of the story is the author's focus. 

Nevertheless, in a few long chapters, we read the premise of a vast and intricate fantastic Worldbuilding with Tree Magic, demons, ancient ruins, gods, dimensions, rift incursions, and many magical academies... One clear thing is that there will be a lot of faction politics/powerplay. 

Also, we are quickly given an outline of the different "quests", promising a lot of development: The character's return from exile, the teaching, political wars, and the disaster "main quest". 

Finally, we can tell that this story has more morally grey characters, complex politics, and less naivety than MOL. I don't exclude a classic evil for the main antagonist, but the different characters and plot lines are more mature and less good/evil. 

My only problem is that there are too many character names finishing in "us". 

I just wait for more!

Another banger from the author of Mother of Learning! Starts quite fast. Worldbuilding is abundant, with small hints and also good boundaries of what’s usual in the setting and what’s not. I’m very glad to read it.

I’m not good at reviews at least 50 words long, I don’t know what to add.

I like almost everything about this novel. The pace, the world building, the characters, everything about it is great. The only problem I have with this novel does not have anything to do with the story itself, but rather how slow it's coming out right now. I have to wait more than a month for a new chapter to come out and by the time it does, I already have forgotten a lot about the plot, meaning I need to reread some chapters.  If this novel has around 100 chapters like his last work and each chapter is taking more than a month to release, it could easily be longer than a decade before being completely finished. Right now, this is a great piece of fiction and I definitely recommend it, but the update schedule makes it more difficult for me to follow along with the plot. So if you want to binge, it might be a better idea to wait until more chapters are out.

I was not sure if I want to review the story so early, but given it already has as many words (75 000 words) as Harry Potter Book 1 did, and most other reviews are at chapter one (and I'm questioning if most of them even read that one chapter... seriously is this a cult like following or what?), I think it is actually fair to place it now.

I'll try to update this review in the future when more content is available.

First off... there is a lot of nostalgia I have when looking back to Mother of Learning. Either that, or this story so far is just straight up worse than that one. Don't get me wrong, I think the story is still fairly good. I've read a few books this year that were definitely worse in writing style and quality. But... I've read better as well.

Here are some things I think could be better:

The descriptions regarding Markus, and his thinking. You are trying to depict a powerful adult mage, with a lot of knowledge and wisdom when it comes to his art (of magic). But whenever it comes to anything substantial, anything more solid, you... skip over it. This is clearly in line with your previous work, and tends towards high fantasy, where the magic system isn't a strictly defined. More Harry Potter, less Mistborn. Which is fiiiine, but... in MoL, the characters kind of made up for it. Of course, a young mage doesn't know everything, so his descriptions are somewhat loose. Of course, someone in a time loop with enimies that are also looping, wouldn't go into the nitty gritty of magical theory. But it was easier as a reader to follow along with a teenager trying to be a mage than it is with an adult mage who is already an "elder", I keep thinking of him like a younger Dumbledore... And that is the issue. Dumbledore/Gandalf were characters but were also mysterious plot devices. In one case technically not even human so weren't meant for the reader to associate with directly. And I'm having the same issue here, but in this case, Gandalf IS the main character. I liked the chapters where he interacted with others, like Cricket or the King or the like... because the center of the story isn't on him, but on other more relatable characters.

And you aren't trying to make him more relatable either. You are trying to depict him LIKE a mysterious powerful (old?) mage. Like in this case with his thinking. If he wants to take on students, why does he not pick them, why does he trust this other guy to send him kids with warrior attitudes and just kinda is ok with that? Why are his "methods" of choosing his students not laid out, but we instead have to know about them through the lense of Old Pliny? So that the MC can be, once again, depicted as a mysterious and quirky wizard... It does not for a good main character make, me thinks.

The MC is a wizard, one who obviously is a workaholic. He lives for his magic. He spent years alone wondering a huge magical forest to hone his craft. So, he is obviously not a people person, which has been hinted at many times. Fine. But in that case, the main cornerstone of this character IS the magic. He lives the magic, he breathes it. So, it tends to reason we also have to delve into the nitty gritty DETAILS of said magic to have the same appreciation for it. If you make the main character a spaceship engineer, and center that as the story. You have to write a detailed engineering system for him as well. If not... well, you have to center the story away from him being a spaceship engineer, but instead him being an engineer that so happened to be doing this other thing or interacting with these other people. That way his character can "grow" away from this preconceived notion of what he was, and don't need to delve deeply into his esoteric skills/art in story.

Which is probably why I liked chapters where the MC was just a gateway to those other people, like Old Pliny the old man who decided to take care of orphans instead of being a magical researcher, or Cricket, a spunky young girl who loves to take on adventures and is not so easily put down by the tragedies that life throws at her. Or the political and social elements at his old Academy. All interesting plot lines, but well, the story feels all over the place so far. With this, and many other loose plots started, but not even slightly developed. We've got ancient civilizations, we've got magical endless forests, we've got gods meddling, prophecies, weird soul magics that the MC needs to figure out, and the mystery behind them.

Lots is going on, but I have no clue what to concentrate on. So, to summarize, the main issues:

- high fantasy magic systems are fine, but hard to do when the MC is supposed to be all about said magic, and if the magic just "works", with no hard rules, one wonder why any human being would devote himself to it, given it would be more like a dice roll than a science/skill to work towards.

- the character development of the MC is suffering due to the magic setup, mentioned above

- too many plot lines, with no clear main plot in sight, in MoL the time loop and the looper in Red was the main plot, with subplots related to it. Here? It isn't clear at all.

Scores explained:

- The style is really good, I do like Domagoj's writing style oveall. I did spent a good decade reading his work pretty much monthly (I picked up MoL back when it had less than 20 chapters, I think in 2015 or so). But the style might not fit with the story he is trying to write, not sure yet, so 0.5 less of a star because of that.

- The story is all over the place, as mentioned we are missing a central plot, and we are MANY words into the story. So far, it seems we are still in a very prologue-like part of the story but given the number of words well... 3/5 seems both not enough, and too much. The Indvidual subplots are really good, but the story as a whole is pretty uninteresting. Not completely, since the world building is definitely really good, but not really something I'd call a 5/5 in any case.

- The character score is because we have both too many characters and not enough investment in them. Honestly, even MoL suffered from this. Too many teachers, fellow mages, arachnid companions. But in MoL they felt more real, more developed. It could be that Domagoj just needs more time to develop them though, especially given the number of characters, but at this point in time I can't really recommend it if you are looking for a character driven story.

Basically I don't know how to properly review a novel who have  just a few chapter so far.

But after reading this novel, I already liking this Storytelling along with world building.
Magic system in this novel are very clear to me so far.
And i feel this novel have a great potential. 

Sorry for my bad English.*

Excellent work so far it's just as enthralling as your last work. I look forward to all the coming chapters and I believe your stories will get even better as time goes on. I love how you include other sentient creatures in your stories and I hope we get the chance to see all those creatures and species explored.

Is the story complete?: NO

Did I drop the story?: NO

Is it hard to read?: NO

Did it do something to stand out?: YES

Would I recommend it?: YES

Thoughts:

Another gem from the author that wrote Mother of Learning but now with an a improved naming sense for titles. It's a interesting take on cultivation blending it with unconventional magic systems that sets it completely apart from MoL. The author may go by the name of "nobody" but has shown that is far from the truth when it comes to their novels.

How I format my review, keep in mind they are for the readers not the authors:

- The story starts with 5 stars.

- I remove 1 star if it is not complete.

- I remove 1 star if I dropped the story.

- I remove 1 star if it's hard to read (odd word choice, grammar, etc).

- I remove 1 star if it fails to do something that stands out. (Funny, Unique premise or perspective etc)

- I remove the 1 to 1/2 if I would not recommend it to read regardless of score.

Thought: A summary of my personal take.

I loved the mother of all learning book series it hooked me from the get go and had me trapped for hours, I’m glad to see the author working on a new one and from the chapters released so far… marvelous world building  and character development. I can’t wait to see more.

I've been looking for a good, well written fantasy story for a while and found it here.

The issue though? The updates. I made the terrible mistake on not actually checking that this was completed as I was a newbie with no account when I read this.

Based on the pace, I'd say I'll be expecting a complete story in maybe 6 years. I'll have to come back to this many years later and it's kind of daunting to think about since I'm heavily invested already.

I really enjoy the story.  It is a five star story to me.  But I wish that we got to the apprentice part of the story already.  From my understanding, that's sort of the point of the novel, a master and apprentice relationship from the senior's pov.  And I really like that concept, esspecially since I really liked Zorian and Kerielle's relationship in MoL, so I'm excited to see what Nobody103 does here.  But we're like 50,000 words in and there's no sign of an apprentice in sight (that's the entire length of a normal -nonRoyalRoad- novel).  There are a few maybes, but nothing concrete.  Which I find really disappointing.  Especially since having an apprentice could help with a lot of the long world building descriptions and help with the reader discovering who Marcus is without having him put it in a fat paragraph.  But, as I said at the start of the review, I still really enjoy the story and am along for the ride.  I'll keep up on the story for the forseeable future.  Hopefully soon one (or more) of these candidates will finally join Marcus.