Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation

I know this story inside out. I may have read the fan translation of the book only once but I've seen The Untamed numerous times, the donghua a couple times, have been reading MDZS fanfics for around 18 months now with no signs of stopping. But when this book released, there was no question that I would buy and read it again.

I don't think I can give an objective or articulate review, so I'll just mention things that stood out. Firstly, the artwork is gorgeous. Any fan should buy this book just for those. The first thing I did after I got the book was look at all the art and admire it for a while. The references and character lists at the end of the book are also pretty good and useful for anyone coming into these books without much prior knowledge of wuxia or cultivation stories. I especially loved the humor in describing the characters in these lists - it's quite cheeky and felt like a nod to all the existing fans. The translation itself is pretty good. I like that the Chinese words for titles and some other common terms were used instead of their English counterparts. I did have some minor quips when I felt that the language used was slang but I can't comment on why that choice was made. But overall it was a good read and I'm just delighted we have an official version.

I'd rather not comment on the story or characters because even though I read this version of the book for the first time, this whole world is all muddled in my head with information across all adaptations and I can't separate out my feelings about each one of them. All I know is that this story can make me sob at the drop of a hat, wangxian are one of my all time favorite couples, and MDZS is what helped me survive some of the worst days of the pandemic in 2020 and it still continues to do so.

In the end, I don't know what to say to convince anyone to pick this up. If you haven't already but want something intense but with very flawed and human characters who are very powerful, give this a try. You can start with any version of this story, I promise you that you won't be able to resist watching and reading all of them one after the other. Even the little chibi version is an absolute delight. I'm thankful for the day I decided to watch Untamed and fell in love with this world. And I should probably thank my favorite authors Tasha Suri and Tara Sim for gushing about this epic love story on my Twitter timeline relentlessly so that I couldn't resist watching it myself. And I've never looked back since.