Street Cultivation is a fantastic and fun read. Focusing on Rick, a young but poor martial artist, it has everything you know and love in a Cultivation novel. There’s tournaments, self-betterment and mystical arts to master. But this is an urban telling of the story so the tournaments are underground and the mystical arts can be found at your local library. The characters are nicely realised and the plot bounces along at a steady pace. More than most it really emphasises the struggle of becoming more powerful, both through having to work on yourself and how being poor can be a hard position to get out of. Because in this world those are the same thing.

As an interesting twist on the genre this is Cultivation by way of Capitalism. You do generate a small amount of Lucrim to invest in yourself but the main way of gaining it is by working jobs and being paid it. You then invest it in your ‘portfolio’ of different abilities, some of which will start giving you small returns of Lucrim. Or you could spend Lucrim on other things, things that you might need to make it through the week. It’s a fascinating take and something I haven’t seen done elsewhere.

As good as this book is, however, I would recommend avoiding it for now if you haven’t read a Cultivation novel before. This was my first experience with the genre and I was pretty lost with how it all worked. Going back after reading other books like Will Wright’s Cradle series and Sarah Lin’s other series, The Weirkey Chronicles, I found it much easier to understand what was happening with the magic system.

If you’ve got some experience in the genre then I can say definitely check this out. It’s a lot of fun and a good read. The sequel to this book is Street Cultivation 2.