A lot of Cultivation series have to start slow. The whole point of the genre is that you start at the bottom and, through hard work and perseverance, you work your way to the top, slowly getting more powerful as you do. This means that, while later on you can have a lot of characters with really cool move sets, to begin with you’re very much leaning on the world and characters to be interesting enough to keep you engaged.

Luckily in the Weirkey series the characters and world are more than strong enough but it is nice that by this book we’ve gotten to the point where the interesting techniques are beginning to show themselves.

This is a great book in the series as we get to see more of the worlds and see consequences from previous actions still chasing them. It also allows them to slow down a bit, which bring up a lot of interesting interactions and questions about how their goals relate to one another. I really do love how the characters interact around each other. It’s a nice spectrum. On one end you’ve got Fiyu, who comes from a lovely world of darkness, where people are mostly solitary and touching is reserved only for those you share great affection with. On the other there’s Nauda, who comes from a world of sunshine and community (even if her place in that world is a little mysterious), where half of communication is through touch. And in the middle there’s Theo, who is well travelled enough to know about both of their traditions but is also fundamentally a bit of a broken person who doesn’t really like anyone. It’s nice to see them having to think about how they relate to each other, how what one of them says as a joke could be taken as an insult. It’s interesting and complicated and I love it.

All in all this is another great book in the series. If you’re looking for highstakes, constant action then you won’t find it here but you will find a well crafted world and interesting people.