Beware of Chicken 2: A Xianxia Cultivation Novel

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It is a casual cultivation story where the main character, Jin, rejects his society's vision of what it means to be a cultivator and go live a quiet life on a farm with his animals. He just wants to make his own little slice of heaven in the peaceful, backwater regions of the Azure Hills with his rooster Big D, and maybe that cute sassy girl from the village. It wasn't anything spectacular, but it would keep the elements off me, and the bugs at bay, with it's thatch roof and pounded dirt floor. Jin just wants to live in peace, and that's what we get from him: someone who just wants to tend to his farm, have a good life, with friends and family. Add to that the unfitting first-person partial narration, and the fact that everyone seem to immediately idolize this guy's character even though he's just an average guy with superpowers, and what you get is a wish-fulfillment fantasy that's badly executed on all fronts.

It's noted early on that Azure Hills, the province he's settled in, is rather sparse in Qi, to the point that high level cultivators consider the area beneath their notice, so it's ambiguous whether Jin really is getting stupid strong by being in tune with nature or something, or if his place of birth is so dense in Qi that he's only strong compared to what the province has to offer, while still being a low level schmuck by the standards of the sect he just left.I wanted to figure out more and more about how the world functions and is made, which you get decent glimpses into throughout the book. I like my grimdark, my bastards, my interestingly-hateable characters, but man did I enjoy the extremely likeable, pleasant, and friendly people that populate this novel too.

We learn early that the protagonist is from our world, but few details beyond that he's familiar with Xianxia stories and feels like he is in one. Dear old Jin was essentially a servant right now anyway, and had to do every task that the other people offloaded onto him, while harboring vengeance and hate and angst. Apparently one of the bodyshots had hit poor Jin hard enough, and in just the right way to stop his heart and kill him. Instead of a lifetime of battle, my biggest concerns are building a house, the size of my harvest, and the way the girl from the nearby village glares at me when I tease her. Watching Jin Rou build a farm, slowly come to the realisation that various members of his farm were Cultivators (he got the message when they presented him with the scattered swords of the bandits that were going to attack him) and slowly woo his wife, while just ambling about unaware that he was actually pretty powerful and solving problems he wasn’t even aware of was fun but it was also a plot that was done.All the characters especially the farm spirit animals are interesting characters that develop as the story progresses with you developing feelings for them. Because as a possible side effect of his chi-based farming approach various members of his farm started awakening their powers and becoming Cultivators. And if this was enough to crush his spirit, and ask to leave… Then he was not meant to be a cultivator in the first place. I shook myself out of my introspection and tuned to the pleased clucking sounds coming from my "kitchen. Sure it's ostensibly an isekai cultivation story but unlike most of those, the focus is on the characters and what a great cast Casualfarmer has created for us.

The MC is not some weak willed stupid feminist ideology twit that seems to be popular in a lot of books now days) +1 for Strong smart male character. While masquerading as a peaceful farming story, it is still very much a power fantasy -- only an insincere one. But it had the benefit of sparking curiosity and led me to want to understand the popularity of some of these sub-subgenres that largely come from serial web fiction.A slow, simple, fulfilling life in a place where nothing exciting or out of the ordinary ever happens . A note about Xianxia: I admit I have no idea what this word/genre actually means beyond that it's a type of Chinese adventure story. Man, If I was still in the sect, I'd be doing shitty chores, or sitting in a corner cultivating for months on end, instead of actually making stuff. For any Xianxia novel I've long held a sort of knee-jerk reaction and hard to keep under control absolute sense of imminent dissapointment.