As expected, it became a little more generic after the initial few arcs passed, and the MC's talent was recognized by a powerful faction who started to carefully nurture him. No setbacks at all. Less focus on the VR world in recent arcs, and the MC has shouldered a tiny risk of death for the first time, but even then he can be resurrected if he doesn't let himself be captured.

The MC experiences a major setback. Of course, I'm confident he'll inevitably turn it to his advantage... It's more than simply being subjected to lowered expectations and forced to act low key, too; the entire tone of the narrative changes. It's just what the novel needed to stop feeling like the MC already had his entire life planned out.

It's difficult to rate a novel from IET with less than 200 chapters, but there are quite some differences with his other novels.

As mitre27 said, there is nothing, no enemy to put some pressure on the MC or the plot, although, as a reader you know that a new shift in the story will happen at some point.

Thus, the first 150 chapters have a very slow pace, a bit boring, especially because the fights, and there are a lot of them, do not feel exciting enough: only the values and percentage describing the cultivation levels are what make the fights different from each other, but the descriptions of the attaks feel the same.

Although adding all these numbers makes the cultivation system very detailed, the plot is very boring. "Swallowed Star" 200 first chapters were much better because there was no virtual reality part yet, and much more deadly real life situations.

Also 90% of the plot of this novel is made of tournaments, the "bane" of all chineese novels, thus several chapters are also entirely describing the fights of secondary characters... This was also an issue in Swallowed Star.

This is clearly not the best first 200 chapters among all IET novels, and while reading it, I almost wished for some Er Gen - like drama/tragedy to happen !