THE LUNEFABLE REVIEW
Starting Cultivation During a Trip
Starting Cultivation During a Trip: A Tourist Route into Hidden Trouble
A breakup getaway offers overpriced incense, a suspicious meditation course, and a woman whose presence only Zhang Fan seems to notice.
THE SHORT TAKE
Modern tourist comedy gives the occult mystery an engaging foothold, especially when everyday explanations fail to account for what Zhang Fan has seen.
The ticket price is easier to believe than immortality
Zhang Fan arrives at Zhenwu Mountain nursing a breakup and calculating the cost of everything around him. His friend offers sacred history; he supplies ticket prices, hotel rates, and suspicions about tourist attractions. Starting Cultivation During a Trip gets its opening energy from that mismatch, letting an apparently ordinary excursion carry both genuine beauty and the persistent possibility of being sold something.
The friendship makes the familiar wounded-graduate setup lively. Li Yishan wants to distract him, but his mixture of folklore, crude jokes, and practical enthusiasm hardly produces a solemn pilgrimage. Their banter gives the mountain a contemporary social texture before it becomes mysterious. Zhang Fan has come to stop dwelling on one vanished relationship, and promptly finds somebody else whose presence he cannot explain.
A person nobody else remembers seeing
The black-clad woman at the temple supplies the first effective disturbance. Zhang Fan notices her clearly enough to remember where she stood and how people moved around her. His friend's account differs over precisely those ordinary details. The scene works because the uncertainty enters through a shared experience that suddenly stops being shared, rather than through an immediate declaration that the supernatural world exists.
The landscape develops the same double character. Public sightseeing routes sit near neglected paths, a locked temple contains a sealed well, and a friendly Daoist insists that visitors should trust science. The reader can enjoy how obviously that reassurance invites suspicion while Zhang Fan still has reasons to doubt his own interpretation. Secrecy is folded into the management of a tourist destination rather than hidden on another continent.
A master with a sales pitch
One of the funniest encounters begins with Zhang Fan mistaking an old man's awkward posture for spiritual practice. Helping him leads to an unexpectedly sustained conversation about attention, habit, and the difficulty of doing what one already knows one ought to do. The old man's questions connect cultivation to the protagonist's immediate emotional state, so the speculative explanation has a personal point of entry.
Then the encounter swerves into a paid meditation course. A later online search produces another version of the same frustration: apparently illuminating material routes him toward the same commercial destination. The humor is not that every spiritual claim must be false. It is that Zhang Fan cannot tell whether insight and a sales funnel are mutually exclusive. His curiosity survives his embarrassment, which is a useful way to move him from sarcastic observer toward active participant.
When the mountain changes after dark
The nighttime sequences exchange bright public space for uncertain distance and perception. A place reached by hours of exhausting climbing becomes accessible in a way Zhang Fan cannot account for, and Jiang Lai's matter-of-fact responses contrast with his anxious attempts to classify her. Their interaction is appealing because she supplies neither the reassurance nor the complete explanation he keeps requesting.
The encounter with the mountain serpent then gives the hidden world scale and physical force. More effective than simply making the creature enormous is the later collision between an extraordinary experience and a completely ordinary scenic-area announcement. Public language offers one explanation for damage the reader has seen differently. That recurring contrast helps the fantasy stay attached to its modern setting, even as the institutions behind it become more elaborate.
Other visitors have another reason to be here
The arrogant hotel guests initially resemble a familiar annoyance: wealthy men who assume their reservation outranks everyone else's. Their private conversations gradually reveal a different kind of entitlement, backed by a cultivated lineage and a specific objective. Zhang Fan's changing perception makes his earlier brush with them newly dangerous. Being able to notice more does not mean knowing how to behave safely around what he notices.
The chief drawback is that explanations expand quickly. Accounts of spiritual faculties, ranks, insects, and lineage history can interrupt the suspense just as a scene is gathering pace. The friends' jokes also lean heavily on looking at women, which may tire readers before the mystery takes over. Some translated cultivation terms sound misleading or clumsy. The story is strongest when an unsettling detail, a failed assumption, or a comic reversal carries the meaning without a lecture.
A holiday with an increasingly poor exit plan
This opening should appeal to readers who like contemporary occult adventure with a conversational, irreverent protagonist. Its distinctive pleasure is watching familiar tourist infrastructure coexist with rituals and dangers that most visitors never recognize. A hotel corridor, a phone search, a warning sign, and a public announcement each acquire a second function as Zhang Fan learns to question the surface account of his trip.
The mountain’s sacred history gives the excursion a second map, one Zhang Fan can glimpse without yet knowing how to follow. The immediate attraction is a young man whose attempt to recover from an ordinary disappointment draws him into other people's much older conflicts. He is curious enough to keep investigating and inexperienced enough that curiosity has a cost. Following him promises discovery with humor, uncertainty, and increasingly little assurance that the scheduled journey home will settle anything.
Based on chapters 1–8 of the English edition. This is an opening impression, not a full-series verdict. No later plot developments are discussed.
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