The Path of Ascension: A LitRPG Adventure
by C. Mantis
Aethon Books, 2022
The Path of Ascension is a LitRPG Adventure in which the characters live in something like a Dungeons & Dragons video game, fighting their way to riches, advanced powers, and higher levels. At this same time, this is clearly the far future, with personal AIs and interplanetary empires taking part in the story. There are some hints that this could be Our Glorious Transhumanist Future.
Matt is an orphan, his family having died when a magical rift opened in his city. As an orphan, he is raised from a young age to be a delver, someone who descends into the rifts to clear out monsters and collect their treasures. Unfortunately, when he receives his magical talent, it turns out to be basically worthless; no guild will have him, and he's too poor to set up and go adventuring on his own.
Naturally, he figures out how to make his power work for him; the book's magic and xp systems are rather more complex than necessary, but to make a long story short, he has basically no mana, but can regenerate that small bit of mana very quickly. A clever protagonist can make this work. Along the way, Matt works hard, stays on the straight and narrow path to success, and gets a truly ridiculous number of lucky breaks.
I finished this book, but I didn't love it. It has clumsy phrasing, disorganized expository lumps, and lots of repetition of key information. The world is not intuitive, both being needlessly complex at times, while at other times seeming flat, like playing a repetitive computer game. This may be on purpose, and maybe it's just referencing games that I haven’t played and so don’t seem natural to me. However, the dungeons are set up so that low-level adventurers run exactly the same scenario over and over again, which is rather unrealistic and unsatisfactory from the viewpoint of a traditional narrative. That said, I read this because it was highly rated on Goodreads and Amazon, indicating that my poor review is unusual, to say the least. I suspect that this might be a very good bit of LitRPG, but not such a good work from more traditional viewpoints.
The Path of Ascension is followed by The Path of Ascension 2; then The Path of Ascension 3. You see the pattern. The Path of Ascension 5 is expected to be released December 13, 2023.