Reading had always been a deeply private matter. I had always believed that "one man's delicacy may be another man's poison." Whenever friends who wanted to read asked me to recommend books, I would always use the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus's famous analogy of "fish, seawater, and people" to dodge the question. Works were like people: they had their own dispositions and appetites. Without similar levels of knowledge, life experience, and so on, books and readers might not necessarily hit it off. For a reader, the best thing was to come across a book that suited one's disposition and taste—an immensely happy thing—and then use it to pursue books through the "seeking by category," "seeking by person," "seeking by place," and the other eight methods of seeking. In this way, both one's learning and one's library would grow.
I rarely read web novels, yet I happened to have read both Mortal Cultivation and Chronicles of the Cultivating God. Of course, if the lofty friends around me in their ivory towers found out, their expressions would probably be beyond imagining. After all, the leap from Yimen Reading Notes, Guancui Pian, and Lan Yin Ji to Mortal Cultivation and Chronicles of the Cultivating God was enormous. Fortunately, Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, had also loved Sherlock Holmes and treated it as a pastime in his leisure hours. That somewhat covered the embarrassment.
There were books for the pillow, books for the toilet, and books kept at hand. Mortal Cultivation and Chronicles of the Cultivating God should have been the sort of bedside and toilet books modern people used to pass fragmented bits of time; naturally, there were many books of this type. I would not discuss the plot construction or literary techniques of these two novels here. In my view, Mortal Cultivation