Reviewed by Kana
Who it's for, and whether it holds up.
Er Gen has written longer and more celebrated novels, but "Renegade Immortal" may be the one that shows his range most clearly. Wang Lin begins as a completely unremarkable child, fails his sect entry exam through no dramatic fault of his own, and spends the next several hundred chapters becoming something considerably harder. The early section is slow. It is supposed to be. Those chapters are doing the work of establishing exactly what is being lost and changed, and skipping them would hollow out everything that follows.
Wang Lin is not an anti-hero in the soft sense. He is ruthless because the world of cultivation gives him no other sustainable option, and the novel earns that ruthlessness by showing the cost rather than just the power. His relationship with tragedy, both what happens to him and what he causes, gives the story emotional stakes that most xianxia cannot sustain. Er Gen also writes a world that keeps expanding in ways that feel genuinely surprising rather than formulaic.
The romance is the weakest element by a significant margin. It feels grafted on rather than organic, and the harem tag is more accurate than the emotional investment the story puts into those relationships. Readers who want that element developed will be disappointed.
At 4.1, this sits in the upper half of the genre for readers who can commit to a slow start and a morally complex protagonist. The plot is convoluted in ways that are mostly rewarding, and the writing has a texture that makes the world feel inhabited. It is not for everyone, but the people it is for tend to find it memorable.
