Buryoku, Essence of Foundation

Box Set (Buryoku Collection, Book 1)

By: Aaron Oster

Narrated by: Mare Trevathan

In a world of titans, where Martial Artists reign supreme, Roy is wholly unremarkable. Without the power to channel the Essence of the world, he is weak and defenseless. Adopted into the Shah clan after his parents' deaths, he is forced to do menial labor day after day, all while enduring the ridicule and physical abuse of his supposed family.

Weakness is punishable by death in Buryoku and in the Shah clan, there is no one weaker than Roy. But even the weak can rise up, when pushed to the brink…

©2022 Aaron Oster (P)2024 Aaron Oster

This genuinely a good read but i really have an issue with book 3

It seemed to happen to the authors other books, but when the love interest is jealous or in distress they seem to blow up at the main character being completely rude an unfair, then they get over it and everything is back to normal when the main character got their feelings hurt, but they never actually apologize or feel bad for blowing up on them for no reason or the genuine hurt they caused, they act like they did nothing wrong and after a long relationship of this happening to me, i really want there to be some consequences for the love interest for hurting the mc's feeling like that, but thats really just my pet peeve, by all means this is a great series i just hate it when books do that

Not Good

My first complaint is why did you pick a female narrator for a male MC? That doesn’t make since.
Second is the MC is an actual petulant child even though he is 20. I couldn’t get past half way through the second book. Between the tantrums and the whining I couldn’t handle it.
Third is the supposed grand master power user guy. You basically force the MC to be your disciple and want him to spill his whole life story and when you hear how mistreated he was and how he seized an opportunity to improve his life you also throw a tantrum because he didn’t tell you an you feel he lied to you about his power but not 2 or 3 chapters later turns out the grand master was purposely not telling the MC how to rank up. Honestly horrible writing.
Last is the whole losing his power situation. Just because the MC is in another pity party now all of a sudden he lost connection to his power? It’s like the author was giving the MC the opposite of plot armor. Let me come up with new random issues the MC has to overcome.
All in all save your credit.

Blatant Rip-off

I have found Buryoku to be a rip off of a much more popular book in the same genre. Typically, this can be excused as the genre takes a lot of ideas from other novels in cultivation style books. However, this is a much worse version of that novel. The narrator does an okay job with a few characters, but the main narrating voice is not one that I like at all.