I don’t know how I hadn’t come across this one before now. Truly an amazing twist of combining two progression fantasy genre systems.
Only thing that occasionally frustrated me was the choices of pacing made between the point of views for the initial two characters introduced and the timing of flashbacks. No real critiques otherwise. I love that when a character makes a poor choice it’s not just realistic but they also are self reflective enough to realize what happened and why, and to chastise themselves instead of successfully bulling through everything and never learning. Instead there are consequences for stubborn behavior. Very refreshing especially in this genre.