Let’s start with the good, I truly enjoyed the first book they took time to flesh out the world and show us the stakes and what our MC Ash is fighting for. The narration is also top notch, the only reason I kept on with the second book for so long was the narration team.
Now for the issues which are vast. This entire book was a DBZ esque filler episode. Nothing of note happens. Our MC spends the entire book complaining and saying he wants to protect his family and get stronger. But he doesn’t at all, he literally has Roq who could tell which monsters have gems to power him up and he does next to nothing with that absolutely broken ability. All Ash has to do is spend 3 hours a day hunting some trash monsters and with the ability could be level 20 in less than a month. Instead he does nothing. Then we have the issue with the power scaling, it is all over the place. Ash starts at level 10 and in the first book takes out a super powerful creature almost single handedly. This absolutely shocks the strongest adventurer in town and the guild leader them believing it to be Impossible. Then in this book he comes across another strong monster who seems to be on par with the previous one he single handedly killed, and it absolutely obliterates his entire team forcing them to run in fear of being killed. It makes no sense I could not tell you what is strong and isn’t in this story. The author wants us to think Ash is some super cheat strong adventurer at level 11 however, the author shows him getting beaten constantly by weak creatures other adventurers just simply brush off as trash. Enough of the rant this series has some great potential but the Author really needs to buckle down and flesh out the power levels and what he wants to do with the story, nearly 60 hours of Audiobooks of an MC who does nothing but complain about wanting to get stronger but doing literally everything but trying to get stronger. I would skip this series unless the author makes some large changes going forward.