Well, this is about my 3rd day of playing the game and already I'm hitting undefinable numbers, so the balance and scaling is a bit off, but that's a bit trickier to fix.
The number scaling progression is for sure too fast tho hard to say exactly how much or how to go about fixing. Am less than 5 reincarnations in and already breaking into numbers that can't be displayed, though I did so by popping a bunch of pills of the same type.
Might also be nice if there was reason to relax and spend some idle time at the highest realm, possibly in exchange for better prestige at the cost of more time spent and with diminishing returns, but it seems like the best move is to reincarnate immediately after the last breakthrough, unless you still need some stones. Though am not sure what you need them for since the gardening upgrades and such seem skippable. But yea the instant turnover makes the game somehow feel a bit more like work or something.
I don't think the qi entry cost for expedition ever prevented me from joining an expedition when I wanted to. Basically just ignored it the whole game.
The gardening is a little confusing at first, seems like could maybe plant Dao Ink Lotus to experiment with buffing pet exp even though it seems like just more overkill at this point. However, by the time I unlock Dao Ink Lotus on second to last breakthrough the gardening time is way too high to mess with and so I end up just reincarnating again. Same deal with trying to buff pills to see if can make a pill beyond divine. At this point is mostly just me exploring the system while looking for stuff to do endgame. I'm not sure why the gardening timer lengthens each breakthrough.
All that said, the visual and audio assets are really nice. Game looks and sounds very good. There's some good bones there.
Small thing but would also be cool if could rename character when reincarnating.