Mountain Refuge: A Slice-of-Life LitRPG Adventure

Deep, Inner Backwoods, Book 1

By: A.C. Whitney, David Sung

Narrated by: Kat Riley, Charlie West

When reclusive Ethan’s solitary winter in a mountain cabin is upended by the arrival of a wounded, mysterious elf, his world flips like a snowflake in a storm. Suddenly, he's patching up Lyra’s strange, non-human wounds while a bizarre HUD system reveals unexpected magical talents—his own and hers. Before long, his cozy refuge transforms into a chaotic sanctuary, where a protective werewolf and a healing water nymph join forces with him.

As bitter blizzards, human hunters, and ancient grudges converge, these unlikely allies must combine their divergent powers—and navigate equally unpredictable hearts—to forge a safe haven in a world that’s as harsh as it is enchanted.

Deep, Inner Backwoods explores survivalist outback hijinks.

©2025 A.C. Whitney and David Sung (P)2025 Royal Guard Publishing LLC

Fantastic book 1

Very enjoyable book. I honestly prefer when they have a language barrier so that was a plus. The girls are all attractive and great characters. My id like to see more time in the cabin with the girls relaxing. I also feel like the elf needed more time at the end. she almost felt like a side character that just facilitated the other two meeting.

This feels like a AI book.

The storyline of this book starts off well and there are really good points in this book then it takes a hard left and then it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
One how can you go from a blizzard with feet of snow to raining the weather changes made no sense.
Second in this book the MC starts a relationship off with the elf women they become more than just friends and then it’s like she is never talked about or involved with him at all like there intimacy never happened.
Also why his the MC such a weak and dumb character the bad guys or hunters in this case are literally coming to capture and torture your friends and lovers and this MC is like no we can’t kill them……….WHAT?
It’s sad to see a book with promise go so bad don’t waste your money.

Need to hit a word count?

First I'll say that the Performance is well done and the story is okay with a decent premise. The writing however, feels overly filled with needless explanation and descriptions for what could be easily summed up in a few words the majority of times. Honestly feels as though it's AI assisted writing with how needless the explanations are. I don't know if they feel the reader is to dumb to infer intent and needed to convey every thought process, feeling, and setting. Maybe they had to hit an obligatory word count and extend the book by few chapters. It started becoming very annoying if not somewhat insulting and I struggled to finish it with how frustrating I find this writing style.

A Very Inconsistent story that is Not LitRPG

Caveat: I haven't finished the book. There's about an hour and a half let which I don't even want to try finishing.

It seems like the author started to write a story and had no ending in mind and he's constantly changing it meet the unknown end. At the start there is a massive snow storm with a few feet of snow, but the MC has no trouble running out of his cabin and rescuing several mythical beings without any trouble. At some point, all of the snow must have melted and it started raining and they all were running around the mountains without any problems. After the MC rescues a beautiful elf woman, the ancient forest gifts him with a fancy new, digital heads-up display over his vision with the ability to see character stats. Which doesn't seem to mean anything, except to see improving health and compatibility and when that gets high enough, the MC and the ladies can get their groove on. The HUD isn't something the MC can't call up when he wants, it just pops up when the story thinks you need to know something.

Then there are the mythical creature hunting, hunters, known only as "the hunters". A small, nebulous group of highly trained mercenaries along with a human that can sense mythical beings. They are supposedly financed by a wealthy and vicious scientist who sometimes dissects the mythical beings in the forest and leaves the bodies to be found or sometimes they take them to a laboratory to steal their powers there. The story isn't very clear or consistent on that. Then the group of mercenaries get bigger and starts using werewolves as trackers then they morph into an even bigger group with some high tech tracking equipment. And then they morph again into a huge group with government backing and even higher tech gear with an ever-evolving ability to learn and negate the magic of the mountain's mythical beings on the fly. Yeah, it's ridiculous.

To me, the MC is unlikeable because he is so very, overly likeable. He's kind, caring, and has the ability to create a soul connecting bonds with others to the point where they will trust him with their people's most sacred knowledge, secret sources and locations of their powers. Even though he's a reclusive hermit who only speaks to one other human occasionally by radio.

There is no RPG in this book. The MC doesn't get stronger, smarter, or level anything. The only thing that can be kind of LitRPGish is his HUD, which again is only of minimum use

Inconsistent with poor decision making.

they are coming to kill us and will keep trying, but I just can't kill them...irritating and stupid, it does not give a sense of goodness...and then, let's send them after so.eine else. extremely poor story telling.