There's a lot of stories where the author overdoes it with the exposition, but I guess every now and then you get something like this instead, where the author forgets to drop hints on how things work even broadly. I mean, you can do that shit if you're doing a mystery type thing, or if you have a 10-chapter intro arc you've really thought out, but this reads like the author assumes you automatically know what he knows a lot of the time. Nobody likes the feeling of being left out of the loop.