mate I read everything, up to the latest chapter. The title of the novel is "Shadow Slave" for goodness sake. Also, the MC does behave very subservient when close to nephis and even when he has all the reasons in the world to hate her, he still acts pathetically, specially when he told her "Watch me" after having a fight with her and then shortly after he comes back to her and talk like nothing happened. Author did a very good job at making Nephis as unlikable of a person as possible and me and everyone knows that the MC being her slave is not going to change, the MC is going to be her dog for the rest of the novel.

Novel started out interesting but quickly became generic with a pathetic mc, which the author constantly has to remind the readers that he is a "natural killer" and "cruel" as if he is the only human in existence to go through bad times, which despite the author best efforts, the MC acts nothing like it, seriously, the MC from the first volume was infinitely more cruel, selfish, calculative and "cold-blooded killer" than the MC for the rest of the novel, after the first volume the MC lost his personality and turned into the cliche "I am selfish and cruel and a killer but I'll still save random people or do things even though there are no benefits." He literally does things he himself was mocking back at the start of the novel. A contradiction upon contradiction and it doesn't get better, believe it. Considering the author pats himself in the back by giving himself a 5 star review then it's easy to assume he lives in a bubble of positive reviews of people who treat his novel like the holy bible and ignore any negative review. The reason for saying this is because people were complaining about the nonsense at the start of the novel the moment it happened, but it was never addressed, instead the problems were just becoming worse and worse, imagine an author actually taking into account negative constructive feedback and actually working on that flaw so that the novel would improve the only things people ever complained about? yeah, wishful thinking, he doesn't. If you bothered reading and started noticing any kind of problem early on in the novel with the MC personality and how he was seemingly becoming more of a wimp and a sidekick as the story went on, I'll just say that it doesn't get any better, it'll only get worse, the MC has no character development, he started out more cold, calculative and cruel than whatever he became later on in the novel. The author has to constantly remind the reader that the MC is <insert personality trait here> because the MC actions is completely incapable of portraying it. I've been reading novels for around a decade and this one isn't too bad, it even has a unique aspect to it, but that's about it, not the worst I've read, not the best either, it could have been so much more if the author actually took into account negative feedback to improve his novel.

"Finally, author only responds to positive feedback. I.e., acts as an author completely insulated to criticism. This almost guarantees that flaws in story will continue to be unresolved for the next several hundred chapters." Considering how the author gives himself a 5 star and pats himself in the back then you're most likely right. The problem that showed up at the start of the novel and complained about by a lot of the negative reviews is never addressed.

He 100% is a slave. There's literally no denying this.