Novel is great, but the translation quality is absolute trash. There are alternative sites to read this on so would recommend those more than whatever this is supposed to be

Your bog-standard MMO novel, now with guns! Grammar & spelling isn't quite up to par. You can understand what the author intended to write, but intentions and what is actually written very much differ in multiple passages per chapter. Author has no sense of scale and uses numbers that are far too big or extreme when compared to logic. I coudln't find much character design in this apart from how everybody everywhere seems to react to how amazing the MC is in one way or the other. That is the role of every other character than the MC. To bring up how awesome the guy is. Everything in this novel moves far too fast, which is a common trend in these kinds of novels. A game is out for 2-3 days and suddenly half the people playing seem to know intricate details about obscure 1-off places as if they've been living there for years? It's about as bad as xianxia characters knowing events that "only happen every 1 million years" even though they're roughly 20 years old themselves.

The synopsis for some reason states something about this not being an edgelord story. It also states that the main character is bullied, doesn't rely on anyone, the MC being badass and a whole boatload of things I would definitely contribute to an edgelord story when combined. I won't even comment on the fact that the novel itself is literally titled "Hero of Darkness".

(C231) It's a very good story, looking forward to more chapters. Fun/Easy to read, has some good touches here and there, a lot of plot progression, and more importantly a lot of groundwork being done for future expansion of the story. I don't particularly care too much about the numbers/system, but so far there hasn't been too much inconsistency in the way game elements are handled. Dumb things behave like dungeon encounters while smarter enemies behave a bit more lifelike. Author is also actively patching up obvious plotholes/inconsistencies in a timely manner, and not 50 chapters into the future like a band-aid. Good work so far author, keep it up.

The best description I could give this would be a fast-food novel. It's basically just fighting continuously for several hundred chapters, with little to nothing in-between. There is not really any harem even though the novel advertises it as such - as it really wouldn't make any difference whether the characters were male or female considering the lack of meaningful dialogue. Chapters are short, events are quick and to the point and while nothing really stands out, there really aren't any aspects of the story that are unforgivably bad. It isn't exactly a good read, but it's easy on the eyes.

Update after reaching current chapter: Most of my criticism regarding the earlier chapters still holds valid, but most of them also went on the backburner the further the story progressed. A lot of the chapters after the first 100 or so are much more focused on story progression and world-building, which are precisely what this novel does best. Overall I'm very happy with the way this novel turned out. The author is doubling down on what he's good at writing and the novel has turned out great for it. +Plots +World-building +Characters

How is this piece of trash ranked as #1 on Webnovel? It's literally painful to read, no matter what age or interests you have. The only positive thing about this novel is the rate of updates. Writing quality is below average even for this site. Half-baked English with multiple spelling errors, basic language, and plenty of grammatical errors. It's slightly above a 1-star due to it being 80% coherent and identifiable as English, but that's about it. Updates are probably why this novel still lives on. The author just keeps writing, and the mindless reader just keeps reading. The chapters are short though, so really nothing special even there. The story up to the point that I've read makes no logical sense at all. The characters are as basic as they come, almost as if they were directly drafted from a character template for a B-rated anime show. The only reason I gave the World Background a 2-star rating is that I quit reading before the author even had a chance to improve on it.

It's a solid read, but it also has quite a few annoying parts to it. To define this book is to say "Kingdom builder with reincarnator from the future" There are 4 points that irk me in this novel: *There's very little dialogue and a ridiculous amount of narration. The narration is made even tougher due to the 10 line+ paragraphs that it's served in. *Many times we're reminded of the shortcomings of the middle-ages, but somehow the town smithies seem capable enough to practically mass-produce high-quality muskets, 12 pounder cannons, and even a large scale steel-piped irrigation system only a few days after being introduced to steel which was somehow produced several tons a batch using a Bessemer Process which ALSO seems to have been built in only a few days. *Building on the previous point, the main character is far too knowledgeable about "future stuffs". It's basically to the point of "Oh, a medieval problem? It's fine, I've got the perfect solution for it, and I can provide a random perfect blueprint or plan to solve it" The MC is basically an "Army engineer" who somehow knows: History and geography to a T, can create literal blueprints for cannons, muskets, rifles, an entire irrigation system, several types of textile machines, how to create "White Arsenic" and GOD KNOWS what else the guy will "remember" straight from wikipedia. It's just far too easy to cheat this way, and it sort of impacts the story and the writing quality a lot. *The amount of "foreshadowing" in the sense of "And only in the future would they know the significance of this event!" - It's literally once every chapter. It's annoying. Apart from all of that? it's solid. Characters are quite solid and their positions in society done quite well to match their personalities. The plots/schemes are well done and you can feel the MCs plans for the future building bit by bit.

This church certainly takes the word "Tithe" to a whole new level.

Well the point of it is quite understood, the problem is the multiplier and thus forced future scale. This novel won't end for a good couple thousand chapters and if we're scaling the currency into soon to be trillions at this current stage, we will end up with going from unimaginable numbers that we currently have - to numbers that a vast majority of the population including your reader base hasn't even heard of in 2-3 ordeals time. That means that you will at some point convert Aether Points into "Aether Chunks" (1B AP = 1 AC) as is usually done with spirit stones in xianxia novels. I just don't see the point of inflating numbers to the power of 10, nor the point of having a "plot convenience" tool like the instaheal - A tool which is planned to be used to put the MC in a really shitty situation and used very likely only once; which in turn will definitely empty all of his aether but be a "good choice" in hindsight. I have a problem with "things like this" due to my full understanding that it's not the "MC choices" that matter, but the way the Author will write future situations that do. The "MC choices" here didn't make any sense whatsoever considering both mathematics, uncertainties and his quite obvious inclination towards relying less on "Oracle" and more on "HImself".

Why are the aether points so ridiculously undervalued all of a sudden? For example the shop feature - Charge 200 times something + 20mil after only the second ordeal? What about the 10th ordeal? Will things cost a Google? Anyone with half a mind understands that Aether points will just become something absolutely irrelevant and probably replaced by another currency within 100 chapters. Let's just recap on that. It costs him 200 times as much to buy an item from wherever he is; and only items that cost him millions are probably useful to him at all. This means that he'll have to spend BILLIONS of points to get anything at all relevant or useful to him in any way when using the skill. Heal? 2000x the cost? The dude can already regrow his whole body, and it's gonna get much stronger as time goes on. Yet he finds it intelligent to get a "Heal" which he in no way can use as he can't even afford the treatment to begin with. The super smart guy who didn't trust the oracle just suddenly decided to get every useless and overpriced product it had to sell when he could've bought things that increased his power, diversity or knowledge. I seriously start to doubt you Author. The last ordeal was pretty bad, and the rewards etc were weak bullshit.

I really don't like where this novel is trying to go. It feels like author is starting to turn everything around the MC into the MCs enemy for absolutely NO reason. I hate this since it's the same thing as some random Young master in a xianxia novel that for no reason harrasses the MC.

I agree with your opinion for most part of the novel but the "Aren't used to reading usual books" part is.. misleading. Webnovels have a LOT more text in them than your average book does. Even fantasy epics spanning multiple volumes don't hold a candle to most webnovels, and a single story book would basically be 400 pages give or take - In other words roughly 50 chapters of this. Point i'm trying to make is that a regular book goes from start to finish including all the action and drama in less words than my guy Jake here takes to even enter the first Ordeal.

The characters! The oracle paths isn't a very unique type of story, but it certainly tries its hardest to carve a unique spot within the genre. The characters and their relationships are very impressively done. The MC doing a character a favor does not mean that the character will follow the MC, nor does a character being an annoyance at one point mean that they will be an irrelevant side character/villain. Each relevant named character has a developed personality which is not centric to something relevant to the MC. The story is reminiscent of "The New World" @ RR, characters and interactions are quite reminiscent of "Dungeon Crawler Carl" @ RR. It has some other things that remind me of a bunch of different novels but in my experience it reminds me the most of these 2, and I'm somewhat confident that the author has read both of them. There are huge problems with this novels though, and by problems I don't mean things like plotholes or grammar errors - The world being built is simply so big and comprehensive that for this story to end up satisfying and fulfilled, it will need to grow for thousands of chapters. The mere fact that it needs thousands of chapters is almost a gamebreaker in itself as it's very unlikely that either the author can keep up quality or very likely that the author will deviate to a narrower plotline/drop the novel at some point. Around c280-300 I realized that the author already has a slight problem with how to progress the plot, and the following 50 or so chapters became very stagnant and simply had a lot of pointless description baked in. 2 more nagging problems in the novel is how hard it is to compare how strong characters are without having them brawl. Due to the body//aether system and the tons of different races involved, the MC is obviously not the strongest contender, but at the same time he should pretty much be one of the strongest "unprepared" human contenders - but struggles way too much with them in comparison to his stat sheet. The second "problem" is how hard it is to evaluate "time" when the "standard time" should be a few weeks, but the standard+ordeal time is more similar to 5 months. The reader has no real understanding of how long digestors/evolvers have been "active" and whether or not any power scenario that is introduced seems reasonable or "Hmph, you took a year to gain that power? I took 3 days" and vice versa. All-in-all, it's a veeery good novel, but it's too huge to be reviewed properly, as 350 chapters is basically enough for half the system tutorial.

Is this arc over soon? It feels like for the past 50 chapters that it's just been delayed by pretty much pointless filler.

Why a god damn katana Why do they all step into this trap?

The McDonalds of Novels. I did write a few hundred words to describe it, but since basically anyone who has read this COULD write a separate novel of 1000 pages reviewing this by just listing the awfulness, logiclessness and the infinite plotholes that exist in it, I'll just summarize it quickly. It's fast-food. It's not "good", there's really nothing good about it save for how long it is and how stable the updates are. It's also extremely easy to read since you can skip entire chapters and not miss anything important at any point. The only semi-good parts of this entire story is the "power-grind" or "exploration" aspects, and I guess that's what keeps you reading. Reading legendary item descriptions and doing PvE content, solo exploring mysteries and whatnot. The problem is that these account for perhaps 5-7% of the story - The rest is just offending people and guilds and superpowers and corporations and whatever else he can find to waste huuundreds of chapters with some pointless back-and-forth that leads nowhere.

Quite bad quality of writing, completely pointless secretive narrative and truly unrealistic characters with a literally spot-on typical "common" story building. Hey, even though the words and sentences are simple and not very descriptive - There's very few misspellings!

It's got good main characters, but I think it suffers too much from the intentional "evil world" design. What I mean is that everyone everywhere are just greedy monsters who strive for power and kill millions of others for shits and giggles. Also most if not all characters somewhat relevant to the story all build their power in some way by using randoms as food for their cultivation. This creates a problem in my opinion since the "MC faction" can't really have greedy power hungry mindless villains as friends, but instead needs to find "unique" people or simply mind-control subordinates. This in turn creates a problem where everyone is mindless and the story predictable except for when the main crew does something smart. Another problem I have is the use of ridiculously excessive numbers such as billions, trillions etc. They are numbers too big for a human mind to even understand the implications of. It's common to use in Xianxia for some reason, but I find it annoying to read as the implication of "billion" becomes a "trivial" thing to the story, making it seem not special whatsoever. Using 10 thousand instead would be a number one could picture in their head and still seem very impressive. "Slaughtering a trillion people in an instant" > ...Uhh okay? "Slaughtering a city of 10 thousand people in just a few hours" > You pretty much see the bloodbath taking place. The story isn't bad though, and DPs writing quality is good, as it was in his other works.

Honestly I've no clue if this is trash or not since I've read 2 chapters, but I'm giving it 5 stars only due to 1 reason. The first bully he meets is called Tyler. A bully called Tyler is usually a monster capable of controlling hundreds of underlings and deserves a 5 star instantly.