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1% Lifesteal #1
1% Lifesteal, Book One
An action-packed LitRPG Apocalypse perfect for fans of The Primal Hunter, Road to Mastery, and The Ten Realms.
In a world of countless enemies, Freddy's unique power will help him thrive.
Freddy Stern, a twenty-one-year-old cashier, has lived a plain, albeit harsh life. Having been orphaned—twice—he's spent the last ten years working and staying out of trouble. His only aspiration is to save enough money to become an archhuman.
His dream gets the jump on him when he barely survives a near-death encounter and finds himself in possession of 1% Lifesteal, a bizarre talent with numerous contradictions and just as many uses
With every dead enemy, he becomes a bit stronger, a little wiser, and a lot more ruthless. And no matter how much damage he takes, he can always put himself back together. Physically, at least.
But on his path to power, after having to look at the rotting guts of archhuman society again and again, can his talent keep his mind and soul as pristine as his body?
Or will that part of him simply remain broken...
Experience the start of this action-packed LitRPG Adventure from Robert Blaise set two hundred years after a reality-altering apocalypse. Featuring a weak-to-strong Brawler MC who never backs down, a unique power system, apocalyptic elements and more!
In a world of countless enemies, Freddy's unique power will help him thrive.
Freddy Stern, a twenty-one-year-old cashier, has lived a plain, albeit harsh life. Having been orphaned—twice—he's spent the last ten years working and staying out of trouble. His only aspiration is to save enough money to become an archhuman.
His dream gets the jump on him when he barely survives a near-death encounter and finds himself in possession of 1% Lifesteal, a bizarre talent with numerous contradictions and just as many uses
With every dead enemy, he becomes a bit stronger, a little wiser, and a lot more ruthless. And no matter how much damage he takes, he can always put himself back together. Physically, at least.
But on his path to power, after having to look at the rotting guts of archhuman society again and again, can his talent keep his mind and soul as pristine as his body?
Or will that part of him simply remain broken...
Experience the start of this action-packed LitRPG Adventure from Robert Blaise set two hundred years after a reality-altering apocalypse. Featuring a weak-to-strong Brawler MC who never backs down, a unique power system, apocalyptic elements and more!
604 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 18, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 372 reviews
March 19, 2025
DNf 35%
If you love a Mary sue MC who cries all the time. Has no skills. Is a push over. And is absolutely useless. Then this is the book for you! Spend your time reading about someone who is absolutely worthless and feel great about yourself because your life isn’t as pathetic as his 👍
If you love a Mary sue MC who cries all the time. Has no skills. Is a push over. And is absolutely useless. Then this is the book for you! Spend your time reading about someone who is absolutely worthless and feel great about yourself because your life isn’t as pathetic as his 👍
March 27, 2025
1% life steal? 100% boring.
I cannot being to explain how boring and dumb this was. I am genuinely surprised that it was written by R.Blaise. My major problem with the series is that every character stinks. I am talking about the main character, side character, antagonist and protagonist. For some reason, the world is populated with immature bullies and elitist. You got people with a modicum of power and they feel like they are kings. Even the non-powered people act high and mighty to anyone lower than them.
The main character, is just a loser. I don't mean he stops being a loser just because he gets his powers. I mean if he became super rich, becomes superman, and wears a magic charm to attract women like honey...he still would be a whiny baby. He walks around confused and makes poor decision. Gets angry when people take advantage of him. Doesn't realize that at the end of the day, he made his poor decision with ignorance. The world and story seems boring too.
Trust me, the series is not worth it. I can already picture the rest of the story. The character gets screwed over, gets angry, rages like an angry baby, makes dumb decisions and rages again.
I cannot being to explain how boring and dumb this was. I am genuinely surprised that it was written by R.Blaise. My major problem with the series is that every character stinks. I am talking about the main character, side character, antagonist and protagonist. For some reason, the world is populated with immature bullies and elitist. You got people with a modicum of power and they feel like they are kings. Even the non-powered people act high and mighty to anyone lower than them.
The main character, is just a loser. I don't mean he stops being a loser just because he gets his powers. I mean if he became super rich, becomes superman, and wears a magic charm to attract women like honey...he still would be a whiny baby. He walks around confused and makes poor decision. Gets angry when people take advantage of him. Doesn't realize that at the end of the day, he made his poor decision with ignorance. The world and story seems boring too.
Trust me, the series is not worth it. I can already picture the rest of the story. The character gets screwed over, gets angry, rages like an angry baby, makes dumb decisions and rages again.
Read
April 8, 2025DNF at 17%
I could not deal with the pace of this. Glaciers could outrun it.
It packs in repetitive details about how much his life sucks and is stinky and wretched and all that— and then circles around to do it again. And again.
Overwritten and underbaked. Pass.
I could not deal with the pace of this. Glaciers could outrun it.
It packs in repetitive details about how much his life sucks and is stinky and wretched and all that— and then circles around to do it again. And again.
Overwritten and underbaked. Pass.
March 26, 2025
DNF 11%
This novel reads like typical Russian LitRPG... set in a corrupt dystopia, with a rampant wealth disparity, and a down-trodden protagonist. When bullied or marginalised Freddy would come up with scathing retorts which went unsaid while he grovelled at their feet. Distasteful.
This novel reads like typical Russian LitRPG... set in a corrupt dystopia, with a rampant wealth disparity, and a down-trodden protagonist. When bullied or marginalised Freddy would come up with scathing retorts which went unsaid while he grovelled at their feet. Distasteful.
April 2, 2025
What I would have liked to have known ahead of time
About part way through the book I went and took a look at the reviews which has a rule I try to avoid as they can sometimes spoil a book. The reviews below five stars were far more accurate. My understanding is that stories are about exceptional people or about normal people an exceptional circumstance. This book is the latter. I've never read anything by this author before. I do try and take it easy on the first book of any new series. That said the beginning of this book started out like any other. A main character who has less than a stellar life with no indication that it will ever change until something happens. For me this is usually where the real story starts. Unfortunately the book continues as if that special thing didn't really have an effect. If I was to be generous I would classify the book as a Slow Burn. There is however usually some sort of satisfactory conclusion with such stories. I found the story unbelievably boring. I did actually finish the story in large part because I have greatly enjoyed the stories published by athon. That is largely the reason why I picked up the book in the first place. I am also willing to give new Authors or perhaps I should say authors that are new to me a shot because I have subscribed to Kindle unlimited. If after reaching the end I find that I like the book and the book has received the audio treatment then that is where I will buy in completely. It is very rare that I give an author less than four stars. Perhaps one of the other people who left a review is correct and the sequel will turn out better once it is released, but I have serious doubts. I thought perhaps maybe we would get something of a Count of Monte Cristo type ending where the payoff is literally at the end, but that just wasn't the case. The overall theme throughout the book tended to be one where there was very little character development. The additional characters introduced were crappy people in one way or the other. The few who seem like they might have been good people turned out to be garbage and the ones who seem like they might have been bad people never developed an ultimately became irrelevant. The language in the book was crude, and there was a particularly unpleasant torture scene for lack of a better description that was tempered only because I suspect the author felt that a full castration would be a step too far. At the end of the day I cannot recommend this to anybody.
About part way through the book I went and took a look at the reviews which has a rule I try to avoid as they can sometimes spoil a book. The reviews below five stars were far more accurate. My understanding is that stories are about exceptional people or about normal people an exceptional circumstance. This book is the latter. I've never read anything by this author before. I do try and take it easy on the first book of any new series. That said the beginning of this book started out like any other. A main character who has less than a stellar life with no indication that it will ever change until something happens. For me this is usually where the real story starts. Unfortunately the book continues as if that special thing didn't really have an effect. If I was to be generous I would classify the book as a Slow Burn. There is however usually some sort of satisfactory conclusion with such stories. I found the story unbelievably boring. I did actually finish the story in large part because I have greatly enjoyed the stories published by athon. That is largely the reason why I picked up the book in the first place. I am also willing to give new Authors or perhaps I should say authors that are new to me a shot because I have subscribed to Kindle unlimited. If after reaching the end I find that I like the book and the book has received the audio treatment then that is where I will buy in completely. It is very rare that I give an author less than four stars. Perhaps one of the other people who left a review is correct and the sequel will turn out better once it is released, but I have serious doubts. I thought perhaps maybe we would get something of a Count of Monte Cristo type ending where the payoff is literally at the end, but that just wasn't the case. The overall theme throughout the book tended to be one where there was very little character development. The additional characters introduced were crappy people in one way or the other. The few who seem like they might have been good people turned out to be garbage and the ones who seem like they might have been bad people never developed an ultimately became irrelevant. The language in the book was crude, and there was a particularly unpleasant torture scene for lack of a better description that was tempered only because I suspect the author felt that a full castration would be a step too far. At the end of the day I cannot recommend this to anybody.
April 16, 2025
DNF at 65%. The MC is unbearable. His personality is all over the place without any growth. One second he is scared and whiney, the next he is cocky and blood thirsty but at the end of the day he is a slimy, spineless turd.
May 1, 2025
Book one
I almost dropped this book early on due to just how nasty the MC is. I realize that the author was just trying to make the MC as pathetic as humanly possible, but I think he took it to far. I'm surprised that the MC could even read because he couldn't do anything else. Dirty crusty sheets, running around in nasty smelling clothes, black mold on his walls. I was surprised when he took a shower and brushed his teeth.
The other major problem I had was the constant crying by two grown ass men. Maybe it's just because I'm gen X, but men aren't supposed to cry about every little thing. Rub some dirt on it and keep getting on with whatever.
This is being written on Royalroad so if you hurry you can read more there.
5/10 As I was writing this review I wanted to drop the stars to two because of that nasty MC in the early chapters.
I almost dropped this book early on due to just how nasty the MC is. I realize that the author was just trying to make the MC as pathetic as humanly possible, but I think he took it to far. I'm surprised that the MC could even read because he couldn't do anything else. Dirty crusty sheets, running around in nasty smelling clothes, black mold on his walls. I was surprised when he took a shower and brushed his teeth.
The other major problem I had was the constant crying by two grown ass men. Maybe it's just because I'm gen X, but men aren't supposed to cry about every little thing. Rub some dirt on it and keep getting on with whatever.
This is being written on Royalroad so if you hurry you can read more there.
5/10 As I was writing this review I wanted to drop the stars to two because of that nasty MC in the early chapters.
March 27, 2025
Did not finish, only made it halfway through. So firstly, there is nothing action packed about this. It had a glacial start with a broken main character. It takes the first third before it even begins the weak to strong power creep. There is no action ever. It is all behind the scenes emotional baggage. The description does not remotely fit the actual reading experience.
September 13, 2026
So, this is a rage-inducing setup to create the perfect edge-lord. Poverty, betrayal after betrayal, hardship, torturous body-horror, and many insults after injury on a never-ending cycle, it really sets us up to root for watching our MC plow through everyone and everything.
Yep. It's a blood for a blood god kind of book.
So, of course, it's amusing to see that this 1% lifesteal ability is just an underestimated ability that everybody discounts because it IS so weak. You know, assuming that the wielder isn't punching WAY above his weight class.
And by the end of this book, guess what he's doing? Muahahahahahaha. Of course, he had to go through multiple hells to get there. But every edge lord has their origin story.
Yep. It's a blood for a blood god kind of book.
So, of course, it's amusing to see that this 1% lifesteal ability is just an underestimated ability that everybody discounts because it IS so weak. You know, assuming that the wielder isn't punching WAY above his weight class.
And by the end of this book, guess what he's doing? Muahahahahahaha. Of course, he had to go through multiple hells to get there. But every edge lord has their origin story.
March 22, 2025
Disclaimer:
Due to the nature of Goodreads’ aggregate review system, I only leave 5-star reviews. Please note that a 5-star rating does not mean the book is perfect; it simply means I enjoyed it and would recommend it to others. I will try to specify in my review the type of reader who might enjoy the book.
Negative reviews are not something I typically write.
I primarily listen to audiobooks, so I’m not concerned with punctuation or minor editing errors. However, I may comment on the quality of the narration.
Review:
This book is fantastic. I enjoyed it so much that I binged the rest on Royal Road and will continue following it for future updates. While the beginning isn’t necessarily slow, it does take some time to build up and develop the characters before diving into the main action. The latter half of the book, and the rest of the series, explores a lot of dark and heavy themes. I’d recommend this to fans of stories like Path of the Berserker. If you enjoy protagonists who are willing to take hard hits to hit back even harder, and who overcome skill gaps with sheer determination, then this story will be right up your alley. The narration is excellent, too
Due to the nature of Goodreads’ aggregate review system, I only leave 5-star reviews. Please note that a 5-star rating does not mean the book is perfect; it simply means I enjoyed it and would recommend it to others. I will try to specify in my review the type of reader who might enjoy the book.
Negative reviews are not something I typically write.
I primarily listen to audiobooks, so I’m not concerned with punctuation or minor editing errors. However, I may comment on the quality of the narration.
Review:
This book is fantastic. I enjoyed it so much that I binged the rest on Royal Road and will continue following it for future updates. While the beginning isn’t necessarily slow, it does take some time to build up and develop the characters before diving into the main action. The latter half of the book, and the rest of the series, explores a lot of dark and heavy themes. I’d recommend this to fans of stories like Path of the Berserker. If you enjoy protagonists who are willing to take hard hits to hit back even harder, and who overcome skill gaps with sheer determination, then this story will be right up your alley. The narration is excellent, too
August 8, 2025
I've had this on my radar for a while since it's one of the newer buzzworthy titles in the gamelit community. I'm happy to say the hype was warranted and I enjoyed this quite a bit.
Plot - 8/10, Characters - 8/10, Setting & Magic - 9/10, Writing - 8/10, Enjoyment - 10/10
Plot
The story follows Freddy Stern, a 21-year-old orphan spending most of his waking hours working as a cashier while trying to eke out a living in a dystopian society. A few hundred years ago, rifts leading to various parallel dimensions began appearing on Earth. Technologies stopped working because of ether exposure, but if a person was lucky when killing a rift creature, a spiritual construct called a vestige might manifest and present the opportunity to gain special abilities. These people, who become known as Arch humans, are the new elite as they grow in strength and can harvest fantastical materials from the other dimensions.
The overall plot is similar to the Rise of a Street Rat style of story mixed with a spin on the cultivation systems fused with dungeon/rift delving. It was a fun mix that worked well for me.
Characters
Our point of view character for 95% of the book is Freddy, who felt like a pretty good representation of a come-from-nothing person who's just trying to stay afloat in a society that couldn't care less about him. Something I appreciated was the fact that the author firmly grounded Freddy as someone who still clung to the idea that he could genuinely lift himself by the bootstraps and make it somewhere in the world. All too often, people living in hopeless conditions develop a day-by-day mentality and live for the moment, making impulsive and self-destructive choices. Freddy is clinging to a future that will never be, and with each passing week, the part of him privy to this fact becomes harder to ignore. But, through a twist of fate, he is at ground zero when a rift breaks and creatures flood into the streets. This kick-starts a series of events that will kindle Freddy's hopes of becoming something while exposing him to a whole new world of difficulty.
The supporting cast are varied and mostly play smaller (though important) roles, and I didn't mind that. I usually enjoy stories that stay firmly locked in a single person's perspective. Many of the characters we meet are representations of the setting and the attitudes people have while living in this world.
Setting & Magic
The setting was what you would expect from a dystopian society with the typical urban sprawl of low-income people trying to get by, with clusters of wildly affluent society living with fantastical things like self-propelled carriages and such.
The magic/cultivation is a fun hybrid that sets itself apart from other stories in the genre while incorporating familiar elements. Basically, a person can acquire a vestige, which is a little ball with a face on it that can talk and it represents a spiritual container of sorts for a magical power. The vestige, depending on its rarity, will also provide one or more affinities that determine the nature of a person's abilities (water, fire, metal, blood, etc)
Once a person decides to absorb the power of a vestige, they become a one-star Arch human with a single ether core inside them that collects essence and stores constructs that represents the abilities the person develops. Over time, with training and collecting ether and essence from defeating creatures, a person will grow their star until their power overflows and allows them to create an additional star. I'm not sure what the upper limit is, but we see a handful of four-star Arches in the story and each one is either the lord of a city or leader of a clan family.
There's also a spiritual plane that exists called the Netherecho and an Arch can spiritually project themselves into it at any point with a meditative state. While in the Netherecho, they can gather essence to refill their ether star. It's almost like a minigame because the essence might also take the form of creatures that exist only in the Netherecho. An Arch can use their projection to defeat the stronger creatures to reap more essence, or capture the creature to serve as a building block for a new ability, but there's always a chance they might run into a creature so strong they have to leave the Netherecho immediately or risk their projection being torn apart. While that wouldn't cause death, I believe it causes a degree of soul trauma that's exquisitely painful and a new projection is very difficult and time-consuming to recreate, leading to a long period of limited essence gathering.
Writing
Overall, the writing was functional and clear. I don't remember any glaring syntax or grammar issues that popped out. There were times that the writing felt a little verbose and purple, like the author was trying a little too hard for no real reason, but it either toned down over time or I simply got used to it. As far as overwriting goes in gamelit, this was far from the worst I've seen, so easily ignored.
That being said, there were some genuinely great bits here and there to show the author really put some effort into the character and world-building. I think snark is overdone in many gamelit stories and often the default mode for writers trying and failing to be funny. The author here does a great job of grounding Freddy with a certain degree of self-awareness while allowing him to flounder a bit in unfamiliar situations. So while he may justifiably be ignorant and do dumb things, he has enough sense to know when things start going sideways, as exemplified by fun lines like: It was so bad that one of the nearby girls asked her friend whether she thought he had a disability or something. He couldn’t even get mad at that, since he was beginning to ask himself the same thing.
Enjoyment
I was genuinely surprised to see the number of low ratings for this. Everyone's entitled to their perspective and I've definitely been on the opposite side of the fence for certain books as well. So I guess I would advise prospective readers to keep in mind that this isn't your standard OP MC crushing everybody story. The character makes bad decisions often, due to his lack of experience and knowledge, which to me was expected and justified given his background.
I'll be the first to say that realism doesn't always make for a fun story, but this one worked for me. And the ending went bonkers. I've already grabbed Book 2 and can't wait to see where this series goes next.
Plot - 8/10, Characters - 8/10, Setting & Magic - 9/10, Writing - 8/10, Enjoyment - 10/10
Plot
The story follows Freddy Stern, a 21-year-old orphan spending most of his waking hours working as a cashier while trying to eke out a living in a dystopian society. A few hundred years ago, rifts leading to various parallel dimensions began appearing on Earth. Technologies stopped working because of ether exposure, but if a person was lucky when killing a rift creature, a spiritual construct called a vestige might manifest and present the opportunity to gain special abilities. These people, who become known as Arch humans, are the new elite as they grow in strength and can harvest fantastical materials from the other dimensions.
The overall plot is similar to the Rise of a Street Rat style of story mixed with a spin on the cultivation systems fused with dungeon/rift delving. It was a fun mix that worked well for me.
Characters
Our point of view character for 95% of the book is Freddy, who felt like a pretty good representation of a come-from-nothing person who's just trying to stay afloat in a society that couldn't care less about him. Something I appreciated was the fact that the author firmly grounded Freddy as someone who still clung to the idea that he could genuinely lift himself by the bootstraps and make it somewhere in the world. All too often, people living in hopeless conditions develop a day-by-day mentality and live for the moment, making impulsive and self-destructive choices. Freddy is clinging to a future that will never be, and with each passing week, the part of him privy to this fact becomes harder to ignore. But, through a twist of fate, he is at ground zero when a rift breaks and creatures flood into the streets. This kick-starts a series of events that will kindle Freddy's hopes of becoming something while exposing him to a whole new world of difficulty.
The supporting cast are varied and mostly play smaller (though important) roles, and I didn't mind that. I usually enjoy stories that stay firmly locked in a single person's perspective. Many of the characters we meet are representations of the setting and the attitudes people have while living in this world.
Setting & Magic
The setting was what you would expect from a dystopian society with the typical urban sprawl of low-income people trying to get by, with clusters of wildly affluent society living with fantastical things like self-propelled carriages and such.
The magic/cultivation is a fun hybrid that sets itself apart from other stories in the genre while incorporating familiar elements. Basically, a person can acquire a vestige, which is a little ball with a face on it that can talk and it represents a spiritual container of sorts for a magical power. The vestige, depending on its rarity, will also provide one or more affinities that determine the nature of a person's abilities (water, fire, metal, blood, etc)
Once a person decides to absorb the power of a vestige, they become a one-star Arch human with a single ether core inside them that collects essence and stores constructs that represents the abilities the person develops. Over time, with training and collecting ether and essence from defeating creatures, a person will grow their star until their power overflows and allows them to create an additional star. I'm not sure what the upper limit is, but we see a handful of four-star Arches in the story and each one is either the lord of a city or leader of a clan family.
There's also a spiritual plane that exists called the Netherecho and an Arch can spiritually project themselves into it at any point with a meditative state. While in the Netherecho, they can gather essence to refill their ether star. It's almost like a minigame because the essence might also take the form of creatures that exist only in the Netherecho. An Arch can use their projection to defeat the stronger creatures to reap more essence, or capture the creature to serve as a building block for a new ability, but there's always a chance they might run into a creature so strong they have to leave the Netherecho immediately or risk their projection being torn apart. While that wouldn't cause death, I believe it causes a degree of soul trauma that's exquisitely painful and a new projection is very difficult and time-consuming to recreate, leading to a long period of limited essence gathering.
Writing
Overall, the writing was functional and clear. I don't remember any glaring syntax or grammar issues that popped out. There were times that the writing felt a little verbose and purple, like the author was trying a little too hard for no real reason, but it either toned down over time or I simply got used to it. As far as overwriting goes in gamelit, this was far from the worst I've seen, so easily ignored.
That being said, there were some genuinely great bits here and there to show the author really put some effort into the character and world-building. I think snark is overdone in many gamelit stories and often the default mode for writers trying and failing to be funny. The author here does a great job of grounding Freddy with a certain degree of self-awareness while allowing him to flounder a bit in unfamiliar situations. So while he may justifiably be ignorant and do dumb things, he has enough sense to know when things start going sideways, as exemplified by fun lines like: It was so bad that one of the nearby girls asked her friend whether she thought he had a disability or something. He couldn’t even get mad at that, since he was beginning to ask himself the same thing.
Enjoyment
I was genuinely surprised to see the number of low ratings for this. Everyone's entitled to their perspective and I've definitely been on the opposite side of the fence for certain books as well. So I guess I would advise prospective readers to keep in mind that this isn't your standard OP MC crushing everybody story. The character makes bad decisions often, due to his lack of experience and knowledge, which to me was expected and justified given his background.
I'll be the first to say that realism doesn't always make for a fun story, but this one worked for me. And the ending went bonkers. I've already grabbed Book 2 and can't wait to see where this series goes next.
June 2, 2025
Overrated grimdark fantasy.
The protagonist never has any agency over the plot. Literally: 0%. He's like a fish being carried away by another fish, only for the fish to be caught by a bird, who is then eaten by a bigger bird and so on. The fish somehow survives the ordeal, because he can instantly heal when the plot demands it, but at no point does he have any semblance of an impact on what's going to happen to him.
Add to that the senseless torture scenes and the completely missing payoff? Yeah, it's rough.
Basically, it's complete misery porn. The protagonist fails at everything, the world hates him, literally everybody betrays him at some point and he never, ever gets revenge for any of it. Even the ending is just kind of... lame? Usually he doesn't even know what's happening in the background: it's all spoiled to the reader in these constant, nonsensical foreshadowing-scenes where we get to see the "plot" developing from the perspective of one of the many, many, many antagonists. There, they plot how they will betray and kill the unwitting protagonist, who never ever figures out what's happening.
In general: the protagonist is just kind of dumb and goes along with whatever people throw at him. At every turn he makes the most obviously nonsensical choice he could. His decision making skills are that of a 14-year-old. Calling him "unlikable" would be a massive understatement. I get that he's supposedly been burned by everybody (I mean, it keeps happening, so I get it), but making your protagonist an edgy teenager who lacks even basic human decency, is just not a great decision IMO.
The side characters are, without fail, assholes. Every last one. There genuinely isn't a single character that is in any way redeemable. I get that this is supposed to be grimdark (I hope it was supposed to be that, because it most definitely is), but the author just kind of overdid it. I have no interest in reading about any of the myriad of asshole side characters introduced in the book, because every last one of them is garbage.
It's a seriously depressing read. Not just the torture, murder and betrayal, but mostly the lacking agency of the protagonist and his glacial advance that is constantly reset again by circumstances beyond his control. I could live with all the other flaws, but the protagonist not having any impact on the plot is just... lame.
The plot is basically arbitrary. Anything can happen at any point for no reason whatsoever. The entire plot of the protagonist being hunted is nonsensical to begin with, but it's literally all the plot that fuels the story. There's nothing more to it...
I'm seriously disappointed, because it started so well.
The protagonist never has any agency over the plot. Literally: 0%. He's like a fish being carried away by another fish, only for the fish to be caught by a bird, who is then eaten by a bigger bird and so on. The fish somehow survives the ordeal, because he can instantly heal when the plot demands it, but at no point does he have any semblance of an impact on what's going to happen to him.
Add to that the senseless torture scenes and the completely missing payoff? Yeah, it's rough.
Basically, it's complete misery porn. The protagonist fails at everything, the world hates him, literally everybody betrays him at some point and he never, ever gets revenge for any of it. Even the ending is just kind of... lame? Usually he doesn't even know what's happening in the background: it's all spoiled to the reader in these constant, nonsensical foreshadowing-scenes where we get to see the "plot" developing from the perspective of one of the many, many, many antagonists. There, they plot how they will betray and kill the unwitting protagonist, who never ever figures out what's happening.
In general: the protagonist is just kind of dumb and goes along with whatever people throw at him. At every turn he makes the most obviously nonsensical choice he could. His decision making skills are that of a 14-year-old. Calling him "unlikable" would be a massive understatement. I get that he's supposedly been burned by everybody (I mean, it keeps happening, so I get it), but making your protagonist an edgy teenager who lacks even basic human decency, is just not a great decision IMO.
The side characters are, without fail, assholes. Every last one. There genuinely isn't a single character that is in any way redeemable. I get that this is supposed to be grimdark (I hope it was supposed to be that, because it most definitely is), but the author just kind of overdid it. I have no interest in reading about any of the myriad of asshole side characters introduced in the book, because every last one of them is garbage.
It's a seriously depressing read. Not just the torture, murder and betrayal, but mostly the lacking agency of the protagonist and his glacial advance that is constantly reset again by circumstances beyond his control. I could live with all the other flaws, but the protagonist not having any impact on the plot is just... lame.
The plot is basically arbitrary. Anything can happen at any point for no reason whatsoever. The entire plot of the protagonist being hunted is nonsensical to begin with, but it's literally all the plot that fuels the story. There's nothing more to it...
I'm seriously disappointed, because it started so well.
December 19, 2025
Going into this book, I was genuinely hyped for several reasons. One of my friends had been trying to get me to read this series for a long time after he read it on RoyalRoad and said it became one of his favourites. At the time I passed on it because there was no audiobook available and I only listen to audiobooks. Later on, when I was asking for recommendations again, he told me the audiobook was finally out and that I should give it a try. That was when I hesitated. I have issues with Daniel Wisniewski’s narration style. For some reason, every protagonist he narrates ends up sounding the same to me. Whiny, arrogant, self absorbed, and generally insufferable. Because of that, I almost skipped this book entirely. What finally tipped the scales for me to give it a fair shot was seeing that it landed in Audible’s top 10 fantasy series of the year. That raised my expectations quite a bit.
Too bad that did not last long.
This review will contain spoilers.
The first 8 hours of this book were glacial in both pace and tone. Freddie is extremely unlikable early on, and that is putting it lightly. After the passage event, I could mostly understand the trauma and excitement surrounding it. That part worked well enough. But once we got to the vestige selling section, it turned into a masterclass in dumbassery from almost every character involved.
I can somewhat excuse Freddie here because he is in shock and clearly a fish out of water, but everyone else involved is either outright evil or just a miserable asshole. Well maybe not evil in the strictest sense, but absolutely unpleasant. The two men we are introduced to during the trading house section were especially awful.
I mean, come on. Freddie is being taken for a complete fool. The guy outright tells him he is a fool. He throws way more items at him than Freddie ever expected. The moment Freddie tries to walk away, the man panics and nearly shits himself. And somehow none of these massive red flags clue Freddie in that something is very wrong. It is honestly baffling.
Then we get to the Madam Home arc, which also doubles as a pseudo training arc. If the story was barely moving before, now it feels like it completely stalls. We finally get a training arc and it mostly turns into a gym routine. That was incredibly disappointing. The only genuinely interesting thing to come out of this entire section is the revelation that Freddie’s talent works on plants. That is it.
Madam is unlikable. Marc is just an objectively terrible person. At this point, it really feels like the author only knows how to write asshole characters. I will say that Marc briefly felt more than one dimensional when it became clear he was dealing with something like PTSD. Those moments almost made him interesting. Then he gets scratched by some death attuned creature and immediately turns into just another asshole again. Later, when we learn what he did to secure his sister’s education, I felt completely vindicated in my initial dislike of him.
Then we enter the torture and prison section. By this point, well over ten hours of book time have passed, and only three meaningful things have happened. The rift break. Getting a vestige/remnant. Training at Madam’s house. That is it.
If you thought the story was slow before, this is where it completely nosedives. It feels like the narrative actively decides to move backwards. We get six months of torture followed immediately by being thrown into an “inescapable” prison. What is the actual plot here. How long am I supposed to sit through the suffering of an insufferable brat with no agency.
Since when did books casually start throwing in torture porn like this. Nothing is happening. The protagonist is constantly being taken advantage of, trapped by people with dubious motives, stripped of agency, tortured, imprisoned, and made powerless over and over again. That is not a story. That is stagnation.
The prison arc is clearly meant to be a comeback or rebirth moment for Freddie, but instead we watch him transform from a clueless and naïve arch-human into an arrogant jackass arch-human. That is the character development. One extreme straight into another.
Quick rant.
I hate when authors expect you to like their story when the protagonist has nothing about them that is likable. The protagonist’s job is to move the story forward, and whether or not a story works often depends entirely on who that protagonist is. In this book, why would I like anything about the story when Freddie has absolutely no redeeming qualities. He is naïve, oblivious, stupid, whiny, arrogant, self absorbed, and deeply unlikable. The one friend he manages to make turns out to be a terrible person. Every other character introduced is also an asshole. The only character I found remotely likable, Bloodshed, is missing for about 98% of the book. So here is the question. Why would you write a protagonist with no redeeming traits, surround him with awful people, and expect readers to enjoy the story.
The ending is the only part I genuinely liked. For the first time, something actually happens. The fight with the Blood Patriarch was cool, bordering on great. The payoff with Freddie’s power was decent. But by the time I finished the book, I did not care.
I did not care that the main character got a massive power up. I did not care about his future. The only thing I wanted to learn more about was the power structure itself, which is actually a unique and interesting take on LitRPG progression. Everything else failed to hook me.
The world is intriguing, but it means nothing to the protagonist. The characters are almost universally uninteresting and unappealing unless you enjoy assholes. And Freddie himself is the single biggest problem in the entire book. He is the reason I have so many issues with this story.
This book has an interesting world and a unique power system that could have been worth investing time into. Unfortunately, everything surrounding those ideas is deeply unappealing.
What a terrible shame.
Too bad that did not last long.
This review will contain spoilers.
The first 8 hours of this book were glacial in both pace and tone. Freddie is extremely unlikable early on, and that is putting it lightly. After the passage event, I could mostly understand the trauma and excitement surrounding it. That part worked well enough. But once we got to the vestige selling section, it turned into a masterclass in dumbassery from almost every character involved.
I can somewhat excuse Freddie here because he is in shock and clearly a fish out of water, but everyone else involved is either outright evil or just a miserable asshole. Well maybe not evil in the strictest sense, but absolutely unpleasant. The two men we are introduced to during the trading house section were especially awful.
I mean, come on. Freddie is being taken for a complete fool. The guy outright tells him he is a fool. He throws way more items at him than Freddie ever expected. The moment Freddie tries to walk away, the man panics and nearly shits himself. And somehow none of these massive red flags clue Freddie in that something is very wrong. It is honestly baffling.
Then we get to the Madam Home arc, which also doubles as a pseudo training arc. If the story was barely moving before, now it feels like it completely stalls. We finally get a training arc and it mostly turns into a gym routine. That was incredibly disappointing. The only genuinely interesting thing to come out of this entire section is the revelation that Freddie’s talent works on plants. That is it.
Madam is unlikable. Marc is just an objectively terrible person. At this point, it really feels like the author only knows how to write asshole characters. I will say that Marc briefly felt more than one dimensional when it became clear he was dealing with something like PTSD. Those moments almost made him interesting. Then he gets scratched by some death attuned creature and immediately turns into just another asshole again. Later, when we learn what he did to secure his sister’s education, I felt completely vindicated in my initial dislike of him.
Then we enter the torture and prison section. By this point, well over ten hours of book time have passed, and only three meaningful things have happened. The rift break. Getting a vestige/remnant. Training at Madam’s house. That is it.
If you thought the story was slow before, this is where it completely nosedives. It feels like the narrative actively decides to move backwards. We get six months of torture followed immediately by being thrown into an “inescapable” prison. What is the actual plot here. How long am I supposed to sit through the suffering of an insufferable brat with no agency.
Since when did books casually start throwing in torture porn like this. Nothing is happening. The protagonist is constantly being taken advantage of, trapped by people with dubious motives, stripped of agency, tortured, imprisoned, and made powerless over and over again. That is not a story. That is stagnation.
The prison arc is clearly meant to be a comeback or rebirth moment for Freddie, but instead we watch him transform from a clueless and naïve arch-human into an arrogant jackass arch-human. That is the character development. One extreme straight into another.
Quick rant.
I hate when authors expect you to like their story when the protagonist has nothing about them that is likable. The protagonist’s job is to move the story forward, and whether or not a story works often depends entirely on who that protagonist is. In this book, why would I like anything about the story when Freddie has absolutely no redeeming qualities. He is naïve, oblivious, stupid, whiny, arrogant, self absorbed, and deeply unlikable. The one friend he manages to make turns out to be a terrible person. Every other character introduced is also an asshole. The only character I found remotely likable, Bloodshed, is missing for about 98% of the book. So here is the question. Why would you write a protagonist with no redeeming traits, surround him with awful people, and expect readers to enjoy the story.
The ending is the only part I genuinely liked. For the first time, something actually happens. The fight with the Blood Patriarch was cool, bordering on great. The payoff with Freddie’s power was decent. But by the time I finished the book, I did not care.
I did not care that the main character got a massive power up. I did not care about his future. The only thing I wanted to learn more about was the power structure itself, which is actually a unique and interesting take on LitRPG progression. Everything else failed to hook me.
The world is intriguing, but it means nothing to the protagonist. The characters are almost universally uninteresting and unappealing unless you enjoy assholes. And Freddie himself is the single biggest problem in the entire book. He is the reason I have so many issues with this story.
This book has an interesting world and a unique power system that could have been worth investing time into. Unfortunately, everything surrounding those ideas is deeply unappealing.
What a terrible shame.
March 25, 2025
Too mean spirited. Too bleak.
I got tired waiting for the main character to turn his life around. He said things to his friends that were undeserved, and he was a slob in the beginning. It made me lose patience.
I got tired waiting for the main character to turn his life around. He said things to his friends that were undeserved, and he was a slob in the beginning. It made me lose patience.
March 18, 2025
amazing!!!
one of the best stories ive read!!! truly amazing piece of work, enjoid the storyline, characters and the writing is pure gold
one of the best stories ive read!!! truly amazing piece of work, enjoid the storyline, characters and the writing is pure gold
May 11, 2025
Pesimo libro, no hay logica en lo que plantea el autor. El MC es de lo peor que he encontrado en mi vida. No vale la pena leer este libro.
September 18, 2026
The protagonist spends most of the book in such hopeless circumstances that the progression feels pointless. Freddy, I don’t care that you’re 55% of the way to level 2, please get back to me once you’ve escaped from the torture prison
Then the climax heavily relies on me being emotionally attached to Bloodshed. Which I’m not because Freddy spent the entire book referring Bloodshed to as an ‘it’ and treating it as a slave. If this thing is sentient, I am retroactively very concerned about Freddy confining it to a plastic bag for half the book
Then the climax heavily relies on me being emotionally attached to Bloodshed. Which I’m not because Freddy spent the entire book referring Bloodshed to as an ‘it’ and treating it as a slave. If this thing is sentient, I am retroactively very concerned about Freddy confining it to a plastic bag for half the book
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 25, 2025
This book had potential. The main character was great. The overall story/plot was great. Some of the scenes were even great. The problem is that the storyline did not follow a path, and was all over the place instead.
We had Freddy in the slums. This part of the story was interesting and compelling. Then the story diverted to Freddy as a participant on a talk show. This part of the story, although an odd divergence from the plot, was still interesting. Then there is a long prison and torture section of the book. Then story diverges again, and now we are on a mining colony. WTF? I'm not even sure what happened to the talk show part of this book. Maybe I missed it, but we jumped from the talk show section to the torture section to the mining colony, and I'm not even sure what happened to the talk show host. Maybe she was killed or bought off, but I missed it.
Overall, Freddy has this amazing, bad-ass remnant (Bloodshed) that the entire world is after, and yet Bloodshed is absent from this novel for virtually the entirety of this book. Imagine learning that the MC has $100M dollars, but yet the MC is begging for food the entire book, rather than spending some of the money. We keep hearing about Bloodshed and how rare and amazing Bloodshed is; yet, Bloodshed is kept locked in a closet despite Freddy desperately needing help.
I feel like this had the makings of a good story, but it's utter lack of direction killed the novel. Alternatively, the author intends this to be a 17 book plotline, which is entirely too much for me.
We had Freddy in the slums. This part of the story was interesting and compelling. Then the story diverted to Freddy as a participant on a talk show. This part of the story, although an odd divergence from the plot, was still interesting. Then there is a long prison and torture section of the book. Then story diverges again, and now we are on a mining colony. WTF? I'm not even sure what happened to the talk show part of this book. Maybe I missed it, but we jumped from the talk show section to the torture section to the mining colony, and I'm not even sure what happened to the talk show host. Maybe she was killed or bought off, but I missed it.
Overall, Freddy has this amazing, bad-ass remnant (Bloodshed) that the entire world is after, and yet Bloodshed is absent from this novel for virtually the entirety of this book. Imagine learning that the MC has $100M dollars, but yet the MC is begging for food the entire book, rather than spending some of the money. We keep hearing about Bloodshed and how rare and amazing Bloodshed is; yet, Bloodshed is kept locked in a closet despite Freddy desperately needing help.
I feel like this had the makings of a good story, but it's utter lack of direction killed the novel. Alternatively, the author intends this to be a 17 book plotline, which is entirely too much for me.
October 26, 2026
Audiobook:
Daniel Wisniewski does a wonderful job with this story. His reading is clear and expressive, and he manages to introduce a genuine emotional dynamic when the material calls for it. There is an argument that this occasionally tips into the overdramatic, but I am willing to forgive the excesses of certain scenes, particularly when the story itself moves so freely between extreme registers of emotion. Wisniewski also creates characters who feel distinctive in tone and timbre, each carrying their own particular weight rather than bleeding into one another. This is an impressive performance and a clear indicator of his potential as a voice actor. More than that, he does precisely what any author should want from the medium: he elevates the material he is given.
Book:
Robert Blaise delivers an admirable first LitRPG novel, producing an engaging story that does not trivialise the brutality of the world it inhabits, and he deserves credit for that achievement. The bones of the novel, however, do not yet feel firmly enough in place. The world remains underexplored, the magic system feels simplistic in its execution, and the protagonist has not yet developed a sufficiently consistent value system to anchor his development. Coupled with a noticeable shift in pacing during the second half, these are the gaps that prevent a novel with genuine promise from becoming something more.
Set two hundred years after a reality-altering apocalypse, this is the story of humanity acquiring extraordinary powers through the manifestation of vestiges, each carrying a set of attributes that enable a wide range of abilities developed further through skills attuned to a person's latent potential. A star-based system ultimately measures the user's strength, which is where the first significant difficulty emerges. The star system undermines the sense of mystery the world might otherwise cultivate, gamifying what feels in its better moments like a softer and more unusual magic system and reducing it to something more familiar. This becomes something of a recurring pattern throughout the novel. Blaise engages meaningfully with the more uncomfortable concepts of wretchedness, brutality and the everyday struggle to survive, only to pivot back towards the more commonplace conventions of the genre just as those elements begin to distinguish the story from its peers. The result is a noticeable fracture in the novel's pacing between the first and second halves, as though Blaise is reasserting his LitRPG credentials at the precise moment the story had started to set itself apart. What begins as a relatively consistent developmental arc gives way to a leviathan-slaying sequence that feels less like a natural culmination of what preceded it and more like a retreat towards familiar ground.
Freddy himself is an uneducated and thoroughly wretched creature, and Blaise does a commendable job of leaning into his flaws rather than softening them. He occasionally seems to forget that Freddy is supposed to have received very little formal education, but these are minor inconsistencies rather than fundamental failures. His transformation from the poor, ugly and downtrodden figure of the opening chapters is admittedly swift, though this can largely be accommodated when set alongside his rapid physiological changes. This is not a traditional hero but a man who has drawn the short straw for most of his life and continues to suffer even when he catches a glimpse of something better, and there is something genuinely engaging about watching someone so thoroughly disadvantaged attempt to carve out a place for himself in a world that offers him very little reason to believe he deserves one. The reservation is that this promising foundation has not yet developed into a sufficiently consistent set of values to guide him. Freddy's flaws are interesting, but the novel needs to do considerably more with them if his development is to carry the weight the story intends for it.
The world itself requires considerably more explanation than this first instalment provides. The other planes and the various routes leading into the Great Labyrinth are gestured at rather than illuminated, and these are not incidental details. They appear fundamental to understanding the forces shaping the world Freddy inhabits, and their absence is felt. The next novel will need to address this gap with some urgency. Blaise hints in the final section that there is more to the world than has been revealed, but this arrives so late and with so little preparation that it raises more questions about what assumptions the reader was meant to be making all along. I had understood that humanity had established footholds on these other planes, pushing back into the wild and cultivating new territories as they emerged into the human world. If that is not the case, the novel has done insufficient work to clarify the distinction, and a last-minute gesture towards hidden depth is not adequate compensation for the worldbuilding that should have preceded it.
Blaise needs to commit to the tone that makes this story distinctive, because the passages in which he resists the pull of genre convention are genuinely engaging. The brutality, the wretchedness of ordinary life, and Freddy's precarious position within it offer something more interesting than a straightforward progression fantasy, yet these elements are not developed with enough consistency to realise their potential. The side characters are largely incidental to my experience of the novel, and I will not dwell on them here, but they are symptomatic of the broader problem: there is potential throughout, weighed down by many of the same shortcomings that plague the genre. Wisniewski's performance, however, brings a real professionalism to the audiobook that elevates the material considerably, and it is in no small part thanks to him that the novel earns the regard in which I hold it.
Daniel Wisniewski does a wonderful job with this story. His reading is clear and expressive, and he manages to introduce a genuine emotional dynamic when the material calls for it. There is an argument that this occasionally tips into the overdramatic, but I am willing to forgive the excesses of certain scenes, particularly when the story itself moves so freely between extreme registers of emotion. Wisniewski also creates characters who feel distinctive in tone and timbre, each carrying their own particular weight rather than bleeding into one another. This is an impressive performance and a clear indicator of his potential as a voice actor. More than that, he does precisely what any author should want from the medium: he elevates the material he is given.
Book:
Robert Blaise delivers an admirable first LitRPG novel, producing an engaging story that does not trivialise the brutality of the world it inhabits, and he deserves credit for that achievement. The bones of the novel, however, do not yet feel firmly enough in place. The world remains underexplored, the magic system feels simplistic in its execution, and the protagonist has not yet developed a sufficiently consistent value system to anchor his development. Coupled with a noticeable shift in pacing during the second half, these are the gaps that prevent a novel with genuine promise from becoming something more.
Set two hundred years after a reality-altering apocalypse, this is the story of humanity acquiring extraordinary powers through the manifestation of vestiges, each carrying a set of attributes that enable a wide range of abilities developed further through skills attuned to a person's latent potential. A star-based system ultimately measures the user's strength, which is where the first significant difficulty emerges. The star system undermines the sense of mystery the world might otherwise cultivate, gamifying what feels in its better moments like a softer and more unusual magic system and reducing it to something more familiar. This becomes something of a recurring pattern throughout the novel. Blaise engages meaningfully with the more uncomfortable concepts of wretchedness, brutality and the everyday struggle to survive, only to pivot back towards the more commonplace conventions of the genre just as those elements begin to distinguish the story from its peers. The result is a noticeable fracture in the novel's pacing between the first and second halves, as though Blaise is reasserting his LitRPG credentials at the precise moment the story had started to set itself apart. What begins as a relatively consistent developmental arc gives way to a leviathan-slaying sequence that feels less like a natural culmination of what preceded it and more like a retreat towards familiar ground.
Freddy himself is an uneducated and thoroughly wretched creature, and Blaise does a commendable job of leaning into his flaws rather than softening them. He occasionally seems to forget that Freddy is supposed to have received very little formal education, but these are minor inconsistencies rather than fundamental failures. His transformation from the poor, ugly and downtrodden figure of the opening chapters is admittedly swift, though this can largely be accommodated when set alongside his rapid physiological changes. This is not a traditional hero but a man who has drawn the short straw for most of his life and continues to suffer even when he catches a glimpse of something better, and there is something genuinely engaging about watching someone so thoroughly disadvantaged attempt to carve out a place for himself in a world that offers him very little reason to believe he deserves one. The reservation is that this promising foundation has not yet developed into a sufficiently consistent set of values to guide him. Freddy's flaws are interesting, but the novel needs to do considerably more with them if his development is to carry the weight the story intends for it.
The world itself requires considerably more explanation than this first instalment provides. The other planes and the various routes leading into the Great Labyrinth are gestured at rather than illuminated, and these are not incidental details. They appear fundamental to understanding the forces shaping the world Freddy inhabits, and their absence is felt. The next novel will need to address this gap with some urgency. Blaise hints in the final section that there is more to the world than has been revealed, but this arrives so late and with so little preparation that it raises more questions about what assumptions the reader was meant to be making all along. I had understood that humanity had established footholds on these other planes, pushing back into the wild and cultivating new territories as they emerged into the human world. If that is not the case, the novel has done insufficient work to clarify the distinction, and a last-minute gesture towards hidden depth is not adequate compensation for the worldbuilding that should have preceded it.
Blaise needs to commit to the tone that makes this story distinctive, because the passages in which he resists the pull of genre convention are genuinely engaging. The brutality, the wretchedness of ordinary life, and Freddy's precarious position within it offer something more interesting than a straightforward progression fantasy, yet these elements are not developed with enough consistency to realise their potential. The side characters are largely incidental to my experience of the novel, and I will not dwell on them here, but they are symptomatic of the broader problem: there is potential throughout, weighed down by many of the same shortcomings that plague the genre. Wisniewski's performance, however, brings a real professionalism to the audiobook that elevates the material considerably, and it is in no small part thanks to him that the novel earns the regard in which I hold it.
April 6, 2025
Can’t wait for book 2
Amazing first time read for new litRPG beginners I recommend if you’re looking for an interesting book with an underdog
Amazing first time read for new litRPG beginners I recommend if you’re looking for an interesting book with an underdog
October 28, 2026
I came into the book expecting the usual OP character tropes. Even so, the story took a couple of turns I didn't expect. The magic system isn't overly complex, but it's interesting. It was kind of cool to see how a power that might seem weak could end up being strong. I enjoyed the book enough that I feel like diving into the second one.
On a side note, and maybe some slight spoilers, I wasn't expecting a story about two dudes bonding over the joys of weightlifting. It made me chuckle. But in all seriousness, I was surprised by how well the author showed the journey of a complete beginner. He starts light and practices proper form, then gradually increases the weights as he gets stronger. That's not the entirety of the book or even the main focus. But yeah, that's one of my main takeaways, haha.
On a side note, and maybe some slight spoilers, I wasn't expecting a story about two dudes bonding over the joys of weightlifting. It made me chuckle. But in all seriousness, I was surprised by how well the author showed the journey of a complete beginner. He starts light and practices proper form, then gradually increases the weights as he gets stronger. That's not the entirety of the book or even the main focus. But yeah, that's one of my main takeaways, haha.
April 24, 2025
That was a lot of blood! I had fun!
July 30, 2026
Gory gory, what a heck of a way to go
Had to establish the power structure of the world, and the math, and that takes a minute, but the end was proper bloody battle, let's see how the rest goes.
Had to establish the power structure of the world, and the math, and that takes a minute, but the end was proper bloody battle, let's see how the rest goes.
February 7, 2026
Fun and surprisingly well written! A cut above the usual works in the genre
March 24, 2025
Original system and style, but in the middle of the book, it takes a turn into torture porn and gore.
didn-t-like-it
March 25, 2025Note to self: didn't like the narrator's voice.
March 19, 2026
I really wanted to like this book. I'll start with the positives-The premise itself and the lack of lengthy exposition do a lot to grip me as a reader. The setting is earnestly intriguing at its core. I felt firmly onboard by the time Freddy gets his prime vestige, which means this book did a lot to lose my willful suspension of disbelief.
I'll divide my issues with this book into two discrete columns, one being writing, the other being content.
Content-wise, most of this book is an overlong workout montage. On the one hand, I enjoy watching a protagonist come to know their new powers. On the other, in a fantastical world brimming with monsters and magic, it feels almost like a punishment to spend a third of the entire book in the gym talking about how much its protagonist can lift. This would be more tolerable if the main character wasn't an edgelord with entirely mutable character traits, save his disdain for women and his love of chicken tenders and talking to himself. Moreover, the same book that contains minorly homophobic microaggressions also spends pages fetishizing the muscles and vascularity of pretty much every man that the audience is meant to like. Villains, by contrast, are uniformly women or fat.
Onto the writing itself- I give a lot of grace to new writers in the LitRPG space, but this book reads like a middle schooler's power fantasy. Incorrectly ordered adjectives and inappropriate verbs exist amid an abundance of superfluous adverbs. Repetitive descriptors do little to mask an author less concerned with the characters' emotional states than he is with the notion that his protagonist has 0% body fat. If I wasn't listening to a fairly compelling reading of it as an audiobook, I probably would have put it down long ago. Secondarily, There are certain portions of this book that read like AI to me. This isn't any sort of real accusation, and I'd happily chalk it up to repetitious sentence structure rife with an overabundance of clarifying prepositions, but there are moments where I question that, especially given how quickly more books in the series have materialized.
Ultimately, whatever new take on LitRPG this book has to offer is undermined by what it chooses to focus on and how it describes those things.
I'll divide my issues with this book into two discrete columns, one being writing, the other being content.
Content-wise, most of this book is an overlong workout montage. On the one hand, I enjoy watching a protagonist come to know their new powers. On the other, in a fantastical world brimming with monsters and magic, it feels almost like a punishment to spend a third of the entire book in the gym talking about how much its protagonist can lift. This would be more tolerable if the main character wasn't an edgelord with entirely mutable character traits, save his disdain for women and his love of chicken tenders and talking to himself. Moreover, the same book that contains minorly homophobic microaggressions also spends pages fetishizing the muscles and vascularity of pretty much every man that the audience is meant to like. Villains, by contrast, are uniformly women or fat.
Onto the writing itself- I give a lot of grace to new writers in the LitRPG space, but this book reads like a middle schooler's power fantasy. Incorrectly ordered adjectives and inappropriate verbs exist amid an abundance of superfluous adverbs. Repetitive descriptors do little to mask an author less concerned with the characters' emotional states than he is with the notion that his protagonist has 0% body fat. If I wasn't listening to a fairly compelling reading of it as an audiobook, I probably would have put it down long ago. Secondarily, There are certain portions of this book that read like AI to me. This isn't any sort of real accusation, and I'd happily chalk it up to repetitious sentence structure rife with an overabundance of clarifying prepositions, but there are moments where I question that, especially given how quickly more books in the series have materialized.
Ultimately, whatever new take on LitRPG this book has to offer is undermined by what it chooses to focus on and how it describes those things.
October 7, 2026
Review first posted at
Bookworm M.D.
🦴 Musculoskeletal System — Worldbuilding
Diagnosis: 4 — Reinforced Structure
Clinical Notes:
There was a catastrophic event to the world, about 200 years ago. Now, there are these portal/passageways that open up in various locations across the world, that lead to other dimensions. Aside from new and valuable resources, there are, of course, monsters. However, along with these new dimensions, came the items called Vestiges, which give people special powers, and allow them to become Archhumans, and to enter the Etherworld. As would be expected, society is based soley around this. Archhumans are above normal humans, and the higher the rank an Archhuman, the higher is society they are.
🫀 Cardiovascular System — Characters
Diagnosis: 5 — Ventricular Fibrillation
Clinical Notes:
Freddy…. what to say about Freddy. There are character who have to go through trials and tribulations, and being stuck down in dirt, with everyone and even luck against them… and then there is Freddy, who makes those people look like had won the lottery. Freddy’s birth parents abandoned him. He then went to a Orphanage, and was adopted… but it was by parents who abused drugs, and eventually they too abandoned him at 12. Now at 21, he lives in a busted apartment, sharing a restroom with about who knows many other people, has literally only a 15 minute window per morning to use it, and they don’t even have enough towels for each person to use. He has a dead end job, wearing stinking and sweaty clothing, making scraps, with a boss that is, well, a typical boss. No friends, no family, no girlfriend. Nothing. Just alone.
As I will explain below in the plot, things seems to turn around when Freddy miraculously gets a Vestiage! But, it is for farming….
Freddy has rough journey from here on out. The theme seems to circle around people using and abusing him for their own gain. Manipulating and lying to him. Every time Freddy thinks he has a friend, gets a break, or a great opportunity, it again comes back to him being lied to or manipulated. The hardest part is, Freddy is a good guy. He just wants a friend, he is genuinely a good guy, he is out here minidng his own business, but he just cannot escape what is coming.
But I promise you, in the middle and end of this books, you will not believe what Freddy goes through
⚡ Endocrine System — Plot
Diagnosis: 4 — Hyperthyroidism
Clinical Notes:
As I stated above, Freddy has a completely trash life, and things seem to get even worse when a new passage to extremely dangerous dimension open right on top of his head. However things do briefly turn about when he is able to kill a monster (by dumb luck), and this then results in him being able to come across a Vestige for his own. However, it is for farming? He decided to trades this for one that has the power of 1% lifesteal. As you can imagine, the man doing the trade lied and manipulated him to get the farming one. However, things one again look up as Madame wants to interview him about this new portal incident on her show, and to prepare him, she sets him up in the rich part of the city, and with his own personal trainer, Mark. Things seem to finally be changing for Freddy, he is an Archhuman, spot on Madame’s show, and for the first time ever, a friend in Mark. Regrettably, the Vestiage was not the only thing that Freddy got from that passage way, but though he was yet to know it a first, there was also an artifact, and a very powerful one at that. And that powerful artifact caught the eye of two 4-star archhumans, who willing to risk anything to get to Freddy and get that artifact.
🩸 Renal System — Politics
Diagnosis: 3 — Acute Kidney Infection
Clinical Notes:
Points neither awarded nor lost. Yes there are politics with different star levels of Archhumans, and then between different families of power, but this is not a story of high political intrgiue, and with people setting up pieces for back stabbing and maneuvering.
🧬 Genetics — Magic System
Diagnosis: 4 — Well Sequenced
Clinical Notes:
Once a person receives and accepts a Vestige, they become an Archhuman. Vestiges are what give people their powers, and can be broken down into combat and non-combat types. From there, Vestiges also containes affinities, anywhere from 1 to 3 or more per Vestige, and these affinities can be for elements like fire or water, or other sources like blood, life, and death. Depending on the affinity, depends on the powers you can use. i.e. a fire affinity user cannot learn flowing stroke, a water based affinity. As you use and develop these abilities, your Archhuman star will slowly fill up. Everyone starts at 1, 4 are considered extremely rare and amongst the stronger in the world. There have only been a handful of 5 star Archhumans ever
🔥 Respiratory System — Climax
Diagnosis: 5 — Acute Hypoxic Respiratory Failure
Clinical Notes:
The final battle scene? 5/5. EPIC shit.
All the shit and Freddy goes through to make him into who he is at the end? ABSOLUTE emotional damage.
👂 Auditory System — Narration
Diagnosis: 5 — Transcendent Performance
Clinical Notes:
Daniel Wisniewski may be one of my favorite audio book narrators from now on.
💊 Prescription
Recommended For:
- Strong character development
- Characters you will get emotionally attached to
- Fun and easy to understand progession system, that can get complex
- Fast-paced story, always moving forward
- Peak narrator with Daniel Wisniewski
- Warning: Freddy goes through a LOT to develop, and some people may not be able to handle those moments
📝 Long-Term Prognosis
Closing thoughts:
Lets just get this out of the way: Progression Fantasy vs LitRPG. For me LitRPG is all about the numbers, while Progression is not. Because of that, I consider 1% Lifesteal to be a Progression fantasy. I understand some don’t believe that, and that fine. You can call it LitRPG. Now, moving on.
This book was incredible! I cannot emphasize enough about Freddy’s character development is. I will say it again: he goes through a lot of shit. The beginning in bad, but he goes through stuff at the end that probably require some trigger warnings, but man, he changes his mindset, grits his teeth, and get through it. And seeing who he is, and how he thinks about himself at the start, compared to who he is at the end and the belief he now has in himself. Incredible.
I need more people to read this book. Not to bring up DCC, but best LitRPG I’ve read since DCC.
📊 Fantasy / Science Fiction Lab Results
🦴 Musculoskeletal (Worldbuilding) 4 — Reinforced Structure
🫀 Cardiovascular (Character) 5 — Ventricular Fibrillation
⚡ Endocrine (Plot) 4 — Hyperthyroidism
🩸 Renal (Politics) 3 — Acute Kidney Infection
🧬 Genetics (Magic System) 4 — Well Sequenced
🔥 Respiratory (Climax) 5 — Acute Hypoxic Respiratory Failure
👂 Auditory (Narration) 5 — Transcendent Performance
Reading Difficulty Diagnosis: 3 / 5 — Moderate Cognitive Load
Map Dependence: Not Needed
Commitment Level: Moderate Series (5 as of this review)
Plan: Continue Immediately
Final Diagnosis:
Near-Immortal
Recommended by 4.5 out of 5 Doctors
– DJ, Bookworm MD
🦴 Musculoskeletal System — Worldbuilding
Diagnosis: 4 — Reinforced Structure
Clinical Notes:
There was a catastrophic event to the world, about 200 years ago. Now, there are these portal/passageways that open up in various locations across the world, that lead to other dimensions. Aside from new and valuable resources, there are, of course, monsters. However, along with these new dimensions, came the items called Vestiges, which give people special powers, and allow them to become Archhumans, and to enter the Etherworld. As would be expected, society is based soley around this. Archhumans are above normal humans, and the higher the rank an Archhuman, the higher is society they are.
🫀 Cardiovascular System — Characters
Diagnosis: 5 — Ventricular Fibrillation
Clinical Notes:
Freddy…. what to say about Freddy. There are character who have to go through trials and tribulations, and being stuck down in dirt, with everyone and even luck against them… and then there is Freddy, who makes those people look like had won the lottery. Freddy’s birth parents abandoned him. He then went to a Orphanage, and was adopted… but it was by parents who abused drugs, and eventually they too abandoned him at 12. Now at 21, he lives in a busted apartment, sharing a restroom with about who knows many other people, has literally only a 15 minute window per morning to use it, and they don’t even have enough towels for each person to use. He has a dead end job, wearing stinking and sweaty clothing, making scraps, with a boss that is, well, a typical boss. No friends, no family, no girlfriend. Nothing. Just alone.
As I will explain below in the plot, things seems to turn around when Freddy miraculously gets a Vestiage! But, it is for farming….
Freddy has rough journey from here on out. The theme seems to circle around people using and abusing him for their own gain. Manipulating and lying to him. Every time Freddy thinks he has a friend, gets a break, or a great opportunity, it again comes back to him being lied to or manipulated. The hardest part is, Freddy is a good guy. He just wants a friend, he is genuinely a good guy, he is out here minidng his own business, but he just cannot escape what is coming.
But I promise you, in the middle and end of this books, you will not believe what Freddy goes through
⚡ Endocrine System — Plot
Diagnosis: 4 — Hyperthyroidism
Clinical Notes:
As I stated above, Freddy has a completely trash life, and things seem to get even worse when a new passage to extremely dangerous dimension open right on top of his head. However things do briefly turn about when he is able to kill a monster (by dumb luck), and this then results in him being able to come across a Vestige for his own. However, it is for farming? He decided to trades this for one that has the power of 1% lifesteal. As you can imagine, the man doing the trade lied and manipulated him to get the farming one. However, things one again look up as Madame wants to interview him about this new portal incident on her show, and to prepare him, she sets him up in the rich part of the city, and with his own personal trainer, Mark. Things seem to finally be changing for Freddy, he is an Archhuman, spot on Madame’s show, and for the first time ever, a friend in Mark. Regrettably, the Vestiage was not the only thing that Freddy got from that passage way, but though he was yet to know it a first, there was also an artifact, and a very powerful one at that. And that powerful artifact caught the eye of two 4-star archhumans, who willing to risk anything to get to Freddy and get that artifact.
🩸 Renal System — Politics
Diagnosis: 3 — Acute Kidney Infection
Clinical Notes:
Points neither awarded nor lost. Yes there are politics with different star levels of Archhumans, and then between different families of power, but this is not a story of high political intrgiue, and with people setting up pieces for back stabbing and maneuvering.
🧬 Genetics — Magic System
Diagnosis: 4 — Well Sequenced
Clinical Notes:
Once a person receives and accepts a Vestige, they become an Archhuman. Vestiges are what give people their powers, and can be broken down into combat and non-combat types. From there, Vestiges also containes affinities, anywhere from 1 to 3 or more per Vestige, and these affinities can be for elements like fire or water, or other sources like blood, life, and death. Depending on the affinity, depends on the powers you can use. i.e. a fire affinity user cannot learn flowing stroke, a water based affinity. As you use and develop these abilities, your Archhuman star will slowly fill up. Everyone starts at 1, 4 are considered extremely rare and amongst the stronger in the world. There have only been a handful of 5 star Archhumans ever
🔥 Respiratory System — Climax
Diagnosis: 5 — Acute Hypoxic Respiratory Failure
Clinical Notes:
The final battle scene? 5/5. EPIC shit.
All the shit and Freddy goes through to make him into who he is at the end? ABSOLUTE emotional damage.
👂 Auditory System — Narration
Diagnosis: 5 — Transcendent Performance
Clinical Notes:
Daniel Wisniewski may be one of my favorite audio book narrators from now on.
💊 Prescription
Recommended For:
- Strong character development
- Characters you will get emotionally attached to
- Fun and easy to understand progession system, that can get complex
- Fast-paced story, always moving forward
- Peak narrator with Daniel Wisniewski
- Warning: Freddy goes through a LOT to develop, and some people may not be able to handle those moments
📝 Long-Term Prognosis
Closing thoughts:
Lets just get this out of the way: Progression Fantasy vs LitRPG. For me LitRPG is all about the numbers, while Progression is not. Because of that, I consider 1% Lifesteal to be a Progression fantasy. I understand some don’t believe that, and that fine. You can call it LitRPG. Now, moving on.
This book was incredible! I cannot emphasize enough about Freddy’s character development is. I will say it again: he goes through a lot of shit. The beginning in bad, but he goes through stuff at the end that probably require some trigger warnings, but man, he changes his mindset, grits his teeth, and get through it. And seeing who he is, and how he thinks about himself at the start, compared to who he is at the end and the belief he now has in himself. Incredible.
I need more people to read this book. Not to bring up DCC, but best LitRPG I’ve read since DCC.
📊 Fantasy / Science Fiction Lab Results
🦴 Musculoskeletal (Worldbuilding) 4 — Reinforced Structure
🫀 Cardiovascular (Character) 5 — Ventricular Fibrillation
⚡ Endocrine (Plot) 4 — Hyperthyroidism
🩸 Renal (Politics) 3 — Acute Kidney Infection
🧬 Genetics (Magic System) 4 — Well Sequenced
🔥 Respiratory (Climax) 5 — Acute Hypoxic Respiratory Failure
👂 Auditory (Narration) 5 — Transcendent Performance
Reading Difficulty Diagnosis: 3 / 5 — Moderate Cognitive Load
Map Dependence: Not Needed
Commitment Level: Moderate Series (5 as of this review)
Plan: Continue Immediately
Final Diagnosis:
Near-Immortal
Recommended by 4.5 out of 5 Doctors
– DJ, Bookworm MD
July 8, 2025
What’s with these litRPG protagonists lately?
TL;DR: A slow burn, overpower litRPG that falls victim to its characters and, a rather interesting and unique magic system is compromised by its unclarity.
This will be a shorter review, but I don’t know why these last couple of audiobooks have felt so weak in the character department. It’s not just the protagonists either, though they are the main problem. Nobody else motivated me to even want to read about them. This is one of those books I’m glad to be done with so I can move on to something new.
Characters: I wanted to care about Mark and his family, I did, but I just couldn’t be motivated to. I couldn’t care about the villain, or even the protagonist either. Everyone is just so…dang…awful. It’s a really decent setup, but it felt like everyone was just whiny and prone to drastic mood swings the whole time. It wasn’t enjoyable.
Setting: I honestly liked the third act the most in this regard. Nothing that happened leading up to this felt like it meant anything, other than a bit of transition and exposition.
Story: It’s a good setup, it really is, but again, the characters, their decisions, and the overall stupidity of various scenes snd their placement really kind of ruined it.
Writing: Organization was awful, weird scenes were weird, it just wasn’t a clean book. Is it enjoyable? Sure. Should you read it if you’re looking for power fantasy? Meh. Should you read it as some sort of quality book with a stable diagramming of story and well-thought out positions? No…
This was an experience and it wasn’t as bad as some books, but I just can’t get behind whiner baby protagonists that actively make the book worse most of the time.
2.2 🌟
TL;DR: A slow burn, overpower litRPG that falls victim to its characters and, a rather interesting and unique magic system is compromised by its unclarity.
This will be a shorter review, but I don’t know why these last couple of audiobooks have felt so weak in the character department. It’s not just the protagonists either, though they are the main problem. Nobody else motivated me to even want to read about them. This is one of those books I’m glad to be done with so I can move on to something new.
Characters: I wanted to care about Mark and his family, I did, but I just couldn’t be motivated to. I couldn’t care about the villain, or even the protagonist either. Everyone is just so…dang…awful. It’s a really decent setup, but it felt like everyone was just whiny and prone to drastic mood swings the whole time. It wasn’t enjoyable.
Setting: I honestly liked the third act the most in this regard. Nothing that happened leading up to this felt like it meant anything, other than a bit of transition and exposition.
Story: It’s a good setup, it really is, but again, the characters, their decisions, and the overall stupidity of various scenes snd their placement really kind of ruined it.
Writing: Organization was awful, weird scenes were weird, it just wasn’t a clean book. Is it enjoyable? Sure. Should you read it if you’re looking for power fantasy? Meh. Should you read it as some sort of quality book with a stable diagramming of story and well-thought out positions? No…
This was an experience and it wasn’t as bad as some books, but I just can’t get behind whiner baby protagonists that actively make the book worse most of the time.
2.2 🌟
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