
It all started with a Chinese animation, quite nice and flashy, but also very confusing. Also called Lord of Mysteries, I soon found out that it was based on a series of books by an author with the funny name Ai Qianshui de Wuzei (translated to Cuttlefish That Loves Diving) who published all of them as web novels. So I looked for it online and I found it - on the Internet Archive no less, so I guess legally free? - in EPUB format. I had no idea how many books there are and I just thought this was the first. I was a bit surprised that it took a longer time to load than other books, but I assumed it's some weird Chinese format or something. But no. What happened is that the epub contains ALL of the books: 1400 chapters, 27000 e-book pages!
The writing style is very direct, it's not bad at all, but it feels different from the usual Western books I have been reading, even if it is an English translation. The world building is amazing, a combination of steampunk and interesting magic, with elements from all kinds of myths - ancient and modern. The story is a bit too linear, with the main character being good at everything and being rational and good and strong and ingenious. A bit of a Martin Sue. But I've only read the first volume, so this might change. Overall, I quite like this series!
The first volume has about 130 chapters and tells the story of a "keyboard warrior" (an Internet troll, basically) who gets sucked in a fantasy world where magic is real. And before you groan and stop reading, even if it does feel a bit like the setup of a video game, it's quite a complex world with many cultures, interesting characters and complicated magic systems. I was saying above that the animation is confusing, that's because the first five one hour episodes cover the entire first volume. It cuts a lot of things off, reorders or combines characters and storylines, so that it kind of makes sense, but without having read the book I couldn't enjoy it. Also, the animation has more of an anime/manga feel with everybody beautiful and flashy and amazing visuals during battle. The book is less so, more grounded and makes a lot more sense.
I have to say that writing a book like this is not easy at all. The author planned a lot of it before starting writing and it shows. A lot of effort has been poured into this series and it elevates it to levels above most books in the genre I've read recently. If I have one complaint is that the character gets everything right, even if he's just a kid who spent to much time on the Internet and should have very little life experience. He adapts to the new world like he's playing an RPG game and doesn't seem to feel anything amiss. He comes off as a bit of a psychopath that way, or at least high on some sort of autism spectrum.
I've already promised myself that if the quality of the book doesn't drop significantly, I will read all of the volumes. In fact, there is no real separation of the volumes. It is indeed a book that has 1400 chapters. So if I stop it will be because I got tired or the writer really dropped the ball. I hope that doesn't happen.