The Umbrae Lunae existed before man, beautiful abominations birthed in the nightmares of mad gods. They wait for humanity to misstep, for the angels to look away. For the moment when they can cloak the world in moon shadows once again.
But even horrors have children. Even nightmares must feed. One child, unlike the others, finds his way to a school for young abominations. Will he be a sheep cast before the wolves, or a terror that wears the skin of wool to entice the wolf close?
The flesh of his body was his only coin, strips cut to pay debts that never ended. Everyone has scars, stories in a life led, lessons learned, and licks taken. Luminous bodies touched by darkness. There are a cursed few that are the opposite, black shadows consumed by scars, twisted minds devoured by diseased hungers, bodies tortured misshapen works of gouged flesh, silver lines of blade thin cuts, ragged tears of teeth and glass. For them, the scars are marks of homecoming, the mangled wasteland the only place they feel at peace.
Hell is a place. It's made of concrete, steel and glass. It's the sounds of starving kids crying themselves to sleep, huddling into small balls as creepers come and take their due of innocence and tender meat. It's eating rotten food and carrying ticks in your hair. It’s having no one and nothing while surrounded by everything. It's the life of a street kid. What abomination was birthed in the corrupt womb of man’s cast-off shit?
Pretty people don't know the power of ugly. They can't see the strength in a broken soul or the power in a calloused heart. Those secrets are for the discarded alone. Only the broken understand the grace of darkness. The blessed folds that hide scars and tears, the protection of its concealing umbra.
- UpdateNov 8, 2023
- Alone Chapter 22Nov 3, 2023
- Alone Chapter 21 – 7Nov 1, 2023
- Alone Chapter 21 – 6Oct 27, 2023
- Alone Chapter 21 – 5Oct 25, 2023
- Alone Chapter 21 – 4Oct 20, 2023
- Alone Chapter 21 – 3Oct 18, 2023
- Alone Chapter 21 – 2Oct 13, 2023
- Alone Chapter 21 – 1Oct 11, 2023
- Alone Chapter 20 – 4Oct 6, 2023
- Alone Chapter 20 – 3Oct 4, 2023
- Alone Chapter 20 – 2Sep 28, 2023
- Alone Chapter 20 – 1Sep 27, 2023
- Alone Chapter 19 – 4Sep 21, 2023
- Alone Chapter 19 – 3Sep 19, 2023
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Hiatus - Updated Nov 8, 2023
Last updated 6 months ago
- 322 reading
- 107 plan to read
- 7 completed
- 11 paused
- 28 dropped
The writing is good, the style is nice, the plot is kinda plodding and slow, but that's not the issue. The big problem here is with the characters.
What ruins the whole story for me is simple. The protagonist is a literal doormat, the doormattest doormat, and one of the more offensive varities since he's only a doormat for women. When it comes to the female characters he's an ultrasimp with few personal desires or stakes, catering to them in totally no matter how sh*ttily they treat him, use him, abuse him, hurt him, are disloyal to him, or outright betray him. Honestly, he's pretty much an NTR hentai protagonist in the wrong series at this point. There's no real explanation why he even remotely cares about these particular female characters either (other than Liz), none being particularly special other than being beautiful and talking to him. They all, to varying degrees take him for granted or treat him like dogsh*t, both which makes him simp even harder, even if he hurts his own initial stated interests (staying in school, get money/job/whatever which he suddenly stopped caring about), cause him to nearly fail out from using all his time to teach Anastasia, or be severely wounded. This is most blatant and inexcusable for Anastasia, wherein despite all the sh*t she does to him, the MC still inexplicably thinks of her as a friend, helps her win power, and does ridiculous stuff like wait around for hours for her to show up, immediately after she passively watched her boyfriend try to kill him and bails her and her boyfriend out from any consequences. It's inexcusable, and kills any enjoyment I can get from this, fundamentally I want her to get her just deserts and to lose everything, she's completely and utterly intolerable, and the MC letting it happen just makes it worse. If the MC actually stood up for himself and dropped the actively toxic 'relationships', it'd be a far more enjoyable story to be reading about, but I can't see that happening at this point.
Oh yeah, and later when extremely shallow Anastasia gets horrific facial scarring and loses her eyes and Blaez breaks up with her, then and only then does she start relying on the MC or 'caring' about him, which of course makes him simp even harder despite all the sh*t she's done to him despite his constant aid. The MC becomes a rebound relationship that she only now suddenly gives a damn about, because he's the only who would accept someone who is now horrendously scarred - shallow reasons for shallow people that the MC gobbles up. She honestly does not deserve the slightest bit of pity for everything she's done, bad ends for bad people, but nope, karma doesn't exist here. It'd take alot of her own personal sacrifices for me to start caring about her in the slightest.
Elizabeth is the nicest of the lot and pretty loyal, and is probably the only girl that actually deserves the MC. Alex is... okay and treats the MC somewhat decently, but she's militantly religious and inserts/pushes her faith everywhere (even school assignments), which gets pretty damn annoying at times, and is loyal to her faith first and foremost.
3/5, replace the intolerably bad MC with someone with an actual spine with the ability to say 'no', and it'd be great. Not so much right now.
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I had high hopes for this work. S tier writing quality ngl. But MC is a beta jap bitch so hard pass. 1.5/10 for false hope. Author-nim, this work has great potential. Seeing you force relationships by down syndrome-ing the MC into masochistic ntr hentai protagonist tendencies truly makes me want to unalive you... but I digress. If this is what you're into then do you, I judge not. I feel betrayed, lulled into a sense of expectation just to be ruthlessly stabbed in the back. I'm not upset that you lied to me, skillfully but lied nonetheless. Im upset that from this point I cannot trust you nor your future works.
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Loneliness, hated protaganist, bullying, monsters. Every other tag you can toss out the window. It's a horror dystopian tragedy of a homeless kid going to a monster school. A battle academy, with monsters, as a human.
Yeah, it's painful. What separates it from re:zero is the kid has one life, way more guts, and the pain is written more flowery. Romance is a subplot, harem barely, as no one has confessed, litrpg is just blatant lies. No stats or skills, just knuckles, blood and Guns.
Be foreworned: There is betrayal. Main love interest is a forbidden relationship. Secondary goes off with the bad boy (temporary), Tertiary is basically a bodyguard. They all come to love him too late after irreparable damage (words & literal scars), at least to street kid with no ***** to give. (Hence 4 star)
Now, this may sound like cons but let me tell you. It is written like a slasher film. It's so good. The protagonist bleeeeeeeds and you want everyone around him to suffer. It brings out sadism. You're a masochist for reading though. You will get invested in the man. The chapters are poetry filled with metaphors, philosophy, and sophistry abound. You won't be bored.
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An amazing story that is both causing me to refresh my site every week and also dread doing so. Insanely well written and also very scary. I just don't want my heart to be broken, but this novel is treading a dangerous line. One I feel like it could cross and ruin the story for me, but if it pulls it off... sheesh! Regardless, great story. You should read it if the tags are too your taste.
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It's been 3 days of late night and pain reading this... and I can't stop. a scripture that doesn't try to tell you what's going on paints it with pagan metaphors that would burn the eyes of the ignorantI, a bookworm with more than 300 dead in my cemetery, can say that this is a jewel of such high quality that gold and other material objects are not capable of paying for such a revealing experience. only the beauty of the immaterial can shout how good this is.
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This story is written like an addict. I've read many stories that heavily focus on a single subject, but none have felt like the deep obsession of an addict that needs help. This story is addicted to s*x and what that means to an unhealthy individual. You can't go a handful of chapters without the MC thinking about how he wants to "sheath his blade into her warm, soft, and wet heat." or one of the other copy and pasted lines that are repeated constantly throughout the entire story. I'm not sure what to make of it honestly. On one hand it plays perfectly into the MC being addicted to being a broken simp, but on the other hand it gets mighty annoying having to read the same paragraphs every chapter for hundreds of chapters straight. The point I draw the line is when the author purposefully sets up scenes so that he can copy and paste 1/3 of the chapter, where significant portions are the the aforementioned obsession.
The characters are not very believable either. Everything is shown through the MC's perspective, and this includes the perspective changes, which results in said characters not being believable in the slightest. I can suspend my disbelief at the MC being a multi-talented philosopher, somehow managing to land jobs that make him good at a variety of talents, while still finding the time to spend hours each day thinking about the world, all the while starving on the streets, all the while never figuring out how he can put these talents to good use, but I find it hard to believe any of these kids have the same with the same.
The world is an interesting one. It's a xiaxia-like world where everything takes after a singular theme and everyone outside of this theme are portrayed as outsiders to the story. My major issue with it is the strange need to copy straight from our world, despite this world having little in common with ours. I believe it was done as a shortcut to world building, but it just causes significant confusion for the first 30 chapters.
Overall, the story has it's very enjoyable moments, and despite the significant criticism I largely enjoyed it. The main reason I'm giving it a 3/5 is because this is absolutely not a bingeable story. It's not on the level of some stories that will torture you if you binge read it, but it grates on your until you find yourself clicking next just to get to the end of what's written. I was even planning on giving it a 4/5 and debating on a 5/5 until around chapter 100. Actually, I've decided right here and now just after writing this in Notepad that I'm putting this story on hold for a while, despite being basically at the end.
P.S. Can't be bothered finding a spot to squeeze this in. The first 20 or so chapters have very poor writing quality, where paragraphs of intricate detail about a wall is favored over story pacing. The issue persists, but isn't nearly as bad later on in the story.
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I think there is one point reader must know before going into this: MC is a masochist. There is no buts about this. World-building, his mindset, his actions - all aim to maximize his personal suffering (but without reaching terminally unrecoverable point). Even if outcome or some of premises don't really make sense upon deeper examination.
So MC can't ever have nice things - he'll either sabotage it himself or some outside influence will. But monotonous suffering is boring, so to create contrast we get regular respites and constant teasing that things could in theory improve (no, they don't).
Once you take the above point into account, It's a generally well-written story with a lot of unique aspects.
It's interesting enough, but MC is just not my cup of tea. MC's combination of sado-masochistic traits (that only keep getting more pronounced) makes me question that even if he was to somehow reach a "better" point in his relations with girls, I'd actually like the result.
At some points story also gets a bit too convenient at reaching the conclusion author wants.
Like first half of 2nd book being essentially a conga line of exactly the "level-appropriate" challenges MC needs jumping straight at MC. Or his public perception by other students ignoring any of his pretty high profile achievements and instead laser-focusing on minor incident from early chapters. Which often leads to physical consequences for said students. You'd think that ability to learn is a basic capability we all share...
Style-wise there are also some minor issues, like author's trope of using "adjective + Truth" as actor in sentences. Way too common in narration, but also used in direct speech. By many characters or different origins, despite being extremely unusual speech pattern. For me this merger of character voices is somewhat immersion breaking.
This review may read overly negative, but that's really not the point. Stuff I don't like just gets low score, but if liked a story enough, this makes all more aware of it's shortcomings (objective or otherwise).
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