The web novel I’ll be talking about is Shadow Slave by Guiltythree.
At the time, it has close to 875 chapters 11.0 million views and a 4.77 rating. Here’s a general synopsis of the story. The story starts in a world that’s like ours, but in the near future, we’re a lot more. Animals have gone extinct and resources have become scarce, and multiple wars have been fought by countries for those resources.
A few decades ago, the nightmare spell first appeared in the world. The planet was just starting to recover from the series of resource wars and natural disasters. The nightmare spell at first looked like a new disease that causes millions of people to go through unnatural fatigue and sleepiness. Once they slept, there was no sign of waking up. Even days later, the world began to panic.
When the infected started dying in their sleep, their dead bodies turned into monsters. They call them the nightmare creatures aka shadow slave. Nightmare creatures started to overwhelm nation militaries. Those that did wake up from their sleep began appearing with powers and abilities that could help defeat these new creatures and help restore order and peace. Our main character is named Sunless. People call him sunny.
He’s an orphan, of course. What main character is in these days? Sonny spent a majority of his childhood trying to survive on the streets alone. Always trying to survive. The next day, he didn’t attend school like the other kids. The other more well-off kids would get survival training, martial training and private tutors to help them survive in case they ever had to go through a nightmare.
We meet our main character, sunny starting to feel very tired and knew he was going to experience his first nightmare. He has to take himself to a facility so when he does go to sleep, his body will be taken care of. As nightmare may take days to complete. Also, if he fails to complete his nightmare trial, a nightmare creature will appear in his place in the real world and start wreaking havoc.
That’s why society locks people up as they go through their nightmares, just in case they fail. And someone like our main character with no backing, training or advance knowledge or skills most likely will. For all people who come out of their first nightmare spell, they receive one ability and one flaw. A flaw is basically a side effect of their ability.
Basically, their weakness, the more powerful the ability, the more restrictive and cumbersome the fliers. Personally, I like this balance in the story. No person is undefeatable if they find out the person’s flaw. They can use the exploit for some interesting battles and a power leveling dynamic. People who get through their first nightmare spell trial have to go through the dream realm during the sole’stest.
The dream realm is a vast, ruined, magic world populated by nightmare creatures. So far, there are no other people in this realm besides people coming from the real world. For people to go back to the real world. They have to go through a gateway depending on where the user nightmare spell drops. It might be harder to get there than others.
Once they get back to the real world the second time, they’ll be classified as a awaken for those who just get through their first nightmare trial. They’re known as sleepers. As you read the story, you get more information about the world and the system in which the nightmare spell seems to be slowly explaining what the nightmare spell actually is and its purpose coming to humanity.
The author does a great job of not info, dumping everything in chapters, but possibly telling us about the world as the story goes on. Just so it’s not overwhelming to read, the piece of the story is pretty good. The author seems to know what the skip time and where to take his time in the most interesting parts. Another thing that the author does pretty well is that he doesn’t give too much flood armor to our protagonist to make him open and his adversaries irrelevant.
Our main character does grow in strength, but not in a way we see in other novels. I really enjoy that. The author is taking his time with the story, the character development in shadow slave, with the main character and the side characters. Not every story should go overpowered. The pacing and growth of the story reminds me of chaos air by eve of chaos.
And if you’ve read any of his books, you already know how great of an author he is. The novel is a must read if you’re looking for a well-written, weak to strong, trans migrated anti-hero.