Book Review: Lord of the Mysteries

A two-million-word Chinese Online Fantasy Novel

It's time to review a two million word story that's been capturing my free time lately: Lord of the Mysteries and answer the question in our minds: was it worth it, or is it just Stockholm Syndrome?

This review was originally available at https://recordcrash.com/blog, dated July 31st, 2020.

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Official Synopsis

Lord of the Mysteries (诡秘之主) is a Chinese western fantasy webnovel written by the Chinese author Cuttlefish That Loves Diving (爱潜水的乌贼)

With the rising tide of steam power and machinery, who can come close to being a Beyonder? Shrouded in the fog of history and darkness, who or what is the lurking evil that murmurs into our ears?

Waking up to be faced with a string of mysteries, Zhou Mingrui finds himself reincarnated as Klein Moretti in an alternate Victorian era world where he sees a world filled with machinery, cannons, dreadnoughts, airships, difference machines, as well as Potions, Divination, Hexes, Tarot Cards, Sealed Artifacts…

The Light continues to shine but mystery has never gone far. Follow Klein as he finds himself entangled with the Churches of the world—both orthodox and unorthodox—while he slowly develops newfound powers thanks to the Beyonder potions.

Like the corresponding tarot card, The Fool, which is numbered 0—a number of unlimited potential—this is the legend of "The Fool."

Introduction

Let’s get one thing out of the way: the synopsis up there is misleading.

The story indeed takes place in the victorian era. You can easily replace Backlund with London, Tingen City with Oxford, etc. The writer has done his research of the time period, and technology levels, politics and so on are (at least to the uneducated eye) very accurate.

However, I’m sure the snippet made you think of the Steampunk genre/setting. I don’t like it very much, and you’ll be happy if you don’t either, because it’s a lie. There’s one character early on and a few interludes that will make you believe the story will have some degree of focus on the technological development of the world, but they go absolutely nowhere. There has been one (1) airship in the thousand chapters that have been released so far, and the only differential engine in the story is a plot device in a very minor subplot. Description clickbait?

The rest of the synopsis is accurate, thankfully. But let’s get into the style of the story first, because it’s our first dealbreaker.

Style

The original story is in Mandarin Chinese. The most complete English translation by Atlas Studios is bad. It’s not awful— I have heard rumors of popular stories with millions of readers that somehow make it with Google Translate alone—but it’s not even remotely close to professional quality.

The main problem is the absolute lack of localization, so to speak. It’s not a machine translation, but it’s a very, very, VERY literal one. To use a couple of examples:

There are two characters in Mandarin for the area of the face between the eyebrows. In English, it’s translated as “glabella”. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of you have never heard the word before. The word is used approximately 59485 times in Lord of the Mysteries. At no point did the translators think “hey, this word is particularly rare, I should word it slightly differently sometimes so it doesn’t get jarring and repetitive”.

Concepts like “Law of Beyonder Characteristics Conservation” are literally translated without any thought as how they work written in English. There are a lot of these, and they’re written out in full every single time. In the original language it’s presumably not a big problem, since it’s four or five chinese characters instead of the monstrosity above.

While these problems are somewhat common even in professional translations (see “It can’t be helped” in anime subtitles), they are not the norm as they are in the most complete translation of Lord of the Mysteries.

You will have to bear with it. If the above sounds like a deal breaker (weird word choices, long winded concepts, repetition) then you are highly encouraged not to read Lord of the Mysteries. Wait for the anime.

Setting and Worldbuilding

This is one of the story’s main strengths.

All the background factors of the story — the magic, the characters, the places, the factions — are incredibly layered and fleshed out.

The story’s beginnings have a weird focus on history, but as the story goes on you’ll realize that every single boring fact will come to life, with a lot of historical actors and magics being subtly foreshadowed a million chapters in advance, before the main character has to deal with their modern incarnations.

The setting wears its inspirations on its sleeve: Bloodborne, One Piece, the SCP Foundation, and many others, but recombines them in an incredibly natural and unique way that gives way to a lot of interesting plots I haven’t seen in other stories, and continues building on them. There is a fair amount of exposition, but a satisfying percentage of it is shown and not told.

An interesting factor is the “game design”. This isn’t really a LitRPG or (especially, since there the world is basically western) Xianxia, but the setting has the concept of Beyonders, people that can choose one of 22 Sequences — similar to the Job concept in some litRPGs — but with a twist. Instead of having to grind out actions, the progression of an user through the sequences requires the mandatory use of a specific Potion.

Potions are made from ingredients, from either magical creatures, which aren’t a big part of the story, or from other spoilery origins. The most interesting part is that this world has lived with Beyonders for 5 historical eras, and there are established prices for both the potion ingredients themselves and the formulas.

The economics of it are important. The story even starts with a weirdly obsessive focus on money that only makes sense when the main character needs to start working and saving money to progress to the next tier of his Sequence. Big segments of the story are dedicated to his efforts to get into specific black markets and make the right connections, because while there is a price for everything, the Beyonder markets are entirely underground unless you join one of the different churches’ magical police departments. The power growth of a character is closely tied to their growth in society.

Most magical creatures are nearly extinct after a thousand years of Beyonders hunting them, and this and other factors have “second order effects” that decide the entire shape of the world. It’s easy to judge some parts of the setting as bad writing, until certain concepts related to the Sequences and Potions are revealed, and it’s explained how exactly things became as they are. Every piece of the setting falls into place perfectly and you can tell the writer worked hard on this aspect of the story.

[MINOR SPOILERS BEGIN HERE]

Another twist on the progression formula is the Acting concept. It’s not revealed until later in the story, so feel free to drop this paragraph right now if you don’t want any spoilers. Beyonders suffer from mental corruption similar to any lovecraftian setting, and it keeps getting worse with ascension to new tiers.

One of the only ways to deal with it, as the main character discovers, is the obscure Acting Method. Turns out the names of the tiers (for example, Clown), are not entirely based on the abilities the user gets, but on the roles they need to play. For example, the Seer beyonder has to literally take up a job as a fortune teller in order to “digest” the potion faster and slow the corruption. Other tiers have looser or metaphorical relationships between name and acting principles, but the important part is that characters are forced to act unlike themselves to progress, with one different method per tier, which leads into interesting character development (though not particularly strong, more on that later).

[MINOR SPOILERS END HERE]

Potions, Sequences and the abilities that come with them aren’t the only factor. Coming from spoilery origins, Artifacts always come with balanced positive and negative effects. An example is a glove that can steal attacks, but that requires eating one person after its use or it turns on the user, which isn’t an easy drawback to deal with for our Good-aligned protagonist. Another artifact causes area-of-effect possession, which can be easily avoided if you’re part of a group, but is deadly if you’re alone and no one can smack you out of it. These add quite a few layers of complexity during the amazing fight scenes of the story, another strong point. It’s to the level of how Entads are used in the story Worth the Candle, but with the negative effects needed to be worked around - almost every item is effectively cursed.

Added to this are the various Gods, Spirits and otherwise evil entities messing up rituals, causing blessings, curses, and generally adding another factor of complexity Klein needs to tread carefully around. This is a world with History.

It’s all incredibly satisfying. I can’t talk up this aspect of the story enough, even if I can’t get into details, because this is, after all, Lord of the Mysteries, and the reveals are the point.

Story and Characters

Serviceable.

The main character is nothing stellar, and his character development is almost null. While Lord of the Mysteries is an isekai, and the MC is the fusion of someone from our world and a history student of Tingen City involved in a mysterious ritual, this is not a “uplift” story. That was done by a previous isekai protagonist two hundred years ago. Yes, similar to Worth the Candle, a large part of the setting’s cultural and industrial development was carried by transmigrator Roselle, now dead after an assassination. No one can translate his journal, which is written in Mandarin chinese, and our main character Klein uses it to give him the edge. Funnily, every attempt to appear wise using knowledge from Earth gets called out as something he ripped off from Roselle.

He also gets some advantages due to the ritual that apparently summoned him there, but he needs to leverage them with misdirection, which is the best character dynamic in the story. He stumbles into becoming the anonymous leader of a secret organization, and takes advantage of the misconception for all it’s worth, exchanging information and trading his way to victory.

The growing members of the secret organization become other viewpoints, which are sometimes very interesting, sometimes just okay. Really, no particular character stands out in this story, though at least they have unique voices and traits. It’s hard to tell if this is caused by the translation or if the original had the same problem. I’d expect the level of characters and development of your average anime.

Pacing

I honestly don’t know.

The pacing is incredibly, ridiculously slow. You can absolutely have a segment of ten (admittedly short) chapters where nothing of note happens except a bunch of fruitless investigations.

From the above, I’d have to call the pacing bad. HOWEVER, and here’s what kept me reading for a thousand chapters… it gets away with it. Why?

EVERYTHING comes back eventually. Every single fruitless scene, every pointless item, every throwaway character. It’s all jam-packed with foreshadowing. Usually even the aspects you’re sure the author forgot about or just threw away end up showing up during the climaxes of the books or major action scenes for their benefit.

This might come down to personal taste. I really enjoy when everything comes together and you realize the author knows what he’s doing, even if I have to read a lot to get there. It’s the quality of a good mystery novel, which is what this is in the end, and I notice I have a massive smile on my face nearly every time I make it to the climax of any particular arc.

There’s also quite a bit of variation between arcs. One segment of the book can focus on politics, and the other entirely on pirate adventures, so it’s not easy getting bored. Regardless, the very beginning of the story does have some incredibly awful segments. I’ve read a recommendation that amounts to “if you’re really bored skim a dozen chapters until he joins the Nighthawks”, and I think I agree with it, the story gets significantly more focused when that happens.

Lord of the Mysteries contains 1068 chapters of around 2000 words each. This makes it one of the longest stories on the Internet. If you enjoy it, be happy to know it’ll last.

Conclusion

Lord of the Mysteries is an extremely flawed story, I can’t deny it. The translation might be the main culprit, or just one of many factors, who knows. While there is some fair-play whodunnit and there are no idiot balls, I’m not sure it makes it past rational-adjacent. The plotline won’t be frustrating, at the very least.

Nonetheless, if you’re willing to look past the flaws, and especially if you’re a fan of mystery stories with a huge scope and great worldbuilding, you’ll hardly find a more addictive novel. And in the end, isn’t that what matters?

8/10 - Amazing, but lost in translation

Apparently LotM has managed to get both an illustrated light novel and a manga adaptation for the first few chapters. People who get stuck in the early segments of the story might want to give those a try, they’re easily found online.

The story can be read at the links provided in this other recommendation.