Corruption Wielder

Book 1

De: Aaron Shih

Narrado por: Matt Hicks, Erin Bateman

When the world ends, humanity must fight to survive—but where others struggle in fear, Will sees only an opportunity to thrive.

April 3rd, 3:46 AM. Planet Earth merges with the magical world of Arcadia, and a system gives humanity a choice: 40 years of indentured servitude, or entering a tutorial as a user to fight against the chaos incursion.

Will doesn't hesitate—but the system thanks him for stepping into the fight by throwing him into an impossible tutorial. With little chance of survival, Will has a simple response: “Screw it. Might as well fight fire with fire."

Warning: [Corruption] has been chosen as primary attribute.

With a forbidden element, Will just might be able to stab his way out of the tutorial. But as he gains the powers of death and space as well, he realizes that his problems might not only lie in the monsters that now plague the world.

Will, now Earth's sole corruption wielder, finds danger at every corner. For anyone else, that could mean a quick and terrifying end. To him?

Maybe Will was meant for this world.

Perfect for fans of Defiance of the Fall, System Universe, and He Who Fights With Monsters—don't miss the start of the hit litRPG apocalypse series with a million views on Royal Road!

©2024 Aaron Shih (P)2024 Royal Guard Publishing LLC

Wanted to like it but the MC and action were MIA

I liked the premise. Things started interesting and I was sort of okay with how things progressed; however, when the MC enters the supposedly extreme difficulty tutorial, struggles only minorly with the first encounter, then you jump to half dozen kills later, it's hard to really buy into that. I love an MC that's witty and uses clever tricks to defy the odds. This isn't that MC. This is the MC that seems to have the system crushing on him judging by the utterly insanely OP skills he gets time and time again. There's very little struggle. The training montage with another character is only 20 hours and by that time he acts like he's gods gift to humanity...especially when he gets back to earth. The MC goes from "General character with witty banter I was enjoying" to "I know everything and why is everyone else so weak?"

I don't mind OP characters. I love them. This just wasn't done right. Fights are skipped time and time again. Dungeons are blasted through jumping from MC enters dungeon, monsters are described, MC slaughters them after, maybe, having issues with the first...then we're at the boss room.

There's far too much telling and not enough showing to the extent that the character is undercut by the disservice. He's tortured by a god at one point and after doing that once, the MC acts like everything's fine the subsequent times it happens.

The story is interesting and I like many of the characters; however, the agency and luck of the others are sacrificed to prop up the MC's gifted skills and achievements...most of which don't feel really earned. The MC defeats someone in the first half of the book just by merit of his insanely synergistic skills he was gifted. I say gifted b/c skills seem random outside of the element and attribute they're tied to which only influence the outcome.

I wanted to like this. I've got 8 hours left. I just don't think I'll finish b/c I know the MC will just get some new skill to come out ahead of any new impossible challenge.

The world has ended. Let the new world begin

This is a good start. We get to see new characters, And we get to see what happens with two cultures meeting after the apocalypse

Only one thing I did not care for in this book

So overall I really liked this book far more than I did HEFWM that I saw a lot of other reviews mentioning. However it does suffer from a similar problem to what I had with HEFWM and that is the over use of skill explanations, it gets really annoying to be mid fight and suddenly a skill that was explained like 2 chapters earlier is once again explained as if he just got the skill.

Really it should be something that books like this should be aware of and try to avoid, tell us the skill once and then from there on just mention the skill he is using without the details of what it does(this applies for items as well). And then maybe halfway through the book give a chapter dedicated to the characters known skills and items or something that can be skipped if wanted or read/listened to if a refresher is needed.

Other wise this story is a decent enough litrpg. It doesn't do anything to really break the mold so to speak but I do like the character dynamics between someone who was already getting ground down with life while still finishing college and the rest of the world and him taking a very "Nah, Imma do my own thing." mentality

plagiarism anyone?

The story isn't bad, I enjoyed it but nothing revolutionary. However, I did have to check twice that it wasn't the same author as He Who Fights With Monsters. I mean, it's a straight up rehash of the elements in that story. The MC is Asian descent but English raised, the magic system and skill system is nearly identical, the MC gets almost identical abilities (afflictions, cleansing afflictions for power ups, phantom that's also a dark cloak), they even foreshadowed that the God of Peace (God of Purity in HWFWM) was going to be a main villain. Can't you get sued for this?

strong start, gets bogged down

there's a lot of good and cool stuff and ideas in the book, and it's definitely worth checking out. I just felt the magic system was needlessly complicated to the point it made following the character's progression, build, and battles more difficult.

Slow start

First part

For my tastes, this was too much system/info and not much story. 75/25. The narrators didn’t combine their dialogue in a smooth manner so that didn’t help. Listened at 1.1 x speed. Helper? Really? Did someone forget to put a name in the place holder?

Second part

I now understand the Primal Hunter with He Who Fights With Monsters comments. A story line develops more as it goes on. The narration gets smoother.

Final part. Finishes up stronger than the start. Undecided on book 2. Updated my rating.

Just Excellent

A far better and faster start than defiance of the fall, Primal hunter or even HWFWM. The dialogue & humor is just great. It just feels very clean & balanced. Fights & skills feel natural and understandable. It feels more polished than DOTF or PH. Not overly political like HWFWM. It touches on all the details and elements that need to be but doesn’t overdue it. It’s just excellent.

very good story

every one who compares this with hwfwm I dont understand it's more close to primal hunter

Great Value version of He Who Fights with Monsters

Worth a listen the first book starts out slow but gradually picks up but sometimes it feels like it tries to hard to be funny.

Loved the story, can’t stand Matt

I really enjoyed the story, but Matt isn’t a strong narrator, any voice other than his “MC” voice is just grating to the ears. Any deeper and it’s like he gargled nails. Any high pitched comes straight out of his nose. I enjoy Erin but Matt really bring anything I hear with him in it.