a review of “Lord of the Mysteries” Vol. 1, by 爱潜水的乌贼

09 Aug, 2026

last modified 1 week, 1 day ago

This post contains mild spoilers for the titular book. It also contains explicit, brief mentions of fictional suicide.

Edited after posting: I misspelled a character name (Roshelle instead of Roselle, the correct way to write it). Kami has also informed me that the ritual was actually done with rye bread, but that it could be done with any staple crop, so corn isn't all that far off. (I also changed two details in the intro to the post).

I’m putting “Cuttlefish that loves diving” in chinese because I want to and because I need an easy way to test if future fonts I use on this blog will support non-latin alphabet characters...

Several months ago, me and Kami made a deal: she would read One Piece and I would read Lord of the Mysteries. She’s been consistently posting reviews every 50-60 chapters over at this blog, and I finally finished one solid chunk of the story of my half of the deal, so… it’s official, it’s happening, I’m reviewin’ it.

Thoughts! In order! About 76 chapters of webnovel! Gesus.

Some housekeeping. Lord of the Mysteries is a chinese webnovel that combines elements of multiple genres. You may be familiar with mysteries and fantasy and steampunk. However, LotM‘s roots are in xianxia, particularly xuanhuan (which is a genre of fantastic fiction based on Daoism among other things; xuanhuan is just the “high fantasy” equivalent within xianxia) and in progression fantasy, a genre of fiction defined by a plot structure of “incremental improvement” on the protagonist’s part. And it’s also an isekai - a genre of speculative fiction that involves a protagonist from our world dying and waking up permanently stuck in a fantastical world (or at least, stuck long-term).

This is a lot of genre labels. I realize maybe this was counter-productive. Back to the drawing board.

Lord of the Mysteries is about a chinese guy from the modern day who is a bit of a redditor (a self described “keyboard warrior”, hands up everyone who relates!). He attempts a mysterious magical ritual involving corn (I think?) and finds himself whiting out and waking up in a foreign body as if it were his own. Said foreign body is that of a man in 19th-century clothes who has just shot himself in the head.

Our protagonist quickly discovers his new name is Klein Moretti, and that he’s from a fantastical steampunkish Empire where humans may acquire magical powers through imbibing a series of potions. He also figures out that his host body’s previous owner perished due to the influence of a magical artifact, a cursed notebook previously owned by a prestigious family. Of course, our brand-spanking new Klein (who takes on his host’s name and never looks back) is interested in solving the mystery of why did I kill myself, a question many ask themselves in their beautiful lives; and in pursuit of answers, he does a couple of interesting things. The less interesting of the two, though reasonable and useful, is joining a secret militarized organization/peace-keeping force of Beyonders (people who have consumed the magical potions) and becoming a Beyonder himself.

The second one, which I think is a lot more intriguing, comes quite a bit into the first book and involves re-attempting the Corn Ritual, wherein he finds himself in a misty… Skype dimension, and having summoned the souls of two interesting randos who cannot see him clearly through a guise of mist. These interesting randos are Audrey, a young upper-crust socialite lady who is very bright and very attached to her very sweet and huge dog Susie, and Alger, a hot tattooed sailor slash… sea-god priest cop…? (I don’t knowwww. It’s scary). Klein quickly starts posing as a mysterious all-powerful figure, having been granted so generously the capacity to intimidate the A-team with sheer aura and hype moments (the mist skype dimension gives him a misty vtuber avatar that looks badass as fuckkkk), and he finds out some very interesting stuff about the setting, and especially about a figure I’m very intrigued by, a historical Emperor named Roselle.

This is a lot of plot spread quite a lot of chapters. As of speaking, Lord of the Mysteries is over a thousand chapters long. Each chapter isn’t particularly long, but the prose, uhhh… It’s not difficult, in fact I’d say it’s very simple, but it has a lot of quirks in the translation that make it so it’s very hard to get through. There's a reocurring problem, which I'm choosing to blame on the translation (a translation I often found awkward), where information is repeated multiple times in a way I find dizzying, and it caused me to struggle through several parts of the book. For some reason that is genuinely beyond me, this effect felt worse around a specific character called Old Neil, and so now I find him way funnier than I probably should, but like, in the way you find the Original Starwalker funny. Neil carried an aura of infodump with him. I saw him enter stage right and started making the noises featured in the video. I figure that the reason we had to read through Old Neil’s tax forms to the Crown is because at some point, 500 chapters down the line, Klein will be enacting a pyramid scheme, but that doesn’t stop me from begging for mercy from the ruthless, imposing Cuttlefish, that allegedly loves Diving.

My other criticism of this story, aside from the translation problems (fixable) and the info-dumping (part of the genre), is that the start is extremely slow. I sort of wish the author had included a quick plot in the first few set-up chapters, like, I don’t know, a 15-chapter background arc about Klein’s landlord’s divorce happening in the background as he gets used to his new reality. Even if it didn’t impact the plot at all later… I guess my problem is one of format: I’m used to reading sagas edited into multiple books for publication by a professional editor, which would space out its infodumping and foreshadowing and setting-up of plot-threads across multiple books. Now that I’m jumping into a one-and-done literary behemoth published online for free, it’s difficult to adjust to just how much infodumping is required for the rest of the ~950 chapters ahead of me (generously underestimating).

I’ve hit this problem with published fiction, too, mind you… I tried to read Malazan earlier this year and bounced gently off it because there was so much incomprehensible shit in the first couple chapters. That’s the risk of infodumping, and that’s the real strength of genre staples: you don’t need to explain what an elf is every single time you start a fantasy story, because your readers already have a vague idea. But even this is a flawed strength, because if you’re not familiar with the genre, you don’t know what an elf is. Genre fiction is for specialized readers. And I hit a few walls like these while reading Lord of the Mysteries; I’m still not entirely sure how the potions work, but I have this nagging suspicion that if I’d done my homework in the xianxia and lit-RPG spaces, I’d be able to follow the systems a lot better. I feel like a dad, is I guess my take, here.

But now onto what I liked, and the single thing I most liked about Lord of the Mysteries is right in its title: the mysteries. I am on the fucking edge of my seat about so many things in this story. What the fuck is up with Roselle? What the fuck is up with Alger? What the fuck is Klein teeing himself up to? What horrible thing will happen to Audrey that I can’t bear to watch? When will Audrey and Alger find out about Klein just being Some Guy? When will Klein stop being Some Guy? WHAT WAS UP WITH THE CLOWN, WHY WAS THERE A CLOWN? WHY WAS THERE A CLOWN? WHY WAS THE CLOWN SO SCARY? And why did Klein, original flavor, shoot himself?! We still don’t know!!

I found Klein a really funny protagonist, maybe not entirely in the intended way, but I’m still fond of him. He is truly, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, such a redditor. Not even in a bad way. Lately I’ve been getting these videos on TikTok of a guy going over what he’d do if he was isekai’d into any number of Game of Thrones characters and how he would unfuck the realm. This is an entire genre of isekai tales: “I got teleported to a fantasy story I know and now I must unfuck it”. Sometimes they skip the isekai element altogether and opt for, “I was brought back in time and now I must unfuck my future and/or get preemptive revenge”. I love these stories, I very sincerely love these stories, they are the slop of my trough, I drink the milkshake, I drink it up¹. Klein doesn’t know anything about this world, he’s flying blind and by the seat of his old-timey pantaloons, but he has that unfuck-the-realm dog in him. Sometimes he just says some shit and I want to throttle him, but in like, a good way. Lampoon. Christ. He is such a fucking TV Troper. It is so fucking funny. One hundred more Kleins being inappropriately snarky at all times and missing the obvious homosexual red flags from his Leo da Vinci coworker, please.

Other favourites, I mean… Alger and Audrey. Easy. Audrey is so cute and so rootable-for and her dog is so precious and I am so fucking scared right now. I am truly, duly, sincerely, so fucking scared right now. She has taken the Sever Yourself From All Your Friends And Loved Ones Potion and I am Very Scared of when she does, indeed, find herself Severed From All Her Friends And Loved Ones. At least she’ll have a buddy in the Backrooms with her.

And… I think Alger’s going to be a villain, or more accurately a temporary antagonist, but he’s hot, so I forgive it. I don’t think he canonically has tattoos, maybe I lied to you, I actually don’t remember, but the way I imagine him in my head (which supercedes all canon art and the animated adaptation, natch²) involves “middle aged guy” and “brown and grey and blue color-scheme” and “grizzled” and “hot”. So I forgive him. As long as you don’t show me what he looks like in canon. I live in my own reality. It’s way better here.

I don’t know if he counts as a favourite, but I’m also excited for more emperor Roselle. He sounds like everything I find hilarious about Klein, dialed up to 11. What a fucking redditor. What a legendary fucking redditor of a person. My god. I don’t think I’ve laughed harder than I have at his chapters. For like a solid minute I had the theory that Klein was actually going to be Roselle after time-traveling to the past or something, but then I got my hopes dashed by a refresh on how the power system works… I can still believe. I want to believe. X-files theme inbound. But I really want to know more stuff about Roselle. I’m curious. I wanna know!

And I’m also looking forward to more stuff about the Moretti family. Klein has an older brother and a younger sister and I think they’re the sort of really fun powerless characters that improve the story by rising beyond being background for the main guy. I wanna see Klein come home from being, like, shot by the Steampunk Joker during an intense psychic mind battle set in a projected landscape of a sinking ship in a storm, when he left the house 32 hours ago to leave for a secretive auction full of venetian masks where they’re selling ogre pus and cursed dirigible sweat which led to nothing, and then his sister’s like “Klein I’m sorry is it a bad time to tell you I want to go into engineering professionally?”, and Klein just has to like, handle with grace and negative hours of sleep his sister changing her college major. I cannot overstate how much I want this to happen.

I dunno… I’m terrible at compliments, much less at compliment sandwiches, but I’m hoping this back half of the post is taken as what it is. And what it is is… a pile of compliments. I got really attached. I’m curious to see what’s next. I’m bad at articulating what charmed me beyond the fact that it was charming, but like, it was. It was charming. I’m intrigued. I’m excited for the plot to ramp up and the twists to start twisting. I struggled with the training wheels, but I think they’re off now, and I’m excited to see how fast this will go.

So, yeah. That’s the review! And as always:

Thank you for reading!

#2026 #media #review #🌕