This is a weird one – an online serial that is a) finished, b) published as four books, and c) still available to read for free online. My review is about the free online version: I raced through the ~4k pages in under a week and had fun. It’s alright – or rather, there are parts that are fun and parts that are really ehhhh, and it averages out.
There’s a lot to criticise: the deranged plot turns at some points; some of the characters would be better off just … not existing; the author’s unhealthy fascination with inhuman disaster lesbians (and I say this affectionately, believe me!).
But! At the same time, the story goes some really weird places and then follows them to their conclusion, which I appreciate a ton. Personhood, godhood, continuity of personality (or lack thereof), the nature of God (oh the worldbuilding on that one is beautiful!): hell yes.
Time spent very well, overall, do not regret reading this at all. Plus, it’s rare that you find a serial that has finished and hat an actual final arc that went somewhere. I imagine that some people don’t like the overall ending; I thought that while the pacing was naturally odd, it had some really, really really cool stuff going on, and it was satisfying without being cheesy.
Plot summary
Beware: full spoilers! Also probably incomplete and possibly incomprehensible.
The world: a ton of islands floating above God: a tentacle beast with many eyes and a jealous hunger for metal. If there’s too much metal in a place? God wrecks it. In return, everybody has a capital-T Talent. Many useless, some OP.
Vita starts out a street orphan in a world where everybody has a capital-T Talent and also necromancy is banned and shunned. So naturally, she turns out to be a natural necromancer (at first) who can dabble in (and also eat) souls. With the help of her found-family, she becomes a monster hunter – but she gets stronger and stronger, and can’t hide forever. When she has to flee civilisation with the help of her platonic girlfriend, a callous, healer-slash-poisoner aristocrat, it turns out she is a more of a non-human soul stuck in a human body, and she keeps evolving.
Imprisoned by the church, then sprung out, the plot continues to escalate along an exponential power curve. Vita figures out she is the same kind of being as the God/monster the islands swirl about, and that all islands are basically just soul farms. She also makes contact with a third of their kind.
When she dies in a high-stakes battle with the church, she jumps her soul into the body of the insect-species princess that killed her and merges with her. Her new island/world/personality is very different, which provides a nice late-stage change, though the commitment to her merged personality also makes it hard to relate to her as much.
The final arc shows a cataclysmic event that her new grandmother tells her happens every couple of millennia: The God rises above the islands (which makes them realise that the islands really form a sphere around him, and swims off into space, where it tears apart some planets (they didn’t have a concept of planets or even stars, covered in continuous mists), eats all the souls, also eats the sun, and drops some parts of the planet with some survivors into the existing island mix.
Vita resists her sister’s plan to eat all the islands and then fuck off into space with one remaining island in order to build up power to kill their brother, the God – the amount of death is unacceptable to her. Instead, she sacrifices her God-like sister at the cost of having to swim to space for a near-eternity, until she finds a planet of her own. She becomes a benevolent God-like creature there, uplifting the local race with the consent of the governed in order to make them powerful enough to kill her brother. Millennia later, her girlfriend makes contact, because she managed to become immortal (what’s that after making herself into a dragon lady, tbh). The end.
