I’m not done yet. 🙂

I know it’s a projection. I like the series because I identify with the main character and I project a future for the character that I hope to have personally. It’s fucking obvious, after all. I mean, you have a character who wakes up as a demon larva in a total shithole, and understands that she needs to get stronger if she wants to be more of herself, and I project a future where she gets her old memories and self back, only upgraded by her new experiences. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what I’m doing here. Of course the main character is nothing like me in many ways, but I don’t care as long as I see the main trend of similarity; basically, someone threw you into a pit, you have no memories other than the desire for something you feel you should be but can’t access, and it powers all your efforts to dig yourself out. And, of course, the stronger the soul, the stronger the drive.

Also, I somewhat envy the simplicity and clarity of the system. To Salvos, you just need to kill progressively stronger enemies, and you level. Of course, you need to make choices that determine what kind of a person you end up being, but still, it’s incredibly straightforward. Here, it’s all vague, unclear, indistinct, and the actual method of spiritual evolution is hidden under seven veils and I had to figure it out myself; everything everybody thinks is superficial and more harmful than useful. So, it’s much harder than merely killing monsters 20 levels above you, which is why I envy the system from the books and this envy feeds the appeal.

I also like that the author doesn’t sexualise it. In lots of modern stuff I encountered everything seems to be about sex, and everything else looks like merely ways to package sex. It’s boring, and it hides absence of actual ideas. Here, this part was marginalised and this brings everything else to the surface – the way characters think and feel about all sorts of things. Conversations aren’t merely a way to get to the romantic part; they are the actual point. When someone like Orgaf admires Salvos, he does so because of her achievements – she killed the Lich of the Plaguelands. He saw her fight a Hellabomination that was an evolution and over 40 levels above her. He saw her turn back time in order to land a hit on Belzu, he saw her endure and keep fighting after almost getting killed, and after he himself almost gave up. He saw her kill Ira, whom he fought and lost badly, barely surviving the casual encounter. He saw how she spent the last drops of her potion of regeneration to revive him after he was almost killed, and they were in a rough spot at the moment, where he knew her secret and it wasn’t certain to her that he would protect it; it would have been so easy for her to just let him die or finish him herself; instead, she had him nurtured to full strength and left Willy to care for him. The characters are admired for their actions, and when a meritocrat like Orgaf, who spent his entire life killing monsters in various dark dens, searching for treasures to loot, and who is known for speaking about lvl. 100-149 people as “those useless Diamonds” is fangirling over Salvos, you know he has good reasons for it. Also, when Helena Warshade (I internally call her Helena Ravenclaw for obvious reasons), who is Clayton’s equal in magical power and one of the two highest ranked human Mages, and who actually doesn’t like Salvos very much and is very skeptical of her, teams up with Orgaf and Salvos to deal with shit, you know it’s been earned. There’s no stupid artificial sexual tension or jealousy or rivalry interposed in the plot to cloud the important matters. I mean, sure, it exists, in case of Amanda who has a crush on Daniel and is jealous of Salvos and it’s completely obvious, but it’s very localised. It has a function within the plot; the plot isn’t a mere instrument to sell you the sexual content. That’s very realistic, in fact, despite the modern opinion that sex is the main thing people are concerned with, and everything else is merely a way to package it. I am honestly glad to have found a piece of modern literature that contextualises sex and romance properly, instead of drowning everything in it, the way processed food is drowned in sugar. It’s there because somewhere in the margins Edithe is having a romantic relationship with Hadrian, Daniel has a crush on Salvos which she takes nine books to figure out and only with Amanda’s help, and so on, but it’s one thing among twenty, and prioritised below top ten. The important parts aren’t when someone had sex, they are when they figured something out, overcame something important, when something was revealed that changes everything, or when someone saved a friend from mortal danger at great cost and hazard to themselves. The scenes when Salvos is half-dead from pushing a Skill too far and is completely incapacitated and in excruciating pain, and her companions carry her, protect her and deal with shit for her are much more important and telling. For instance, the journey of Edithe from “Demon! Let’s kill it!” when she first met Salvos, through hostility, guarded tolerance, cautious friendship, to profound friendship that developed in the Plaguelands, where Salvos kept saving her life every moment of every day and twice brought her back from the brink of death and mortal danger at extreme cost to herself where she lost her wings, an arm and almost her life fighting an almost unkillable foe because he had Edithe hostage and was going to kill her the way he killed all those other redheads over the centuries. It starts with Edithe being very reluctant to put Salvos on guard duty, because Demon, to Edithe carrying the wounded Salvos in her arms and protecting her with her life. It’s stuff that develops over nine books of material, very gradually. You don’t get cheap stuff here – no easy rewards, no deep emotions that develop overnight for no good reason. You have deep history between the characters who don’t start as friends. Things don’t just happen. Salvos’ roommate in Mavos Academy wants to kill her when she finds out she’s a Demon, and it takes quite a lot of work for Salvos to get past the dangerous point, and after that there’s lots of suspicion before they get to the point where Saffron would throw herself into fire for Salvos. It takes multiple books to get there. They get to know each other and become friends in book two. By book nine, Salvos is the point of inspiration of Saffron’s entire family; they all look up to her and try to live up to her example, after she saved their lives multiple times with acts of outright heroism. It’s not cheaply earned acclaim; it’s someone flying into the heart of the worst battle in the world at that point to save your family from certain death, and then gets you all out and stays to deal with things, and then things like that keep repeating until you all owe your lives to her ten times over. It’s earned, it’s solid “show, not tell” writing style over multiple volumes. Salvos didn’t just accidentally get famous over one event. It’s multiple instances where she fought, lost, fought again, and barely won, saving people who watched and told stories later. For instance, there’s a group of three adventurers she meets in the second book, and whom we follow through the books at the margins of events, who are so inspired by her that they keep looking up to her and doing more daring things to rise up, because next time they meet, they want her to be proud of them; she, in return, saves their lives on multiple occasions because she remembered them.

Also, there’s the sophisticated arc with the Devil, who looks like a crazy person alleviating his eternal boredom by messing with people when we first meet him; dangerous, deranged, nigh-omnipotent mythical being. He first takes notice of Salvos, then gets to like her, then as he mentors her he develops true feelings for her and adopts her as his daughter, and she’s first annoyed by him but respects him, and then as he helps her develop two grand skills and twenty levels, she feels true gratitude and love for him, and that has so much power that it starts to heal his broken soul, eventually succeeding, and she’s the first person in 50000 years that actually reached him. Also, it’s an arc from book two to book eleven. It’s not some cheap trick, not something that just happens because reasons. She begins by being his dupe, and ends up being his true family.

As I said, “Salvos” is not what one would think it is. It’s deep stuff packaged in shallow nonsense, not the other way around, as it unfortunately tends to be the case with much of literature.

I want to return to the “Salvos” series because I don’t think I’m done with it here.

One of the reason why it’s so good is that the characters break their own mould; they belie expectations. For instance, you would expect that Salvos, as a Demon of Pride, would act in ways a typical prideful person will act, but she’s actually humble. When Willy berates her and she knows he’s right, she will just bow her head, take it and apologise. When Lux Golmi berates her for breaking into its home to kill it for body parts she needs for a potion, and accuses her of being wild, she actually stops, thinks about it and feels shame, because she can understand the “monster’s” perspective and it isn’t flattering. She then offers a compromise and there ends up being no violence. You would expect a proud powerful person to laugh at such criticism, act arrogantly and just take what they want, but Salvos never does. When Haec berates her for hiding corruption from him and doing things behind his back, she again bows her head and apologises. So, her pride is not what people usually mean by it; arrogance, rejection of all criticism, being convinced of your own superiority despite evidence. For Salvos, pride means being great and doing great things and then soaking up deserved praise. Pride is being loved and trusted by worthy people because you are worthy. Pride is not allowing threats to harm what is yours. But when she fucks up and someone gives her a piece of their mind about it, you would expect her to act like those people we all know, who would just arrogantly tell you to fuck off and it’s not your place to say anything. Not Salvos. Salvos believes in reality over everything else. If you believe something about yourself, you have to prove it. If you fucked up and somebody proves it to you, you need to accept your mistakes and do better. Defending your flaws isn’t her kind of pride. Her kind of pride is not having flaws in the first place, and then being admired for it. So, since that’s what she loves, she works on not having those flaws. She doesn’t like being looked down upon for being weak, so she works on being strong. Essentially, she has a constructive approach to things; see what you like, and become the kind of person who deserves it.

Also, one would expect that her pride would demand her to always want a leadership position, but that’s not the case. She’s perfectly satisfied to be the most powerful person in a group, and have someone else lead; whether it’s Helena or Clayton or Haec, it doesn’t matter. She’s more interested in getting things done. On a superficial level, she likes the concept of a cheering crowd or having minions who worship her, but she would get bored of it very quickly, and she usually prefers a much different environment – a company of equals who each have a say, who have opinions, fears and desires she acknowledges and accommodates. She doesn’t want power in order to be a tyrant like Regnorex; in that sense, she’s very much like Samuel, who made a kingdom of equals, people who were joking and messing around with each other and who all had great power, but nobody saw the power of others as a threat that needs to be controlled, the way Regnorex doesn’t allow his minions to evolve to Primordial because he fears being deposed. Samuel’s kingdom was full of Primordials, and they absolutely loved him. They worshipped the ground he walked on. He gave them safety, purpose, peace and hope where there used to be chaos, despair and death. When Trico betrayed them and everything collapsed, including Samuel’s heart, they hoped for 50000 years that he would return to his kingdom and lead them all again. Samuel didn’t need fear to rule, and neither does Salvos.

Even people who barely know her, like Bertrugil, trust her and feel safe with her because they see how she deals with things. They feel safe enough to whine and complain to her. Nobody feels safe with Regnorex that way. People walk on tiptoes around him and constantly bow in submission to appease his ego. Nobody does that around Salvos; instead, Aemula feels safe enough to complain that Salvos doesn’t believe her when she says she can see solid ground, and Salvos is careful not to hurt her feelings. Mind you, Aemula is a lvl. 108 Archdemon. Salvos is at that point a lvl. 165 Lesser God. They are all in Salvos’ pocket space, travelling between the folds of Nexeus, and everybody feels perfectly safe. Aemula whines about not being taken seriously and then rubs it in Salvos’ face when she turns out to be right, Bertrugil sleeps, Taburas broods, Haec is having his evolution in peace. They are all within a construct of space magic created by a Lesser God and they are not walking on tiptoes around her. For a supposed Demon of Pride, Salvos has almost none of what people would call “ego”. Sure, there’s pride in her own achievements, there’s a desire to be great and to be seen as great, to be admired by worthy people who see her greatness and acknowledge it, the pride of truth being said about it and this truth being high praise. Most of it, however, is constructive. She did have some detours into the pathological, such as when she was tutoring other kids and it went into her head, but for the most part, it’s pride of the kind where she doesn’t allow people she loves to be harmed, where she doesn’t allow there to be a power higher than herself that could take all she loves away from her. That’s why the character and the writing are interesting; you don’t expect the Demon of Pride to act mostly as a Goddess of Love.

That, among other things, is why the humans in the Mortal Realm are currently losing their shit over her. They have an expectation of what Demons should be like – Lucerna who rampaged across Nixa, destroying towns and killing people. Belzu who did the same but more effectively, killing millions and razing entire countries. Servants of Regnorex who invaded Inor and Elutra, destroying everything and sacrificing the population to bring in more Demons and eventually the Demon King himself. The fact that the carefree girl who kept destroying all harmful creatures, who was known for killing the Centinels, the undead, the Demons and the cultists who created mischief, who did so many protective and good things that the System gave the Title of “Secily’s Sentinel”, making her essentially the official protector of their world, who fought so hard to defeat the Demon invasion that she brought them all together and didn’t rest until they all focused their efforts to defeat the threat, and was one of their greatest generals and arguably the person most responsible for the victory, the fact that she turned out to be a Demon herself, and not just any demon, but a Primeval Demon who was also a Lesser God who radiated Divinity like the Watcher, Mori Gladius and the Immortal King Alexander – they didn’t know what to do with that. Some tried to argue that it all had to be some deception, but it made absolutely no sense. The alternative was that a Demon can be good, and not just good, but the best person in the world, and that broke their minds even worse because it contradicted everything they knew about Demons. Demons aren’t supposed to have angelic wings, radiate Divinity and make the world safe from threats and evil. The Demons aren’t supposed to have the “aura” Salvos has – something that makes you mildly euphoric, something that makes you want to rise up, earn greatness, leave fears and limitations behind you. Demons aren’t supposed to inspire, elevate, and bring knowledge and peace. Clayton knew she wasn’t human, but his first guess was that she’s a Spirit, because that’s what she feels like. There’s an aura of levity, kindness, protectiveness and inspiration around her, and his suspicion was that she’s either a rogue Spirit, or the Spirit Lord is up to something. Even when he met the Devil in his human form, he felt nothing like what he would expect a Demon to feel like. I honestly can’t imagine what he would have thought; there’s a being that’s extremely powerful, throws one of his professors out the window to prove a point, and then calmly allows Clayton to lead them out of his school without offering resistance, and all the while Clayton is probing him with Identification and who knows what Skills and learns only that he’s the equivalent of a human Elite, but nothing more. The combination of power, mischief and benevolence makes him suspect Spirits, because that’s what people would logically think. Their experience with Demons consists of either Regnorex and his minions, or rogue but evil Demons like Belzu, whose idea of levelling is to raze towns and kill people. When they encounter a Demon whose idea of levelling is to find some wasteland full of wild creatures nobody will miss and kill them, and then go to school to learn magic, their experience offers no guidance that would explain this. And yet, she’s not as unique as they would think; it’s just that Regnorex has been shaping Demons into what they are now for the last 10000 years. The Humans don’t know about the First Kingdom of Samuel the Devil King, who ruled with inspiration, kindness and vision, not fear. Salvos is merely someone who would fit right in with Samuel’s old people, to the point where he ends up actually adopting her as his daughter, and she instantly befriends his viceroy Belphegor when they meet. Humans think Regnorex and his Demons are typical, but they are merely a pathological branch that’s been developing for a long time, and they have a short historical memory.

Humans call the Demons a scourge of the Nexeus, but the Demons used to hang around freely with Spirits, Dragons, High Elves and ancient Humans. They explored sophisticated magic, participated in sophisticated world politics and were seen as merely another species. In fact, Kobolds see Demons as not much different than Spirits; Elves have little to no idea about them, and no prejudice. It’s just Humans that have a problem with… well, everybody except the Spirits, in fact. So, if something is alien but good, it must be a Spirit. Humans, in fact, have a thick wall of prejudice against Demons, that Salvos has to overcome each time with them, but which doesn’t exist with any other species. She befriended a Fairy, a Kobold, multiple Elves, a Spirit and multiple monsters, but with Humans it’s always “Demon! Let’s kill it!” at first. Centina has a similar situation where everybody hates the Centinels, but in both cases, you can’t say the prejudice is unwarranted. The Centinels just kill everything and are completely irrational, and Demons occasionally pop up in the human lands and just kill everyone indiscriminately. Both species are terrible pests that ravage the Human lands. So, why would there not be prejudice against them? There’s 10000 years of history behind the prejudice, and no known exceptions. And Salvos has to concede that. She hates being looked down upon for being a Demon, but when she sees what other Demons are doing there, she can’t blame the humans for drawing the obvious conclusions. Instead, she turns her rage at Regnorex, whose fault it truly is. She’s not stupid the way humans would be, and ask not to be discriminated against as if it were a right. No, she puts real effort into making things right first, and then hopes to be judged fairly.

So, as you can see, it’s this complexity and nuance of the whole thing that I find fascinating.

As a continuation of the previous article, that did make me think why I like some books and characters, while I absolutely detest others.

If a character doesn’t function in a way that makes sense, if they don’t act realistically in their circumstances, if they don’t act realistically for their intelligence, level of knowledge and so on, I just can’t abide them. For instance, Amelia is one such character. She is incredibly obstinate and stupid, and simply refuses to draw the most reasonable and logical conclusions from her circumstances and the situation she’s in, and deliberately acts in the most inappropriate and unreasonable manner, refusing to learn and understand what the reality is telling her. It’s absolutely jarring. Edward Cullen, in the “Twilight” series, is another such character that’s getting on my nerves, because he obstinately refuses to learn what reality is telling him, refuses to listen to smart people, tries to control other people’s destiny in ways that make everybody miserable, and for what – he has a fixed set of ideas about selfishness and refuses to revise them despite quite obvious lessons that present themselves. Basically, it’s a character that refuses to accept God’s providence and his own feeling of rightness because he’s overriding it with his own intellectual concepts as if they were God. As a result, he almost gets everybody killed and creates an incredible amount of suffering. As I said, I absolutely revile the character.

Martin Riggs from “Lethal Weapon” is the opposite. I love that character. He’s incredibly fucked up when we first encounter him. His wife died in a car accident and she was all he had. He’s suicidal, in permanent emotional anguish, and he’s stumbling through that and trying to do his job as a policeman, hoping to die a hero fighting armed criminals, but somehow always manages to survive and defeat them, because he’s both lucky and good at his job. He’s great at killing people, and yet he only wishes he could have his wife back, and he can’t, so killing himself to be with her is the only thing he can think of. Gradually, as he helps his partner save his family, he finds purpose and comes out on the other side of his terrible grief. It’s an incredibly realistic portrait of a virtuous person experiencing terrible tragedy and trying to pick up the pieces of their life, sort themselves out and find new purpose, while life doesn’t wait for them and instead showers them with an avalanche of rocks.

I love characters that are normally preoccupied with their own stuff, but when a crisis happens, they rise up to the occasion and do whatever the situation requires to resolve things. I find the fumbling, insecure, weak people who get confused and do pathetic or evil things to cover up their failings jarring and abhorrent. I just can’t identify with that; also, all the people I hold in contempt are like that. Weak, no responsibility, no accountability, projection, justification of failings, failure to learn and improve. Yuck.

I can identify with Salvos who woke up completely ignorant in a strange world and is trying to create more of the good stuff that she can comprehend, and fight the bad stuff she encounters. She figures things out as she goes, she never has it easy, almost everything is against her, but she’s inherently virtuous, and she’s virtuous by choice. She could choose evil, but she didn’t, and it’s not an accident that she didn’t. She just abhors certain things as a matter of principle. She theoretically could level by killing as many people as she can find, especially if nobody would know. However, she never does. Her moral core is so strong, that a monster can put her to shame by stating that she came to its home and is trying to kill it in order to harvest its body parts, and for no good reason other than her selfish ones. She really stops to think about it, and changes her opinion and actions. This is a realistic way a virtuous person would act. They don’t automatically know things because they are virtuous. Their idea of virtue needs to evolve; you can’t just put a label of “monster” on a category of beings and then treat them like non-entities, especially when they think, feel and offer good points, they didn’t attack you to justify your response, and you invaded their home in order to murder them. She does the “oh wait, that’s not actually a good thing to do, is it?”, and then she acts upon this realisation. She does what a smart, good person would do.

Edithe is also a very believable character. At one point she tells Salvos to ignore what people think because people are idiots, to which Salvos responds “but you did something like that, too”. Edithe replies “Yes, and by people being idiots I mean myself in particular. I was an idiot and you showed me that I was wrong. That’s just how it is”. I like that – no self-justification, no holding on to past mistakes. You fix it, and you realise it was wrong and you were an idiot. You don’t keep being an idiot just to keep pretence that you were born smart.

So, in essence, the characters I love aren’t those who were born smart and omnipotent and can solve all problems with a flick of the wrist. It’s not a situation I can identify with. I can, however, identify with people who are forced to figure it out as they go, they have strong principles about what’s wrong, and keep revising ideas about what’s good and right as they evolve. Also, I love characters who focus under pressure, and can’t stand those who fall apart under it. I can’t stand “comedies” where everybody is confused, virtueless and fumbles and acts sinfully under pressure. I’d rather have my nails pulled than watch those. Things where someone experiences difficulty and tragedy, but gets their shit together and rises up to the occasion, those are my cup of tea.

I love characters that just get shit done. A good example is Eric Northman from “True Blood”. He sees a problem, he sees that he should do something about it, and then his actions look like a mathematical tree-balancing solution. He takes what he needs, does what needs to be done, tries to get maximum good with the least amount of bad side effects, and then just goes on with business as usual. His actions are determined by the needs of a situation, not his own egotistical considerations. In that, he’s the polar opposite of Edward Cullen, who’s trying to be good so hard, he ends up causing disaster after disaster.

Obviously, I identify with characters who embody things I can personally identify with. I can identify with being in all kinds of disasters and ignorance and trying to figure things out from scratch. I can identify with fucking things up and then learning from it and trying better next time. Basically, it’s the characters that are similar to myself, or at least how I want to be, and how I want to react in difficult situations. If I can’t see myself in a character, if I can’t see myself making their choices, I nope the fuck out.

The first thing one would probably ask me when they found out I read all those Salvos books is why? Why do I like it? What’s even good about it?

It’s easy to find parts that deserve criticism. For instance, the characters are written in annoying anime/manga ways; hysterical behaviour, immature stuff that’s supposed to be cute and it’s actually incredibly cringeworthy, author’s tendency to write only female lead characters while male characters look like fumbling fools who couldn’t tie their shoelaces without a female and so on. There’s lots of stuff not to like, and I actually don’t like it either. Also, not all of Melas’ writing is equally good. Some is outright terrible, especially when he tries too hard to be comical. “Amelia”, for instance, is a clusterfuck. It’s almost on top of my list of shittiest writing and dumbest characters in all of literature, and considering how many books I’ve read, that’s truly something. It’s almost as if he was kidnapped and waterboarded by inane, infantile worshippers of manga tropes and forced to write what they thought was hilariously funny good stuff without all that serious shit they don’t care for. Also, it’s almost as if he’s trying very hard to include all kinds of woke bullshit tropes in order not to offend American college audience. Basically, invert male and female typical roles, make most powerful characters gay, make everything that resembles Christianity look like the worst hypocritical bad guys and make Demons good. Sure, I get it, he’s being so progressive and radical in his thinking, it’s almost as if he’s thinking the same things as every stupid kid these days. Yawn.

The authors create characters that feel like themselves; I get it. Greg Bear and Stanislaw Lem write characters that all feel like IQ 150 physicists. Atheists can’t write good religious characters to save their life, because they don’t understand enough to do so. Gentry Lee writes every character as an intelligent person that was profoundly fucked up in some way and then tries to work their life around the fucked up place as a given, and manage symptoms with alcohol or something; it’s as if he was describing the JPL people in some bar in Pasadena. 🙂 Melas writes childish, immature characters who act in ways so hysterical and often stereotypical, it sometimes feels like drowning in a pool of cringe. It’s a lot to get used to, especially if you’re accustomed to reading sophisticated SciFi like Clarke, Lem, Asimov or Heinlein, or sophisticated fantasy like Tolkien or Zelazny. It’s as if there’s a whole subculture of worshipers of inane, hysterical, immature drivel, and Melas took care not to offend any of them by including all of it. So, now we have characters who drop to their knees in despair and pull their hair in anguish when issued a fine by the authorities. How mature.

But if that were all, I wouldn’t be reading it, would I?

“Salvos” is extremely appealing since the main characters are convincing and feel like real people with real problems they are trying to deal with in a reasonable way. Salvos herself wakes up without memories, without any idea about the world she’s in and the beings she encounters, and initially spends her points on trying to identify rocks, because she can’t believe they are all the same and hopes to find a special one. Then she meets others, and soon finds out that everybody is trying to kill each other in order to level, and encounters psychopaths, hapless victims, overpowering threats, and feels an urge to become more of herself, to rise up, to survive and, very soon thereafter, to surround herself with companions she can experience life with. She likes to be great, but in a very specific way – she wants to be great while surrounded by others she can share it all with. This is a particular distinction, because the books are full of people who are example of the opposite; they want to be great by being above everyone, by making everyone else a slave. Also, she develops an ethical worldview very quickly. She never attacks innocents, and never attacks first; she’s reactive in her violence. She tries to befriend someone first. In her worldview, there are wild demons and other wild things that just want to kill everything, and then there are “horned demons”, beings that pretend to be reasonable but are just as wild; the machiavellian psychopaths of the world, but she of course doesn’t have the term for it. When she accidentally falls through a portal into the Mortal Realm, her accidental encounter with Daniel is very inauspicious. She asks him to show her the way back to Netherworld and he tries to kill her because she’s a demon and must be guilty of everything he ever heard demons do wrong. She easily defeats him and knocks him out, and when he wakes up, disarmed, she berates him for attacking her with no reason instead of killing him. He then starts to figure out she’s not anywhere near what he thought, and starts helping her.

The world is not a trivial manga-fantasy trope. It kind of starts that way, but soon you figure out all kinds of complexity there, and it grows more complex as the main character moves in the world, learns more things and figures things out. It’s a gradual process; like seeing a child learn to walk, then run, then go get bread in the bakery independently, then go to school, and so on.

In the Mortal Realm, Salvos does something no demon ever seems to – she joins the human society and becomes a productive member. This is in part due to her own ethics, because she hates killing sentient beings but likes to level, and so she always finds some den of monsters that need to be eradicated, rather than do the easy thing and just kill random people. Her companions always start with “Demon! Let’s kill it!”, then she roughs them up a bit and they get to the “oh wait…” point, then they become hostile but tolerant, then friendly, and at some point when they really know her it becomes a bond of love and trust so strong, they would jump into fire for each other. For instance, Salvos never has to sleep, so she’s always on guard duty. Initially, her companions are very reluctant about it; oh great, let’s have the Demon on guard duty while we all sleep, what could go wrong. But eventually, Salvos on guard duty makes a zombie-infested swamp the safest place in the world, because they know they are the most precious thing in her life and she will literally go to the ends of the world to save them. They gradually understand that she just looks silly and childish, and that she’s in fact very methodical, calculated and strategic about her goals; it’s just that she was a literal baby when they originally met, and she had plenty of room to grow. And that she did. There are some things that never change about Salvos. She always wants to grow and become more. She wants to become powerful. She hates wild things. She forms deep interpersonal bonds. She’s incredibly loyal. She’s kind of terrible at explaining things to people in a gradual way that will get them to the same page. But she learns. She often starts as sucking terribly at something, then gets better, and then gets quite good at it, for instance navigation. Her manners suck, because she doesn’t understand why she shouldn’t just spit something out if she doesn’t like it, or make a scene if she feels like it. It’s normal to her to assume she should just do whatever she likes. It’s a hard habit for her to change, but she does change. The way that happens is realistic; it’s not just some sudden choice, but a very realistic thing, where something happens gradually as you figure it out piece by piece.

She officially joins human society at level 40, as a Gold ranked adventurer. The ranks are Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond and Elite. She rises through the ranks by killing monsters, cultists, demons and the undead. As she does, she becomes slightly famous at first, then very famous as the Liberator of the Plaguelands, and one of the most famous people in the world by the time she’s the Secely’s Sentinel. She joins Mavos Academy, the best magical school in human lands, and initially she struggles at everything. She gradually manages to read up to the point where she catches up with the lessons, then becomes a top student and even tutors others. It doesn’t just happen. We see the struggles, the hard work it takes.

She starts as an outcast, and gradually becomes a famous, incredibly highly esteemed adventurer within the human society, and one of its highest-ranked members. In the end, she’s one of humanity’s top generals in the fight against the Demon invasion. It’s all earned with hard work and lots of blood and sacrifice. She’s no Mary Sue; things don’t just work great for her because she’s Salvos. She gets her butt kicked more often than not. She gets cocky, and then something wrecks her so badly she barely escapes with her life. Sometimes, an enemy is so overpowering she loses and barely escapes multiple times as she levels, but it turns out not to be enough, and she has to change strategy, think things through and go through the entire heroic arc until she finally wins, and then it’s often nowhere near what she imagined at first.

She’s endearing because you can identify with her. She’s virtuous, but ignorant and she messes things up more often than not, then has to learn from the mistakes, pick herself up, understand what went wrong, and grow. She thinks growth means one thing, and then along the way it turns out to be five different things all at once, that she couldn’t even comprehend at the starting point. That stuff is very realistic. For instance, she thinks she has to learn space magic in order to travel back to the Netherworld back to Haec, and works hard to achieve it. However, along the way all kinds of things happen that complicate her understanding of what she’s even doing. For instance, as she grows to love her human companions, she can’t just leave them unprotected amidst an ongoing Demon invasion of the Mortal Realm in order to go back to her childhood friend. Her responsibilities get complicated. And she does learn responsibility. She is often chided by Edithe and Willy, the Grand Spirit of Diligence, and learns that she can’t just take off and leave whenever she doesn’t feel like doing something, because lives of other beings depend on her and she needs to learn true responsibility; and so she does. It’s a gradual change, but it’s also very realistic, with incremental steps of understanding and regression.

Salvos feels like a realistic, complex person, and not like some literary trope. Her world, the Nexeus, feels like a complex place with history, politics, ancient stuff that gets discovered and changes the way you see what’s going there. You have characters that look crazy, and you think they are one thing, and then you learn more and you understand that their crazy ramblings weren’t crazy at all; you just didn’t understand what’s going on. It’s complexity and nuance and sophistication wrapped inside superficial tropes. You think you’re reading a standard fantasy novel about a mage, a rogue and a warrior on their separate paths, joining forces to travel to a distant land, slay a dragon and achieve fame and fortune, and then stuff starts getting really sophisticated and you’re like “whoah, what is it that I’m actually reading here?”

So yeah, that’s why I like it.

Since Melas has been delaying continuation of his Salvos series for ever-changing reasons that never sound quite like the real one, and he will supposedly start posting again in October, I thought I might as well refresh my mental threads and write a summary of where the world and the characters seem to be going. What I’m about to write is my interpretation, but it relies very closely on what the author explicitly stated in at least one place, and often repeatedly. I’m in a unique position to catch all the hints because I’ve read Salvos, Amelia, Kara, Trace and Tian, plus some of his short stories; also, I have a very good memory so I can juggle with the entirety of his opus in my head without it even being hard. And, obviously, I’m doing many other things at the same time.

This contains spoilers. If you haven’t read the books, stop here and read them first.

Let’s start with the world itself. 50000 years ago it has been fatally damaged by the plan envisioned by Trico the Trickster, an ancient Worldwalker that mentored Samuel the Devil since he was barely more than what passes as a child among the Demons. He manipulated all kinds of powerful actors in the Nexeus to perform actions that he portrayed as part of the fight against the Worldwalkers, while they in fact served the purpose of breaking the structure of their own world. He did this in order to hide his responsibility for murdering a fellow Worldwalker, Via. He managed to convince Samuel the Devil that he is responsible, and then showed this as evidence to the other Worldwalkers, who agreed to punish the world of Nexeus collectively for the crime. Samuel never emotionally survived this betrayal, left his function of the Demon King, learned how to be a Worldwalker, and started emulating Trico in his actions, hoping that people would hate him and punish him for it, because guilt was killing him. His lover and viceroy, Belphegor, remained in the lower levels of Netherworld, fighting the spread of corruption that gradually turns the substance of Nexeus into nothingness for all that time. Salvos managed to heal Samuel’s broken soul, and convinced him to accept the path of redemption by joining Belphegor and protecting him in his doomed mission.

We don’t actually know what Nexeus itself is, as a world, because it consists of three planes separated by intra-planar pseudo-Void. Inside that pseudo-Void there’s a supermassive black hole, which is curious in itself, and makes me suspect that Nexeus might be some kind of distorted magical spacetime-ring that’s orbiting that black hole. It was mentioned that the Worldwalkers used to pass through Nexeus in order to recover, rest, and occasionally engage in petty fights. Time differential is a thing between the worlds, which was mentioned in the Amelia series, where time on Vacuos passes slower than on Earth, and so the family of Kalistus Kal lived their full lives and died while only a few years passed for him in Vacuos. Obviously, a world where time passes slower would be the opposite of useful for recovery, and the idea of a world where time passes more quickly and you can heal, recover and rejoin your own reality where only little to no time had passed was explored by Roger Zelazny in the Chronicles of Amber. The confirmation of that thesis can be found in the fact that Salvos seemingly lost a year or so when Samuel took her for a ride across the Multiverse, which took a very short time, minutes if not seconds. That would mean that time passes very quickly in the Nexeus, minutes to years, and you can spend ten thousand years in the Nexeus, while ten thousand minutes passed outside, which is about seven days. Those 50000 years since the fatal damage inflicted to the Nexeus would be a mere month outside, which explains why Trico can take his time and spend seemingly thousands of years on his schemes.

Regnorex has a terrible idea of tearing down the wall separating the Netherworld from the Mortal Realm, thus permanently connecting the planes. He also traded up from Hartia the fallen fairy, who used to be his main space mage. We don’t know whom he traded up to, but it must be someone really superb. Since we already know that Trico pulled a stunt of that kind 50000 years ago, convincing the locals to break the outer borders of their world because that’s how they’ll become Gods, the idea that it’s Trico who’s whispering in Regnorex’s ear has serious merit. He can’t destroy the Nexeus directly because he fears the wrath of the Arcraem, which appears to be the name of the local True God manifesting the Nexeus; so, he uses the gullible locals to destroy their own world and face the consequences, while he laughs at them and calls it a trick they’ve fallen for. At the point where the story hangs at the moment, the ritual of sacrifice of Demon blood with the purpose of breaking the walls separating the planes has just started, which means the Nexeus is facing imminent destruction. We can guess that Melas will find a way to prevent this, but in his other series he allowed the worlds to be completely destroyed, with only a handful of refugees escaping to some other world with the help of a Worldwalker. This indicates that he might allow this fatal and final destruction to the Nexeus to take place. However, it is also possible that Salvos will become powerful enough to save the Nexeus. It’s hard to tell what he has in mind so I’ll stop here.

Salvos has been in a progressively degrading emotional state for quite a while now; less time than books, though, since it’s been weeks since she fought Hartia, and it’s been multiple horribly diluted books filled with incremental stuff. However, she’s been in a situation where she got caught up with Haec’s plan of freeing the Demons enslaved by Regnorex, and ultimately deposing and defeating Regnorex himself. Salvos thinks it’s a terrible idea because she’s the only one who is actually powerful enough to fight the Demon King, and she’s far too weak at the moment, without a clear idea how to become strong enough quickly enough for it to matter. She has a dual rationale for getting involved; first is that Haec is her first companion and if he wants to do it, she’ll help him and protect him. The second is that Regnorex will break the Nexeus at worst, and flood the Mortal Realm with his Demons and himself at best, killing all her mortal companions and friends.

So, she has a situation where she can’t just level somewhere in peace, become strong enough and then revisit the problem, the way she would have normally done. Instead, she has to march towards Regnorex and hope she’ll level enough and evolve into a Primordial by the time she reaches him, and it will somehow be enough. Essentially, she’s flying blindly into a suicidal situation, but she can’t just do the rational thing and delay confrontation until she feels she’s ready. Furthermore, she’s surrounded by Demons who are not actually her true companions, or even true friends. They are with her mostly due to convenience and for protection, because she’s both incredibly strong and exceptionally skilled at space magic, and can thus whisk them away into her own pocket space if they are truly threatened. Haec has been acting weirdly and constantly overriding Salvos’ ideas and complaining about her way not being safe, while at the same time being the reason why she’s doing the least safe thing she would normally never do – attack Regnorex directly while not having a clear idea how to win or even survive.

She’s trying to befriend Hartia because she has a soft spot for the Fairies, but he’s treating her as if she were a leper because of her corruption, which seems to be escalating. Yes, that’s another thing – she was injured/corrupted by a powerful corrupted entity in the second layer of the Netherworld near the wall of infinite corruption, and while it initially seemed beneficial, granting her a Grand Skill and a powerful Title, she also couldn’t freely upgrade her Class, being forced to accept the Class of “Corrupted Apprentice”, with multiple corrupted Skills; trying to even read the description of other class options almost killed her with corruption. In this crazy plan to free the enslaved legions of Demons, she fought multiple enemies much stronger than herself, such as Jofis the Disgraced Hellking lvl. 197, who was an Immortal with a recursive Grand Skill, that grants him the use of Grand Skills of all the enemies he killed, Divinity, extreme regenerative abilities and ability to revive after being killed. Salvos used up all her Skills against him, and started to panic from not being able to kill the bastard despite corrupting him, striking him with a fatal attack, corrupting him again and so on. Eventually Manos the Executioner defected to their side and finished Jofis, and it turned out that Salvos did in fact defeat Jofis’ immortality and got a powerful stackable Title for it, but while that lasted, she was at her wits’ end. Immediately thereafter, she was put in a position of fighting another powerful foe, Chordus lvl. 193, while her Grand Skills were mostly on cooldown, and Chordus, at the precipice of defeat, triggered her suicidal Grand Skills that gave her the temporary level of 205.

Salvos lost an arm, and since her “My Flames…” Grand Skill was on cooldown, Corrupted Regeneration skill created a replacement arm from corruption. If all of that weren’t enough, her attempts at befriending Hartia failed despite the fact that she saved him twice in their fight against Jofis, by literally protecting him with her own body. As the ultimate emotional blow, Manos explained to her that he is ready to betray her if it meant his survival, because that’s how Demons are, and he told her that she was among the Mortals too much and probably forgot how to be a Demon. At this point, she is in complete shock, and abandons the rebel group without a word. I assume she left to kill some wild demons in the Wilderness and give herself time to think alone, and she’ll have to figure herself out before returning.

We know she’s not really self-aware, and is known to suffer from tunnel vision occasionally, and she constantly repeats how she’s a Demon and she’s proud of that, but the fact is that her entire spiritual evolution went in the directions opposite of those typical for Demons. In fact, she became a Lesser God at lvl. 150 because she embraced “becoming more”, which means she’s not merely a Demon; she’s also a being of love, compassion and empathy. Likewise, she’s been with humans for the vast majority of her life, and as much as she would say that she’s a Demon and not some stinking human, the fact that The World of My Mind is shaped like the Mortal Realm shows that this is what her true home looks like, and that she could be most authentic self with her human companions who have a relationship of total implicit loyalty with her, while with the Demons she can wear her Demon form, but all the emotional connections remain shallow and unsatisfying. The fact that they would all sell her out if push came to shove was the final straw – she’s surrounded by five million Demons who will run at the first sign of trouble, while she’s expected to fight a foe she can’t defeat for them and simultaneously keep them safe. A combination of PTSD, shock, exhaustion, injury and prospect of betrayal are simply too much for her and she called time out, because the situation was completely out of control for a while, and threatened to get further out of control in the future. She needs to get stronger, much stronger, before doing anything, but at the same time, Regnorex is currently threatening everything she loves and she can’t just do nothing, because then she loses everything by default, and that ritual has already started.

She’s essentially stuck between a rock and a hard place. At this point she’s lvl. 183 in subspecies and lvl. 171 in Class, with multiple powerful Titles, making her comparable to a Primordial 20 levels above her. The thing is, everything she has to fight is significantly stronger than that.

Haec is an idiot. He’s Salvos’ first companion, which means they were the first person each of them met that didn’t want to kill them, and instead wanted to cooperate with them and could be completely trusted. However, when they parted Salvos was a lvl. 16 Lesser Demon. When they reunited, she was lvl. 165 Lesser God. They both have the idea that they know each other the best because they knew each other the earliest, but since they parted, Haec became very much a lesser copy of Regnorex; Haec the Tormentor. He trained Dukes and Duchesses of the Netherworld, who were sent to the Mortal Realm to kill and spread chaos. Salvos, Secely’s Sentinel, was the one who stopped them. And now, Haec is acting as if he’s on a moral high ground, having a hard time forgiving others like him, who defected from the Demon King after having committed terrible crimes there – Hartia, Manos, the two Deathsquad Hunters. It’s incredible to watch this level of lack of self-awareness. I think Salvos should show him the parents of those children in the Cedric Academy that his student Ira callously sacrificed to bring in more Demons. Or the old lady Anya Veridian whose husband his students murdered because he had a thing they wanted. Would that even mean anything to the person who cares only about Demons? Haec doesn’t seem to understand what amount of bloodshed and terror his service to the Demon King directly caused. He’s a criminal, and he doesn’t even seem to understand that.

He’s also trying to prove to his girlfriend Taburas that he can say “no” to Salvos, and has recently been second-guessing or revising every decision she made, even though she was right every time, and is completely and blissfully unaware of Salvos’ emotional state. She’s powerful, so she can’t be vulnerable, right? She acts carelessly so she must be fine, right? But she’s not fine. Her human companions would have noticed. They’d ask what’s wrong. When she wouldn’t give them a clear answer, they would try to guess, because she’s clearly troubled. Haec didn’t notice, because he doesn’t actually know anything about her. It was her human friends that carried her half-dead from battles she won at great cost, and fixed her with potions and magic while she kept telling them she’s fine through the pain. It’s they who know her quirks and the difference between fooling around because she’s happy and fooling around to hide how troubled she is. Haec is an idiot, and he contributed to her depressed and anxious emotional state. He never stopped her, said she’s obviously worried about facing Regnorex at probably fifty levels and an evolution below him, and it’s fine because no, we’re not going to have you fight him. We’ll not have you die there. We’ll just find a way to sabotage his ritual. But no – when she was half dead from two successive fights with what looked like unbeatable enemies 20 levels above her, he showed her that the ritual just started and said they had to go, now. That’s the guy who calls himself a hero without even knowing what that means, who leads a rebellion while she fights all the major fights because he’s too weak to even be near, at lvl. 151 or something.

And now, when she ran, he’s surrounded by the millions of panicking Demons, whom he tries to convince to go fight Regnorex, the way he told Salvos, and they gave him a hard pass, because it’s obvious suicide and he’s an idiot. So, Manos, whom he doesn’t trust, offered to bring the rest of the Deathsquad Hunters as reinforcement, and he agreed. But then he realised what that means: if Manos is faking his defection from Regnorex, he’ll have a situation where 180 or so Primeval Demons, most of them of higher levelled than him, will come and slaughter them all, and there’s no Salvos to whisk them away with space magic. The only people there with any personal loyalty to him are Taburas, Bertrugil and Aemula, and they are mere Archdemons. Also, one of the defected Deathsquad Hunters is obviously going to betray them. They are fucked.

However, we know that Haec survives this and lives to see Salvos return. We know Salvos grows stronger and learns another Grand Skill. We know she will try to deal with the ritual herself, and Haec will try to dissuade her, because he thinks it’s suicidal. We know this because we had a snapshot of a point slightly in the future from where the story stopped, because Sally, the sentient and emancipated clone of Salvos that was left in the Mortal Realm to watch over her children, companions and friends, synced memories and powers with Salvos before dying in a fight against Matriarch Centinel lvl. 238. Sally developed a soul of her own, not just a mana system of her own, but she was not able to level independently, because the System didn’t recognize her as an independent. This is an interesting situation, because it implies that her experience will be added to Salvos, together with her memories, and, presumably, her soul, which is important, because Sally is the un-corrupted template of Salvos that was left in the Mortal Realm and completely separated before Salvos got corrupted in the Netherworld. This might mean that Salvos might heal her soul from the adverse effects of the Corruption that currently prevent her from accepting non-corrupted Classes. As useful as Corruption is in a fight, it’s a terrible thing that will eventually kill her and destroy everything. The main thing Salvos currently lacks is a way to cure Corruption.

Rachel had a first adult experience in her life. She imitates Salvos and her reckless ways in her childish naivety, and thinks everything will be fine. She disobeyed Clayton, convinced Sally to help her, went out of the protective barrier of the Mavos Academy and tried to talk to the Matriarch Centinel, not knowing she’s there because she hates Salvos and wants to kill her. So, when the Matriarch saw Sally, all hell broke loose, Rachel was gravely wounded and survived only because of Sally’s protection, and Sally died. So, Rachel now has a sobering experience where her childish irresponsible behaviour had deadly consequences and she has to deal with it, because she just had her friend and parent-figure killed.

Edithe took Willy and Centina with her to the Spirit Realm, trying to find Archangel to recruit him for fighting the Matriarch Centinel. Things of course went wrong, because not only were they stuck there, but the Archangel itself got in a fight with the Spirit Lord and lost, badly. She then managed to get in touch with its soul fragments through his remains, and made a deal that got her in the worst situation imaginable – Archangel in control of her body, herself a mere witness, but the Archangel did return them to the Mortal Realm, got her friends to safety, and fought Matriarch Centinel; and almost lost because its skills were all on cooldown from fighting the Spirit Lord. They used Edithe’s skill, Vindication of They, and it killed not only the Matriarch, but apparently the Archangel as well, because he, too, harmed Edithe. She is left in full control of the body that is gravely injured, and passes out. We can expect her to be healed, but she’s in a weird position where she’s in fact Edithe/Archangel hybrid with wings and what not. Her level is so high that Clayton can’t see it, which should be impossible with his level and Identification, knowing that lvl. 250 is supposed to be a hard ceiling. On the other hand, the Archangel is the Judge Appointed by the Arcraem; essentially, the agent of the System. Edithe’s level should be around 140, but if she gets the experience from killing Matriarch Centinel and the Archangel, that’s going to be the greatest level-up ever, literally. She is likely to get her class upgrade instantly, and she is likely to be offered weird options. That would be fun to watch, honestly.

Clayton’s pride is very much squished. He lost Salvos when she was under his command in the battle of Inor, because he failed to understand the true nature of the ritual, failed to stop them before it was too late, and told Salvos to go stop Levithus, which she did, at great cost to herself. He saw how badly injured she was after that battle. And then, when all was lost and they all prepared to die to Regnorex, Salvos figured a way out for them, but it required her to go through that portal and end up on the other side, right under Regnorex’s axe.

Clayton is a realist and he can’t deceive himself. She most likely died there. There is a slight possibility that she might have escaped, but injured and depleted as she was… And it was his fault. The best he could do to repay her for her sacrifice was to take care of her children and Willy. And now, he had to let Edithe, Centina and Willy go into the Spirit World where Edithe and Centina will likely be stranded and die, and he couldn’t protect them, or go in their stead. The last surviving clone of Salvos died in a heroic, doomed fight against an enemy almost 90 levels above her, and for some strange reason managed to put up more of a fight than Clayton himself could ever hope to. Then Matriarch Centinel proceeded to destroy the magic barrier, and he finally understood what Corruption is and what Salvos tried to warn them about, because he saw the End of the World in the mind of Matriarch Centinel by inspecting her magic, and he saw how profoundly corrupted Matriarch is. He was already in shock, processing it all, when Edithe/Archangel hybrid arrived and he understood that Edithe did something that got her reduced to a shell inhabited by the Archangel, which meant he lost another friend, and got a companion of Salvos killed, when his job was to protect them for her.

Orgaf, Helena and unnamed other Elites are traversing the Beastmen Plains, re-tracing Salvos’ steps in search of the Corruption she was speaking of. I can imagine them finding the local tribes and asking for direction, and seeing the huge obelisk that was raised in the honour of the Avenger, who saved the tribes twice. They ask around and understand that the Avenger is Salvos herself. I can imagine Orgaf lifting his eyebrows at Helena significantly and saying “I can’t remember us making a monument for her, despite the fact that she saved our collective butts more than twice”.

Helena is deeply troubled. The Corruption is obviously a serious issue, and she absolutely has to investigate. On the other hand, she feels all kinds of ways about Salvos, being a Demon and all, but also obviously saving them. She is repressing it all, because there’s nothing constructive she can really do about that now other than follow the leads Salvos left them.

Daniel is essentially doing what he thinks is expected of him for being a Hero, fighting the Elf invaders and all, but he’s emotionally running on fumes, and the only thing he lives for is being there when Salvos returns. He fights, he levels, he endures. Then Yves Virgil, the Watcher himself, crossed his path, initially in his alter-ego of Yvonne Vigil the famous Trader, offering him a crazy deal: she’ll fix the Primordial Sword of Salvos, and he’ll give her the Sword of Alexander, which she of course declined, but he was still curious if she could actually do it. However, then he ended up being the Watcher’s Apprentice, killing the undead servants of Hark-Oth the Old God of Undeath in the tunnels within the Astros mountain and levelling all the way to 180. His class as a Trader, of course, is a dead weight that’s doing absolutely nothing for him, being probably at lvl. 20 and not going anywhere since he’s not actually doing any trading, unlike Salvos whose Class is at lvl. 171, and Edithe, who’s busy killing shit and her second Class as a Warrior must be doing pretty well, too.

Daniel is in a pickle, because the most likely reason why the Watcher lured him to a mountain in the middle of nowhere is to level her (because there are multiple hints that the Watcher might actually be a girl) Trader class by getting the Sword of Alexander cheaply, and then basically fatten him up by levelling him in those tunnels, only to sacrifice him to Hark-Oth, which would level both her Trader and Warrior classes and push her towards her lvl. 200 evolution, or class advancement, as humans have it. The only good argument against this line of thought is that the Watcher was always known as a paragon of honour and decency, who made Mori Gladius into the great man he ended up being. So, we have self-interest vs. character.

Also, we find out that Daniel refused to advance his Class because the only option he got was “The Chosen Hero of Salvos”, and he waited with that until Salvos returned or he got other options later, which he didn’t, all the way to lvl. 180, which means the System has excellent reasons for picking it, and it also makes Salvos into a figure of major historic or even cosmic proportions. He proceeds to advance his class, and they are then expected to use [Teleport Feather: Epic Grade – Capable of instantly teleporting the holder to anyone they are thinking of. One-time use only]. It’s obvious to everyone that Daniel might end up thinking about Salvos and teleporting not just himself, but also the lvl 195 Watcher and Kacey the Crusader to wherever Salvos happens to be at the moment, which, most likely, is in great trouble, since she didn’t teleport instantly to Sally’s location once the memories synced, and she realised her companions were in mortal danger, and not in the safety she left them in.

The Mortal Realm is a clusterfuck at the moment. The Plaguelands are turning into normal lands, which means the borderland between the Kobolds and Humans (Van Qieur Empire specifically) is becoming permeable, which means a war is bound to break out eventually, since the Van Qieur empire holds a grudge against the Kobolds for all the murderous incursions, and the Kobolds basically want to exterminate the humans for their role in corrupting the Nexeus. And Saffron, Salvos’ companion and roommate at Mavos Academy, is riding with them, which puts her right in the middle of danger. Beside that, the Humans are currently at war with the Elves who invaded their land, Inoria and Elutra are mostly “netherfied”, or turned into half-Netherworld, and they are all exhausted and not in a great condition for the incoming invasion Regnorex is planning. Also, the Council of Cremont turned out to be a nasty self-serving cult that seems to be on the way to becoming the major villainous force.

Which brings us to the Spirit Lord, or Soli as the Devil and the Archangel call him. There were already hints that this deal Alexander made with the Spirit Lord harmed humanity greatly and benefitted only Alexander and the Spirit Lord; the Lich of Zacharius was particularly adamant on that, and I would take that part of his ramblings seriously. Also, when it turned out that the Archangel wasn’t just a raving lunatic, but a Judge Appointed by the Arcraem, it suddenly turned out that the Spirit Lord wasn’t some kind of a Jesus figure the humans make him out to be, but a self-serving impostor who made an entire iconography trying to portray himself as the God of Nexeus, replacing the Arcraem in the minds of people and, apparently, in reality, if his plans come to fruition. Also, the Judge was apparently ordered by the Arcraem to put a stop to Soli because he’s doing something that will destroy the Nexeus and the Arcraem itself. The only thing that comes to my mind that’s this dangerous and immediate is the sacrificial ritual of Regnorex that intends to break one of the interplane walls of the Nexeus and, likely, make the whole thing crumble into Corruption and be finally destroyed.

Which brings us to the worst possible scenario here. There are lots of hints. The Spirit Lord just popped out of nowhere at some point, took control of the chaotic Spirit Plane, and made a deal with the Immortal King Alexander, who also just popped out of nowhere and wasn’t actually summoned as a Hero by anyone. There’s a word for a Hero who comes to a world on his own. Worldwalker. That’s the Class the System offered Amelia in the other series: “Worldwalker Hero of Vacuos”. She, too, just popped in on her own. Also, there are other terrible hints – the mocking grin on the face of Soli’s vessel during the fight with Iudex. The parade rest. The speech about waging war against the Worldwalkers. The final attack against Iudex, that wasn’t a Skill, and didn’t use the magic of the world. We’ve seen all of this before.

Soli is actually Trico, or a sock puppet for Trico, a transparent proxy. He’s been cooking up plans to destroy the Nexeus and use its energies to become a True God, promising the gullible locals vengeance against the Worldwalkers who doomed Nexeus; the way he lured them into destroying their own world 50000 years ago. He’s ancient, he’s the worst kind of a psychopath, he’s incredibly skilled in mind magic and space magic, and taught the Devil everything the Devil knows, but nowhere near all Trico himself knows. He’s not just an enemy Salvos will inevitably have to face in the end. He’s the solid wall of steel, an entity that would require Archangel, Samuel, Belphegor, Focalor and Salvos at her final lvl. 200 evolution to defeat; and they can’t kill him because doing that will invoke the wrath of the Worldwalkers upon the Nexeus.

So, what’s the way out of this? For Salvos at the current level, even Regnorex is beyond her abilities, and not by just a little. Regnorex has Focalor on a literal chain – obviously because Focalor’s enslavement soul magic rebounded and enslaved him instead, which is a nice piece of poetic justice considering what he did to Paimon, Hydra, Basilisk and, apparently, Belphegor, not to mention having all ascending Primordials killed so that his King wouldn’t lose the Title. So, now he’s a chained slave to Regnorex, who apparently won all his major battles for him from the beginning, which makes me think that Regnorex hides his level (Manos never saw it, btw) not because it’s so big, but because it’s barely above 200. It’s also the reason why he kills everyone who wants to ascend to Primordial, and assures that only those without Grand Skills can ascend to Primordial, which probably means they ascend to something that’s harmless to him, or that they aren’t granted the “Hellking” evolution, the way those without Grand Skills aren’t granted “Hellprince” Primeval evolution. I think Regnorex might be weaker than everybody is led to believe, but Focalor, on the other hand, is an incredibly overpowered ancient menace whose level is probably around 225 or more; definitely something like the Great Agarus. He was a powerful Primordial who enslaved other Primordials 50000 years ago.

The good thing is, Salvos is an incredibly good soul mage; passive at first, with Truth Divination as her only active soul magic Skill, but it’s really a big one; strong enough to overpower Titus the Thrilling Bard at lvl. 150. Strong enough to heal the soul of Samuel the Devil who’s probably above lvl. 240. She’s strong because her soul is pure, sincere and there’s something special about it. She might find herself attacked by Focalor, and she might use Truth Divination during the fight to see what’s wrong with him, and tell him her father is back, he’s with Belphegor in the old First Kingdom, and he needs his friend back. If anything is going to break Focalor’s chains, it’s that.

Which brings us to the next point. Who is Salvos, really? I mean, there’s a possible answer that’s quite mundane: survivorship bias. She’s someone who happened not to die early because of all kinds of circumstances. But there was always something special, something Daniel noticed early, with her golden eyes that seemed to be magical, and he was quite sure they were. Something positive, uplifting, coercive in a good way, that makes people exceed their self-imposed limitations and rise up. Some inspiring, great power that belies her low level.

Which made me think. What if she’s actually someone special? The System gave her the “Angelic Premonition” skill that makes her see the immediate future. The dragon of Vacuos said that the System sees the future. What if nothing about her is an accident? The Devil just happening to meet her in a cave and later adopting her looks too improbable to be an accident. Her finding the First Kingdom underground is too improbable to be an accident. Everything about her is to improbable to be an accident. What if she’s actually special?

In Amelia and other places Melas hinted that the soul of a Worldwalker who dies outside of his native world is permanently lost, except if the System of the native world adopts them as their own and thus saves them. Salvos, in broken Latin, means “The Saved One”. This is a far-fetched hypothesis, for sure, but I have plenty of hints in the original material to show in its defence. What if Salvos is in fact the soul of Via the Worldwalker, who was murdered when she tried to kill Trico the Trickster, a multiversal menace and a villain? What if the Arcraem saw it, and understood that she’s essentially a good person who got stranded in an evolutionary blind alley of being a Worldwalker, because she failed to take the path of selfless love and compassion that would have made her a True God? What if he saved her, adopted her, and gave her another chance, by putting her on a path that would allow her to become a True God, if only she made the right choice this time. Golden light seems to be synonymous with soul magic, but there was an explosion of golden light spreading across Nexeus when Via died. Salvos has golden eyes. Her clones are made of golden fire. It’s not conclusive, but it’s indicative. What if Arcraem adopted Via the way Elocunive of Utana adopted Tian? Only different, because she died?

And now, Salvos is in the Wilderness, trying to figure herself out, understand who she really is. Did she forget what it’s like to be a Demon, and needs to remind herself of her true nature? Or is she aware what being a Demon means, and he chose against it even before lvl. 150? Her last Grand Skill begins with “I Am…”, and we are left on a cliffhanger. It is obvious that she decides who she really is, and who she wants to be. We just don’t know what that is.

And this, I’m afraid, concludes my analysis, because I am out of material to work with.

There’s another thing, surely. The true nature of the System. In Amelia and Trace, the characters speculate that the System might be evil or indifferent, because it awards levels and achievements for people killing each other and being psychopaths. It takes a peaceful world and turns it into a slaughterhouse. That’s certainly true. It is also incredibly self-serving, and fights all alternative forces and threats to its dominion. But then there’s the Pishtim of Utana, from the Tian series, and I would take this as the most authoritative source, because here we have it first-hand from the Core of a System world. Apparently, the System wants to produce beings of selfless love, but it doesn’t mean anything unless it’s at the highest level of power, because, apparently, love and compassion of weak beings don’t mean anything. They have no value. If you’re too weak to do harm, your choice for the good is meaningless. Essentially, a soul-vector consists of the scalar part that defines its power, and the directional part that defines what it actually is and what it does and why. What the System tries to produce is a being of maximum power with a vector of loving-kindness goodness. That, I think, needs one further step in understanding to become a True God. A being at maximum power but with direction other than loving-kindness is a failure, and those exist as Worldwalkers, alleviating their eternal boredom with pointless fights and pointless entertainment.

So, the System doesn’t actually care about deaths of lesser beings, probably because of another thing that is hinted, that their souls are re-absorbed into the System, or at least the world-God, such as the Arcraem. Maybe they are reincarnated with wiped memories, maybe they just give the Arcraem experience; it’s impossible to tell because the author never made it clear. But in any case, there’s much more to it than a mere gamified RPG system; the author tries to make a spiritual message underneath, but I’m not actually sure how conscious and deliberate he is about it.

What remains is pure speculation. For instance, the all-but-imminent evolution of Salvos is going to be interesting, and let me see what I can guess. She’s currently corrupted, and so the Class advancement options offered to her were also corrupted, only one of which she was able to accept without dying. It is reasonable to assume that her Subspecies evolutions at lvl. 200 will be corrupted as well, and she might find herself in a pickle if she can’t accept any of them without dying, and at the same time she’s in the middle of a crisis.

Also, we can guess that one of the options she’ll get will be the linear continuation of her current evolution – “Godly Devil Queen”, which is extrapolated from both Archangel’s stuff and what Samuel’s evolution seems to have been. It’s a Greater God evolution, as well as a Primordial Demon evolution, probably the single such case, or one of a negligible number, because in order to get the next evolution as a God you needed to have a Lesser God evolution at lvl. 150. If you got the Lesser God evolution at 200, the way everybody else seems to, it’s your last evolution and you’re done. If you got it at 150, you have one more evolutionary step in the future, and so far only Salvos got there; ok, there are possible exceptions of Samuel and the Fairy Queen, but I wouldn’t really know.

The second evolutionary option, I guess, would be as a servant of the Arcraem; something along the Archangel line, “The Archangel of the Arcraem” or something. It would bind her to the Nexeus permanently, or at least make her the successor to the Arcraem and make her “World of My Mind” the next Nexeus, if the world happens to be doomed. This will be the option to save her friends, but relinquish her autonomy.

She will likely feel there should be more and have some crisis, and all options will be corrupted so she won’t be able to take them. So, she’ll just stay in some limbo, unable to go forward, unable to get out, stuck and desperate, when the memories of Sally start syncing, and along with them the trickle of experience. When Sally dies, she will get her uncorrupted soul template which will heal her corruption and give her another element of “becoming something more”, and just as this process of healing and integration finishes, there will be a huge surge of experience when Edithe/Archangel hybrid kills the Matriarch Centinel lvl. 238, and Archangel himself dies to Edithe’s Skill, giving her both an incredible boost of experience and levels, and then something happens that I can’t guess. Either she makes a qualitative leap in thinking and becomes a True God, or she gets another, more acceptable evolutionary option, or she just has the first two unlocked and available finally. In any case, she evolves, and then proceeds to solve the immediate situation, and finds herself in the mess she has to resolve with all the political tact and finesse that she sorely lacks. But this is as far as I can take it. OK, I can assume that they will end up on Earth at some point because she promised Daniel she’ll bring him back home.

In any case, it’s the author’s thing to finish.