Life’s tough when you’re trapped in an eight-year-old body on another world.
His name is Eight. Not really, but that’s what the System decided after a slip of the tongue. One moment, he was stepping out the office door on the way home, and the next waking up on a hillside below a town wall. Oh, and the gate guard drove him off, because he thought Eight was a monster.
What’s a boy to do in a world full of magic and so many, many hungry creatures searching for their next meal? Well, there’s an old man inside that body, and he’ll use everything he’s learned in his sixty-four years to survive. Starting a fire? Sure. Crafting a spear? Check. Defending the cave he calls home? Also check, a big one.
There are allies too, but not the kind you’d expect.
As of writing this review, I have read the first book in the series.
Similar series are hard to place for this one. It is definitely all about the solo MC surviving in nature, similar to Defiance of the Fall, or the tutorial intro for Randidly Ghosthound. But it’s also far slower paced, like it’s trying for the slice-of-life aspects that one might find in Beware of Chicken, except without the wholesome and cute aspects.
As alluded to in the blurb, book one follows Eight as he tries to survive in the wild.
For those that have a strong interest in survivalism, you’ll probably enjoy this.
For me, this wasn’t a great match, because I enjoy exploring systems, magic, and technology far more than the survival aspects. I just wrote up my thoughts on Portal to Nova Roma and so shall use that as the example. In terms of pacing, in Portal to Nova Roma (spoilers): Alexander fights monsters, closes dungeons, establishes alliances with the enclaves, works out new skills, figures out enchanting, picks up perks, ventures out of the city with new friends, embroils himself in the political conflict, clears out parts of the city, and a few other things. It’s non-stop.
In Eight, Eight makes friends with a spirit otter, fights worms buried in a dragon turd, kills a deer for meat, integrates a fungus into his body, fights some more animals, and culminates with rescuing two kids from a pair of slavers and fighting off a pack of baboons.
This all takes place near the glade in which the otter lives, and the inability of Eight to speak the local language means that there isn’t a single piece of substantial dialogue in the entire book. There’s sign language that Eight tries to learn, with some success. The lack of character interaction and dialogue does make it hard to know the character properly, and similarly having the book be constrained to a forest near a glade means it’s not really possible to do much world-building. The world is just a forest at this point, after all.
In terms of the system, there is minimal interaction. Eight levels up a few times, but apart from level one, he isn’t awarded any talents. When he gets to pick a class, he just picks the forester one, which doesn’t have any active use, and just makes several skills “active”. I don’t really understand what the benefit of this is, but the outcome is that the system doesn’t seem very relevant to the story, and there is a very minimal amount of creative agency and no possible theorycrafting build pathways.
There’s both cultivation and magic, however the former is currently limited to pushing qi into things to make them a bit better for a minute, and magic is Eight copying some runes that let him cast a basic spell or two (like making a Cold Snap).
So maybe this wasn’t my cup of tea, but if you want a laid-back book with a guy tanning leather and making bows and arrows from wood, jump right on in. If you’re looking for lots of skills, classes, action, or character interaction, it might not be the best for you.
