Speedrunning the Multiverse

Blurb

Conquer all foes. Reach peak Power. Now, do it faster.

The Multiverse is filled with terrific opportunities and terrible dangers—warring sects, priceless treasures, savage martial arts, and all manner of horrible monsters abound.

And Dorian has conquered them all.

He’s a Godking—one of the most powerful creatures to ever exist. And as he sits from his throne at the literal summit of the world, bored out of his mind, one question comes to mind: what now?

Do it all again, of course!

But faster.

He’ll aim for the impossible — A PERFECT RUN.

Thoughts

I’m a sucker for time loops and regression, so the premise here was immediately appealing. Dorian is bored with an empty existence of being super powerful, so he resets and tries to do it all again, but faster. It flips the usual cultivation setup on its head: instead of a weak protagonist grinding upward, you get someone who already knows every shortcut and exploit (even if they need their memory jogged). You go in with the expectation that Dorian is going to break things and be a, shall we say, non-traditional cultivator, and you get that in spades.

The caveat is that book one doesn’t actually feel like a speedrun. Dorian’s original run took over 500 years, and book one covers about weeks (maybe a couple of months, I forget), so it’s just the beginning of the speedrun. I see a lot of reviews being unhappy with this, which is dumb, because those weeks have Dorian blazing through the initial ranks ludicrously fast.

Dorian himself is an acquired taste. He’s cold, callous, and incredibly jaded about the world. People are tools, there to be exploited. If someone dies, well, Dorian doesn’t really care about anyone’s life (including his). He’s tactically polite, functional with people, but he’s not your guy if you want an MC who forms heartfelt bonds. I find it refreshing, and a bit closer to some of the cuthroat MCs in the traditional, translated cultivation stories. The story earns his detachment rather than framing it as a quirk to be healed. Others bounce off him hard and I get it.

That said, it’s not like Dorian is a flat, unemotional robot of cultivation. He’s irreverent and funny as hell, and I actually laughed more than once in when reading his antics (first time this year a story has been able to do that). In particular, there’s a hilarious toe sucking scene in the Oasis which both made my laugh and reminded me DCC has a new book out. Two birds, one stone.

Other characters are a mixed bag. The last few books have Gerald and Sun as persistent characters, which really helps ground things, as in earlier arcs when Dorian outgrows his location the characters there are discard. In some cases, they’re literally all dead. And for all I like Dorian’s complexity, I feel the treatment Kaya got was a bit rough. I won’t spoil what happens, but it seemed like she went from a caring, sisterly figure in book one into something completely different in books two and then different again in book three. I wish that was tied in nicer, or had a more positive ending, but I guess half the point of the story is that the multiverse is a brutal place and power is everything.

Where the series earns its stripes is the mechanics. Knowing the system in advance means Dorian doesn’t stumble into power, he curates what he learns, improves upon it, and masters it perfectly. There’s no “what does this skill do?” discovery phase, just someone who knows exactly what build they want and executes it. The multiverse has enough variety across realms that it doesn’t feel like one long grind through identical content.

Honestly, going in I thought this was going to be power fantasy slop, but it’s so much more and for that I’m grateful.