The Devil's Cage

Read through about Ch. 105 so far.  Great internal consistency in this story, and shockingly, a MC who is actually pretty smart, has a reason and motivation for his actions, and doesn't completely shun help when he needs it.  

Anyway, MC voluntarily joins a VRMMO death game in order to earn money for an operation (on himself), which gives him essentially a reason to risk his life.  The VRMMO is set up into a series of self-contained missions, at the end of which he is sent back into a hub to prepare for the next mission.  While theoretically he can log out, essentially he has no life worth speaking of in the real world and he needs to power up quickly to save his life, so for the purposes of the MC's story it's essentially very similar to VRMMOs where characters are trapped in the world.  

It's a little distressing he doesn't try to powergame and min/max his build given the free availability of a player trading system with very minimal account-bound items, he just kind of rolls with the skills he picked up in his newbie mission despite exponentially increasing costs to level them - despite their exceeding cheapness he hasn't ever bought a single basic skill despite the basic skill level at the lowest level is probably the equivalent of a very highly skilled normal person - basic skill in dagger and sneak has him OHKO assassinating street thugs by the dozen, and basic skill in light arms gives him one-shot headshot mastery of all light firearms.  And he's never so much as checked to see what kind of skills he can pick up.  

Which might be more reasonable, except he's intentionally soloing missions instead of working in teams, so he has enormous skill gaps he doesn't really realize, and there's frankly quite a bit of plot armor that keeps him from being killed outright.  For example, in his 3rd mission, he  plays mercenary, and just as all the team is about to be poisoned eating a meal, he happens to detect it with a skill he coincidentally picked up in his 1st mission.  Which is fine, but there's really no reason he hasn't died  in any number of ways from soloing without being a jack-of-all-trades given the game's general unfairness.  Or how he picked up a lockpicking skill recently, but up until he got the lockpicking skill, he's never encountered a locked door or chest or cabinet or anything, which is just a non-deadly form of plot armor.

There are fun quirks that make the worlds fun; in his 2nd mission, he's basically Sherlock Holmes, and the MC alters his speech accordingly on the theory that playing his assigned character role will make the NPCs act more positively, which appears to be correct although it's not really proven either way.  At any rate, the fact that he's essentially shifting to different settings allows the story to keep from getting dull, and the author is quite good at pulling off a variety of settings that feel significantly different.

All in all, a well-written, entertaining and refreshingly different take on a VRMMO stat-based quantum-leap style world (apparently this is a sorta established genre in the Chinese webnovel world, but I haven't read others).

The story keeps getting better and better.
I like the fact that the MC has more missions in the same mission worlds unlike one world per mission. It gives author the chance to develop the world background.
The side characters are unlike other cliche novels, where anybody can become the MC's friend only because they were their and had a good character. Also unlike other novels where side characters are all generic, the side characters in Devil's Cage and varied with depth to them. For example:
The great witch, the alchemist, the lover in the SHAMAN WORLD.
The historian, the muscle guy, historian's disciples in the ISOGU WORLD.
The little dependent princess in another world.
And many more.
Also, the MC is always deducing and searching for clues which gives him a detective kind of style which seems much better than the guy in "Thriller Paradise".

This is one of those stories where you like it at first but start to wonder why you are still reading it later.
MC's life outside the game is completely ignored. The story just jumps from one dungeon to another and it gets irritating to see no real progress and character development.
I hope it improves later or I would drop it.

I can't get enough of this novel man
The main character is absolutely cool
And it has no harem yay!
Story is amazing it's like a different story per arc
Other arcs are continuation of other stories
World building is good
The sidecharacters are not hallow.
They feel like real people specially the first one.
I missed one character in this novel
The first side character introduced
There is no romance atleast i think so.
Translation is a bit slow because i keep reading and reading i can't just stop
It has like 1000 chapters in the raw
I wish i knew chinese

This is a very good novel it takes a twist on the normal vrmmo novels with it being set in a underworld type of game! Personally I feel like it is very interesting because of the game mechanics and how the race against time is ****** him make un-normal decisions to make money.

Translation-okay,Updating stability-okay,Story Development-okay,Character Design-Okay,World Backround-okay.Well I was just thinking its about time I make a review for this good novel,1st its like Terror infinity and Ultimate evolution because of its entry based model but also different because in TI and UE the stories is based on movies,differrent because in this novel in every dungeon there is also story and its original made by the author not something copied from others,2nd as far as the story goes its good the MC is not that strong in the beginning he's power is earn through hardwork and challenging risk to earn better rewards he also know how to use all of his advantage,3rd ehhh im waiting for more!!!!!,for those who read this review right now i dont see anything wrong with this novel so I Highly Recommend it,thats all.

It was good while it lasted. Now quarter of the chapters are locked. I know why you locked so many chapters but my gosh. You guys are killing me

This has a very great potential but sadly trash execution

Read 1300 chapters before dropping.A fairly solid read. Without spoiling anything, These will be what you need to know:
* Main charcter stays cold, calculated and wary of strangers through and through.
*Other than some girls crushing on MC, almost no romance.
* Action is present towards the end of the arcs lightly but action is not the key of any arc. The story and plot twists are what make this novel a gem, if it is one at all.
* The author does not have the habit of building the worlds in detail. He puts them into dialogues and you will miss a lot of the story of you don't attention and skim over.
* There are fairly good plot twists in every arc, but almost all the villains are one dimensional dumbasses who go into c*cky monologues thinking they are the sh*t before dying.
* Don't expect jumping from game world to reality and vice versa like other novels. Reality is inconsequential.

I dropped because it's like watching Fairy tail. Same story formula applied over every arc.

Did he get his illness cured and when ?

Its fine to just pass some time, the beginning is really good, it gave me high expectations, but I ended up being disappointed. So if you read it without having any expectations, especially from the beginning of the novel, then it's a decent read. 3/5*

Yeah, the story has its moments, like a few of the scenarios are genuinely a good read, but much of it feels like poorly pieced together filler.