- #1
A guy is transmigrated into a gates filled with monsters novel, into this shitty awful half brother of one of the books main characters. Except it becomes pretty apparent that this character (who's an alchemist) has knowledge and skills that the world doesn't know about yet (MC does, as he knows the future of the "book"). Anyways, said character died in the books pretty early on, because he was stuck between a rock and a hard place: he knew that killing monsters would get him corrupted (eventually resulting in a painful death), but didn't have any way to fix it, or get stronger without killing monsters. The thing is, nobody else knows about this corruption either, and won't understand it well for years, after most of the S ranked awakeners are dead from it's effects, at which point there's almost nobody to fight off the monsters. Of course, MC does know, so he sets out to find the item that can heal this corruption and prevent the end of south korea.The thing is, the item that heals this corruption is actually a bird (called salt), and healing an awakeners corruption has the unfortunate side effect of feeling absolutely amazing, which means that healing any given S ranked awakener is dangerous as hell, lest salt get stolen or MC just getting imprisoned.This story is very similar to "The S-Classes That I Raised" (no real romance, all found family, but quite a bit of pseudoBL undertones), also in the sense that MC is running around wrangling people much stronger than him into helping him protect the world. Unlike the S classes that I raised, he's not really trying to save the world, just his immediate surroundings, and there's no crazy system end of the world fight going on.The worldbuilding is quite nice, and I like MC's powerset: he's not very strong, but he's creative, and if he has high ranking alchemy materials, he can deal some serious damage despite his own lack of stats (ex. Turning a boss's core into a magic handgun with strong bullets). The fact that killing monsters slowly causes a sickness is fascinating: it basically adds time limits to every character's hunter career, and drastically changes the power balance, as the stronger someone gets, the closer they get to, well, going insane and/or exploding. That being said, the awakeners in this universe are significantly more superhuman than normal. S rank? You literally don't have to eat food ever. Crazy power, crazy drawbacks, I guess. As far as dungeon gate awakener universes go, this is absolutely one of the best.Characters! I mentioned before that it's very found family, because it is. First off, the body MC inhabits has a terrible relationship with his half brother for quite a bit, until his half brother realizes he's being a horrible as*hole and basically pulls a 180. MC is quite fond of children/teenagers because of his past life's experience, and won't leave them in a bad situation. MC is blunt, prickly, and crafty, but he's not mean, and he's very smart. He sort of has the male tsundere refusing to admit he cares for someone thing, but it's more that others get very attached to his form of affection/help, and he just thinks of them as coworkers (again, he's not s*upid, just confused about why). So we have a basically support character with a penchant for giving battlefield orders sneaking around with several S ranks very worried about him.Critically, MC basically gets to decide, for every high ranking awakener, if he wants to let them die, or save them via purification, even though it puts him in danger/gets him a new pseudo-romantic interest. He also tends to do this quite rationally, and doesn't get emotionally devastated over the implications of his own limitations.I am serious when I say there's no romance though, it's just crazy powerful people wanting to protect (or steal) MC, as he's the one that gives purification.