- #1
This novel may not be one of the greatest novel I've read before, but it certainly deserves a 5-star.The story starts with the MC, a petty criminal who mainly scams others using his mind-reading powers, being dragged into Tantalus, essentially Tartarus, but if it was for the worst criminals in the nation, not titans. When he landed on the bottom, he met three individuals, a (secretly female) regressor, the progenitor of vampires, and the Dog King (the conceptual king of dogs who took on a human form, since humanity is the current dominating species).By reading the regressor's mind, he discovers that the world is on a timer to doom, what exactly isn't clear yet, but after he learns this the MC did what does best, scamming the other three into thinking that he was a warden sent by the Military State (the nation they're in) since apparently, all but three prisoners in Tantalus managed to either escape or die in the process.After this, we follow the MC's plots and schemes to try to survive one day at a time in Tantalus, from attempting to tame the Dog King (somewhat successfully?) to helping the regressor become stronger, to teaching the vampire, and the rest, lessons from the modern era.Of course, there are many problems, quite literally, dropped on the MC throughout the times he spent in Tantalus, and if you want to know how he managed to resolve, or fail to, those events, then go ahead and read the story.Overall, this is a really fun story with a mysterious MC, an equally mysterious, yet colorful cast of characters, the action scenes are also quite good too, so is the social manipulations the MC does.