Book Review: Surviving Among the Letters
Another interesting read that I enjoyed, but what's with me and consuming stories with protagonists that share a phenotype? I have no idea (I do).
So to start off, I think I'll do the usual of recapping the story shortly. To be honest, I feel quite lucky to having been able to procure the last few hundred chapters for a small fee after those korean corporate bastards took it down. So yeah, Novelpia? Suck my balls.
Also, to get it out of the way—yes—this is a superhero-ish novel. No, I do not like the majority of them, and no, the Em-Dashes are not there because of AI, real people tend to use them.
Anyhow, the story is about Blanco Artreia, a child test subject kidnapped from Spain to be experimented on by a government funded group trying to unlock a process to manifest select abilities within anyone. The name Blanco comes from Remy, a child Blanco befriends, who gives her the name due to her platinum blonde hair. The surname of Artreia comes from—surprisingly—the head of the research complex, Messier Artreia.
“How in the heck,” I hear you ask.
Well, our little Blanco is a bit special. Dun du dun—yep—she has been reincarnated and to her luck, knows a few things, but really just so surface level that it doesn't follow in the footsteps of your typical “reincarnated nerd min-maxes” novel.
Alright, but how does this help the situation of our protagonist? Well, she is quite intelligent and makes it her mission to prove her elevated value to her captors almost immediately, which then leads to her betting her life that she can make a breakthrough if she's given the resources. The earlier guy, Messier, a pragmatic and whimsical fellow, allows her to do so.
This leads to Blanco being excluded from tests for the time being and given a small team of researchers to do whatever. And she doesn't waste this chance, using a brief description from the book the world is based on to try to work out a way to force abilities onto people, actually killing more of her fellow subjects in a few weeks than the scientists in months.
The desired result is soon reached though, as Blanco practically pushes another subject to their limits, who, through sheer willpower, manages to survive. Right after, Blanco personally executes them. Why? Well, that subject my friends was Ellie, the sister of the 'real protagonist', Arwin. A tragic character who died after being kidnapped in broad daylight, sending the story's hero on their journey. Blanco, seeing people as nothing more than static 'things' on a page, doesn't want to interfere in these happenings, so she consequently ensures that Arwin's sister doesn't survive.
While doing a lot of spitballing, Blanco's intelligence is pretty clear from the get-go, however, after she uses the method she just developed on herself, she becomes a person of interest, manifesting an amalgamation of one of the strongest abilities she had read about in the book.
At the same time, her only friend, Remy, suddenly collapses. Turns out, the headaches she had been complaining about for a few weeks was actually a brain tumor.
Blanco's exit from the facility under the sponsorship of some shadow-government group was all but guaranteed at this point, so she hacks out a deal to have Remy cryogenically preserved in exchange for her loyalty.
From here on out, the story explores the next 8 years, as Blanco reaches adulthood, remarking on her excellent academic ability and progressing detachment from reality, letting herself be trained in combat by the same mercenary organization that had taken her and even going on such missions herself for 'live experience'.
Skip ahead a few months and she is enrolled into a prestigeous university for 'heroes', her identity finally having been forged by her backers. She quickly identifies and befriends Arwin and his friends, becoming a part of their friend group and team. Basically squatting on them until the moment they collect an artifact she needs before stabbing them in the back.
The rest is as you expect, Blanco does shady shit in the background, her friends are completely oblivious but supportive. She detaches herself futher from reality, making her number one goal to escape the fake reality she thinks she is in, but never along the way forgetting her original goal of curing her friend Remy, an on-going plot that I think the author handles really well. Because, while Blanco sees Remy as basically another 'fake person', her attachment to her is stronger, leading to Blanco wanting to escape the fake reality she perceives with her.
By the end, Blanco had in total been responsible for millions of deaths, pitting people against each other and literally stabbing everyone she knew in the back, at the end finally coming clean to her 'friends' before nearly murdering all of them, stopping only due to her getting the artifact she wanted.
She then kills a few hundred homeless people, perfecting a way to cure her friend, before trying it on the real deal, thawing Remy from cryo and removing her tumor permanently. But not even getting a second of respite, Remy is immediately kidnapped by Blanco's former 'friends', intending to do the maximum damage they can to Blanco's state of mind.
Waking up Remy and confusing the poor kid by basically cramming into her brain that she had been on ice for the last decade, they basically inform her of everything her friend had done to get to the point where they are at now. They don't really need to antagonize Blanco either, her actions pretty much speak for themselves.
When a near psychotic Blanco shows up and wrecks everything, she is forced into a confrontation with her most important person, a very well written encounter that I frankly think reflected the deeply layered character complexity the story had built up to that point.
Blanco, as pleaded to by Remy, turns herself in, literally admitting to all her crimes, but funnily, due to her massive connections, gets 8 years in what amounts to a super-powered daycare due to her absurd ability which had also evolved over time, making her powerful enough that her confinement was entirely by choice.
Of course, 8 years is nothing, a reflection of multiple legal loopholes and corruption at large.
Blanco herself doesn't change much though, and I appreciate that. She isn't remorseful, she doesn't feel guilty at all, her state of mind hadn't really changed at all. At the end of the day, she only 'atones' (whatever that means when you had personally killed thousands and millions by proxy) due to her attachment to Remy. Using her time in the blacksite she is relaxing in to develop her theories on how to leave the fake world around her, hopefully with Remy.
Using the help of some aliens (Would take too long to explain) and an acquaintance whose ability can manufacture anything so long as he sees its blueprint, she manages to leave the world and it's dimension with her friend at long last, stopping at a metaphorical door between dimensions.
Stepping through the door we never get to see the other side of, Blanco ends her story on a monologue about the Truman Show and then uses her most iconic line one last time “A comfortable lie, or the uncomfortable truth?”, basically explaining to the reader that in a perfect story, this would be the part where the protagonist and her friend live happily ever after, but in reality, returning to the boring and dysfunctional world we live in, they would struggle to make ends meet, needing to acquire new identities, working odds jobs and so forth.
Honestly, as with a lot of these works, I cannot truly explain to you how good this story is. There is 300 chapters worth of world-building and characterization that I just skimmed over. But I would say that the author has made a really exceptional work, establishing a character that feels grounded and human, but also a character that stays true to herself. If anything, her character progression was downwards. And I haven't even mentioned the miriad of side characters that give this story so much life. That's how thought-through and well developed this story is.
In the end, I adored this story. It really connected with me and drew me in. It had so many cliché story genotypes, but never followed them, truly presenting new concepts and scenarios, subverting expectations and making the story feel fresh.
The version I read was terribly translated in bulk by GPT, but even then, the content of the story was just so exceptional that I didn't care.
When translation models improve, I will scrape the korean version of this novel and make an improved translation of it, it really deserves it.
Anyhow, that's all. I would tell you to read it, but you can't. Until next time!