What do you think?
Rate this book
The Undead King's Reign of Peace, Vol. 1
DEATH COMFORTS US ALL
When a black-robed skeleton shows up at Mira’s door in the dead of night, the last thing she expects is for him to cure her fatal infection! Her nighttime visitor is Undead King Terios, who soon finds himself feeding and teaching the peasant children he saved from disease during a chance encounter. With guidance from this terrifying yet kindhearted skeleton, Mira blossoms into an apprentice magic user. But will her idyllic world shatter when the nobility sends a squad of knights to eradicate the “skeletal menace”? This is the legend of an Undead King who aims to conquer the world without taking a single human life!
When a black-robed skeleton shows up at Mira’s door in the dead of night, the last thing she expects is for him to cure her fatal infection! Her nighttime visitor is Undead King Terios, who soon finds himself feeding and teaching the peasant children he saved from disease during a chance encounter. With guidance from this terrifying yet kindhearted skeleton, Mira blossoms into an apprentice magic user. But will her idyllic world shatter when the nobility sends a squad of knights to eradicate the “skeletal menace”? This is the legend of an Undead King who aims to conquer the world without taking a single human life!
- GenresLight NovelFantasy
235 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 5, 2021
12 people are currently reading
37 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 25, 2021
THE UNDEAD KING'S REIGN OF PEACE, despite the author's most strident efforts, is ambitiously uninteresting and damningly uneventful. This novel is almost admirably boring.
An undead sorcerer of unmatched power stumbles upon a village corrupted and killed-off by a rogue disease. He pities the children, the village's lone survivors, and so begins his tale of redemption. Terios, he so names himself, pledges to create a world of peace. So why not dedicate every subsequent hour to educating these newfound orphans in the ways of reading, writing, arithmetic, and physical labor? It's about the long game, after all.
Such are the first 88 pages of this sluggish novel.
THE UNDEAD KING'S REIGN OF PEACE toasts and teases Terios's backstory, and how it conflicts with his ambitious and utopist vision of the continent's future, but does little to move beyond feel-good platitudes. Indeed, saving a village of children on the edge of death is nice and all, but it's not exactly an exciting or insightful means to obtain recognition toward a world-conquering goal. It's fairly dull. Even if one strains to ascertain how the novel's thematic crux rests upon appreciating this turnover of generational piety, one is left rubbing one's temples at the ineffectual and garishly dainty story dynamics nudging the narrative forward.
The novel's supporting cast is typical and uninspired. One such character is an eight-year-old girl named Mira, who is gifted in magic. Mira's residual innocence and affection for her new savior/teacher begets the little sister heroine trope. Another such character is Diné Staktos, captain of the second knight squadron of the regional royal military. Diné is the prototypically hard-nosed, battle-tested, and yet insanely attractive warrior woman who finds herself in service of the protagonist because she's suddenly no longer the strongest person in the room. Readers in search of compelling secondary characters should look elsewhere.
Rumors abound that this skeleton fellow, an "undead king," is the latest incarnation of a legendary would-be emperor who massacred whole nations a few short generations ago. The novel plays on this supposition but never comes out with it in the open. The most readers learn of this supposed truth occurs through half-remembered adventures and dreadfully annoying auxiliary characters (e.g., a foul-mouthed black cat, whose past is tied to Terios, just won't shut up). Regrettably, readers don't learn very much about the main character by the end of the novel other than that he used to be a bad guy who is now good (or trying to be).
THE UNDEAD KING'S REIGN OF PEACE reads like the type of novel one might assemble rather lazily if one had never given thought to conceptualizing a conclusion. For every challenge Terios faces and every opponent he fights, he possesses a readymade solution (conveniently conjured, off-screen). Alas, when the stakes are so low as to be undemanding, then what's the point? The story dawdles. The book contrives minor political drama toward the end, but it's all for naught. And while Terios's world philosophy on the pitiable and forsaken nature of humankind peeks through, one will be hard-pressed to take the character seriously, seeing as he's an overpowered skeleton sorcerer who spends his days teaching snot-nosed children their letters.
Other challenges for this book are more facile but impossible to ignore. The narrative style doesn't match the story being told. The character dynamics are rote, amateurish, and uninspired (e.g., it's not entirely certain why most of the cast is composed of children). Even the character names themselves are troublesome (e.g., separate characters are named "Terios" and "Torio," and it's easy to confuse the two).
The writing, for example, yields a contemporary style, despite the story itself occurring at a time and place when such a multitude of linguistic anachronisms would have stopped its characters cold. The fast and informal, chatty style of storytelling is so compellingly asynchronous as to be more than an affectation of the translation or editorial team.
The book's brand of humor is also problematic. The story frequently interjects deliberately coarse or unseemly humor regarding virginity, genitalia, polygamy, pedophilia, and more, as cheeky throwaway lines meant to buckle the knee in good fun. Except, it's not funny. At all.
One finds THE UNDEAD KING'S REIGN OF PEACE a tolerable but ultimately exhausting read. Little action worth noting occurs beyond obvious confrontations with future frenemy characters, and the author's heavy use of foreshadowing rarely bodes well for maintaining the story's already weak dramatic irony.
The novel's lone saving grace is buried in the middle, when the black cat character spends time with little Mira, and explains to her the magic system currently encompassing the continent. Although somewhat borrowed and prebuilt, the character's acknowledgement makes for a good fantasy environment nonetheless: "Becoming a powerful magic user doesn't mean increasing your mana; it means strengthening your connection to the world. Which means you're more affected by the world at the same time [..] When you gaze into the arche [connected to the heart of the world], the arche also gazes into you [..] If you want to stay you, don't ever forget who you are" (p. 108).
An undead sorcerer of unmatched power stumbles upon a village corrupted and killed-off by a rogue disease. He pities the children, the village's lone survivors, and so begins his tale of redemption. Terios, he so names himself, pledges to create a world of peace. So why not dedicate every subsequent hour to educating these newfound orphans in the ways of reading, writing, arithmetic, and physical labor? It's about the long game, after all.
Such are the first 88 pages of this sluggish novel.
THE UNDEAD KING'S REIGN OF PEACE toasts and teases Terios's backstory, and how it conflicts with his ambitious and utopist vision of the continent's future, but does little to move beyond feel-good platitudes. Indeed, saving a village of children on the edge of death is nice and all, but it's not exactly an exciting or insightful means to obtain recognition toward a world-conquering goal. It's fairly dull. Even if one strains to ascertain how the novel's thematic crux rests upon appreciating this turnover of generational piety, one is left rubbing one's temples at the ineffectual and garishly dainty story dynamics nudging the narrative forward.
The novel's supporting cast is typical and uninspired. One such character is an eight-year-old girl named Mira, who is gifted in magic. Mira's residual innocence and affection for her new savior/teacher begets the little sister heroine trope. Another such character is Diné Staktos, captain of the second knight squadron of the regional royal military. Diné is the prototypically hard-nosed, battle-tested, and yet insanely attractive warrior woman who finds herself in service of the protagonist because she's suddenly no longer the strongest person in the room. Readers in search of compelling secondary characters should look elsewhere.
Rumors abound that this skeleton fellow, an "undead king," is the latest incarnation of a legendary would-be emperor who massacred whole nations a few short generations ago. The novel plays on this supposition but never comes out with it in the open. The most readers learn of this supposed truth occurs through half-remembered adventures and dreadfully annoying auxiliary characters (e.g., a foul-mouthed black cat, whose past is tied to Terios, just won't shut up). Regrettably, readers don't learn very much about the main character by the end of the novel other than that he used to be a bad guy who is now good (or trying to be).
THE UNDEAD KING'S REIGN OF PEACE reads like the type of novel one might assemble rather lazily if one had never given thought to conceptualizing a conclusion. For every challenge Terios faces and every opponent he fights, he possesses a readymade solution (conveniently conjured, off-screen). Alas, when the stakes are so low as to be undemanding, then what's the point? The story dawdles. The book contrives minor political drama toward the end, but it's all for naught. And while Terios's world philosophy on the pitiable and forsaken nature of humankind peeks through, one will be hard-pressed to take the character seriously, seeing as he's an overpowered skeleton sorcerer who spends his days teaching snot-nosed children their letters.
Other challenges for this book are more facile but impossible to ignore. The narrative style doesn't match the story being told. The character dynamics are rote, amateurish, and uninspired (e.g., it's not entirely certain why most of the cast is composed of children). Even the character names themselves are troublesome (e.g., separate characters are named "Terios" and "Torio," and it's easy to confuse the two).
The writing, for example, yields a contemporary style, despite the story itself occurring at a time and place when such a multitude of linguistic anachronisms would have stopped its characters cold. The fast and informal, chatty style of storytelling is so compellingly asynchronous as to be more than an affectation of the translation or editorial team.
The book's brand of humor is also problematic. The story frequently interjects deliberately coarse or unseemly humor regarding virginity, genitalia, polygamy, pedophilia, and more, as cheeky throwaway lines meant to buckle the knee in good fun. Except, it's not funny. At all.
One finds THE UNDEAD KING'S REIGN OF PEACE a tolerable but ultimately exhausting read. Little action worth noting occurs beyond obvious confrontations with future frenemy characters, and the author's heavy use of foreshadowing rarely bodes well for maintaining the story's already weak dramatic irony.
The novel's lone saving grace is buried in the middle, when the black cat character spends time with little Mira, and explains to her the magic system currently encompassing the continent. Although somewhat borrowed and prebuilt, the character's acknowledgement makes for a good fantasy environment nonetheless: "Becoming a powerful magic user doesn't mean increasing your mana; it means strengthening your connection to the world. Which means you're more affected by the world at the same time [..] When you gaze into the arche [connected to the heart of the world], the arche also gazes into you [..] If you want to stay you, don't ever forget who you are" (p. 108).
November 27, 2022
A bland read. It's basically a heavy-handed, preachy "killing is wrong. If you kill him, you'll be just like him!" story. The character are one-dimensional, and the titular Undead King doesn't really have a character arc besides "I just, like, want everyone to live in peace, maaaan." The conclusion is not satisfying, and the bad guy basically gets away with everything but is now a bit more inconvenienced.
Despite the Goodreads title saying "Vol 1", this is a one-volume read (it came out in 2020, so it's either that or the next volume hasn't come out for whatever reason, but I doubt the story will continue with how it ended).
Despite the Goodreads title saying "Vol 1", this is a one-volume read (it came out in 2020, so it's either that or the next volume hasn't come out for whatever reason, but I doubt the story will continue with how it ended).
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 27, 2023
An interesting concept, a bit of a weird execution. I liked the story, but I definitely could’ve done with less inappropriate jokes and more focus on Terios’s plans and ambitions. Even just more focus on his potential past, though it’s pretty obvious who he is/was.
Don’t know if I’ll read the next volume when it comes out. We’ll see
Don’t know if I’ll read the next volume when it comes out. We’ll see
March 16, 2025
Love Mira and interesting execution of plot with undead trying to help out the world, and trying to make world peaceful. Also badass knight too in story. Story could be a better though with young prince, etc.
November 17, 2021
Good read
I expected this to be your typical empire/city building light novel but it is a more narrow story focusing on a small cast of characters.
I expected this to be your typical empire/city building light novel but it is a more narrow story focusing on a small cast of characters.
July 13, 2023
Really good, shame there's no more published in the UK
August 20, 2025
But basic, but nice lil’ story. Looking forward to a second volume.
February 10, 2022
This was much too weird for me.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews