Solo Leveling

Chugong is the pen name of a South Korean writer. He serialized 나 혼자만 레벨업 (Na Honjaman Rebereop, “I alone level up”) on KakaoPage from 25 July 2016 to 13 March 2018, 270 chapters with the side stories, for the publisher D&C Media. It was his second novel and is the only one in English: eight volumes from Yen Press’s Yen On imprint, February 2021 to July 2023, translated by Hye Young Im and J. Torres from the revised Korean edition, ten chapters to a volume except the last, which has five and then the bonus stories and an epilogue.

The premise is a game’s. About ten years before the first page, gates began to open in the air: doors into dungeons full of monsters, which walk out into the world if nobody goes in and kills the boss. A few people awakened with the strength to go in. They are hunters, ranked from E to S, paid in the essence stones they cut from the dead, licensed by the Hunter’s Association and bid for by guilds that behave like corporations. The hero stands at the bottom.

“E-rank hunter Jinwoo Sung. That title followed him around everywhere.”

He is twenty-four, known as the Weakest Hunter of All Mankind, and he would have handed in his licence long ago but for the Association’s health insurance; with no other skills, hunting is the only way he can pay for his mother, asleep in a hospital bed. Then a dungeon very nearly kills him, and he wakes with a System only he can see, which turns his life into a game in which he, alone, levels up.

Most of the world met the story another way. A webtoon of it, drawn by Jang Sung-rak (DUBU) of Redice Studio, launched on KakaoPage nine days before the novel’s last chapter, ran to 179 chapters by the end of 2021, and reached English readers in 2020, a year before Yen Press’s first novel volume. In KakaoPage’s 2020 reader awards the series took first place as both webtoon and web novel. The anime, made from the webtoon, carried it round the world again; its first season was Crunchyroll’s Anime of the Year in 2025. Chugong, Game Rant reported in 2025, regards the novel as the most authentic version. This companion walks the novel.

Volume 1 opens on a roughly D-rank gate that hides a second dungeon, the Cartenon Temple: a dome bigger than several stadiums, a seated stone god, a ring of statues, and three commandments on the slate of the one statue with wings. Seventeen hunters go in, and the rules begin to kill them. Jinwoo, the weakest man in the room, works out what the rules mean, loses a leg, and stays on the altar so that the last of the others can get out. Alone and run through, he is offered a secret quest, and accepts. Yen Press put the result on the back cover:

“PING! [Congratulations on becoming a Player.]”

He wakes healed. The System sets him a daily quest of push-ups, sit-ups, squats and a ten-kilometre run, drops him into a desert of giant centipedes the first time he ignores it, and pays him in levels, stats and keys. He clears a dungeon nobody else can enter, kills a crew of lizards, hunters who leave weaker partners to die, takes on a rich rookie partner, Jinho Yoo, and kills a hired killer from the Association’s own Surveillance Team. He ends the volume an E-rank on paper and starting to be noticed.

Volume 2 makes him what the rest of the series is about. A job-change quest sets him against Igris the Bloodred, a red knight guarding an empty throne. Jinwoo hoped to become an assassin; the System makes him the Shadow Monarch instead, able to raise the shadows of the dead as soldiers with one word, “Arise”. The trial’s fallen knights rise first; Igris resists twice and rises on the third try. A Red Gate seals a guild’s training raid inside a frozen world, where an A-rank who goes for Jinwoo’s back becomes the shadow Iron; Jinho becomes his sworn younger brother; and in America, unknown to his son, their long-missing father walks out of a dungeon. The volume ends with Jinwoo climbing the Demon’s Castle, a hundred-floor dungeon the System has given him the key to.

Volume 3 is about being seen. The castle has given Jinwoo a recipe for the Elixir of Life, “A mystical potion that cures all diseases using powerful magic,” and two of its three ingredients; the third waits at the top. To trade the loot the climb demands, he stops pretending. A re-evaluation gives the Association’s instruments a result they cannot use; President Gunhee Go comes to his mother’s hospital with an offer; and he takes day work as a miner and then a porter for the Hunters Guild, whose S-rank vice president, Haein Cha, finds that his is the one hunter’s mana that does not smell foul to her. In an orc shaman’s hall the porter calls his army out of his shadow, and the shaman rises as Fang. The Association makes him Korea’s tenth S-rank, and he climbs the rest of the castle, a demon, Esil, guiding him most of the way, to kill Balan, the Demon Monarch, on the hundredth floor.

Volume 4 gives him what he has fought for since the first page, in its first chapter. He crafts the Elixir and raises Balan’s winged dragon as Kaisel to fly him to the hospital at ten at night.

“His priority was to get out of there and see his mother.”

After about four years she wakes. Then comes Jeju Island, lost four years earlier to the ants of an S-rank gate. A joint raid by Korea and Japan kills the queen on live television, but the colony has bred a king, which breaks Korea’s strike team, kills its healer and takes his power, and goes looking for the humans’ king, killing Japan’s strongest hunter, Ryuji Goto, on the way. Jinwoo, who stayed home with his mother, trades places with shadows he had hidden in the hunters’ own shadows, kills the Ant King and raises it as Beru. Then he founds a guild of his own, with Jinho as vice president, and turns down its first applicant, Haein, even after she admits that she likes him.

Volume 5 asks its question on the back cover: “WHO AM I?” Orcs that break out of a gate at Jinah’s high school do not count him as human. The law is rewritten so that he can raid alone, and his guild becomes the Ahjin Guild, his sister’s name turned round. Then the black key from a cursed mystery box opens the way back to the Cartenon Temple, where the winged statue turns out to be the Architect, who designed the System to grow a body for the Shadow Monarch to wear. The Monarch declines the body and gives Jinwoo his heart instead, a second one, black, and the broken Architect prophesies that Jinwoo will die when the Monarchs come. While he is inside, Tokyo falls to giants.

Volume 6 takes him abroad. He clears Tokyo for a country everyone else has abandoned, as much for the soldiers its dead giants will make as for Japan, and kills the King of Giants, a captive Monarch who first tells him what the gates are for: the beasts are prisoners from the Monarchs’ armies, sent to fill Earth with mana for a war between the Monarchs and the Rulers. In America, after Dongsoo Hwang kidnaps Jinho to avenge the brother Jinwoo killed in Volume 1, Jinwoo beats Thomas Andre, a survivor of the raid that killed the dragon Kamish, so badly that only a national-level hunter could have lived through it, and kills Dongsoo and raises him as the shadow Greed. Then the war reaches Seoul. The Frost Monarch kills President Go, who turns out to have been a vessel for one of the Rulers, and three of the Monarchs agree to join forces and kill Jinwoo.

Volume 7 carries the tagline “THIS WILL EITHER BE THE END OF HUMAN HISTORY OR A NEW BEGINNING.” Jinchul Woo becomes President of the Association, a colossal gate opens over Seoul, and three Monarchs come for Jinwoo at once and kill him. Dying meets a condition nobody told him about: the first Shadow Monarch, Ashborn, shows him the war behind every gate and why he chose the weakest hunter there was to inherit his power. Jinwoo’s father, Ilhwan Sung, sent by the Rulers to kill the new Shadow Monarch, finds that it is his son and stands between him and the Monarchs. Jinwoo gets up as the Shadow Monarch in full, and by the end all three Monarchs are dead, and so is his father, who has spent more power than a human body can hold. Ashborn’s old army, under its grand marshal, Bellion, comes to kneel to the new king, and in Canada the Dragon King, Monarch of Destruction, steps onto Earth.

Volume 8 is two books bound together. The first is five short chapters of war. The Dragon King has wiped out a country. In the white castle Beru built for him, Jinwoo’s three marshals, Beru, Bellion and Igris, try to talk him out of going, and Bellion gives way: “I will be with you until the end, my lord.” Jinwoo binds his daggers to his hands with strips of his shirt, walks out alone and raises every beast of Chaos he kills, while the army he has hidden in Thomas Andre’s shadow ambushes and kills the King of the Monstrous Humanoids. Then he holds the Dragon King in one place long enough to tear space open, and the Rulers come through and spear him.

Jinwoo asks for the last use of the Cup of Reincarnation, which turns time back ten years, on his terms: no mana on Earth, nobody sent there, and every Monarch left to him, alone, in the gap between dimensions. He spends twenty-seven years there hunting them while about two pass on Earth, and comes home still looking like a teenager to a world that has never needed a hunter. His father is alive, and so are President Go and the war’s dead, and almost nobody remembers any of it.

The rest is bonus stories and an epilogue, many of them told through people he saved without their knowing, in an order the Korean edition and the webtoon do not share. Among them are Jinchul, a detective whose memories come back at a touch; Jinwoo’s father, a firefighter, who asks to forget; and Jinho, brothers with him again over pork belly. Haein, who will never be a hunter in this world, is a schoolgirl and a runner when he comes back, and he finds her again at the track. Grown, he becomes a police detective, marries her and has a son, Sooho, whose powers and memories of the shadows he seals away when the other children shy from him. What the Epilogue’s last pages hold could not be confirmed. The reset divides readers, and Chugong has since said he left some things unexplained on purpose. But the man who was once the weakest hunter of all mankind ends it remembered by almost no one, his family alive.

The anime, made by A-1 Pictures and directed by Shunsuke Nakashige, adapts the webtoon rather than the novel. Season 1, twelve episodes from January to March 2024, runs from the double dungeon to Igris’s rising, Volume 1 and the start of Volume 2. Season 2, Arise from the Shadow, thirteen episodes from January to March 2025, runs from the Red Gate through Jeju to Beru and stops partway into Volume 4. A compilation film, ReAwakening, reached cinemas in between. A new film, Beyond the System, was announced in July 2026 with no date; a third television season has been reported, not announced. Netflix is filming a Korean live-action series with Byeon Woo-seok as Jinwoo and, confirmed on 7 October 2026, Han So-hee as Haein. The games, the ice show and the rest are on the adaptations page.

The one sequel is someone else’s. Solo Leveling: Ragnarok, by Daul, ran on KakaoPage from April 2023 to July 2025, 375 chapters about Sooho, an ordinary college student by then, whose parents went missing just before the gates began appearing, and whom the System makes a Player when monsters break out on his campus. Chugong cheered it on at launch and later called it a fan-service spin-off, one possible future among many. This walk ends where he did, on the last page of Volume 8.

Every page was written from a research file and then attacked by a separate fact-checker before a frame was painted. The difficulty with this series is the text. Chugong’s novel is mostly not readable online. The publisher’s previews give the opening pages of each Yen Press volume, and a search of the ebooks turns up short snippets a little further in, along with the names and terms each volume uses most; the official web translation on Tapas gives the first ten chapters in different wording; the back covers add a line or two; and the Korean edition’s chapter titles show how the last book is laid out. Beyond that, the summaries rest on the publisher’s copy, on readers’ reviews and chapter outlines of the novel, and on sources describing the webtoon and the anime, chiefly the fan wiki, Namu Wiki and episode recaps, which follow the novel’s plot closely but not exactly. Where the versions are known to differ, these pages follow the novel and say what the screen did instead. Details only the comic or the anime shows, a gesture, a line of dialogue, a costume, are left out, and where a page leans on the webtoon for a stretch of plot it says so. Quotations from the novel are Yen Press’s own words, from those previews, snippets and back covers, and kept short.

Names are given in Yen Press’s forms, given name first: Jinwoo Sung, Haein Cha, Jinchul Woo. The anime and the webtoon’s English editions say Sung Jinwoo and Cha Hae-In. The book pages’ paintings take the novel’s few words about how people look and, where it says nothing, make their own choices, deliberately unlike the webtoon’s designs; the anime pages paint the anime’s designs from descriptions in words, in this walk’s ink. No frame copies a drawing or a still.