Reborn five years in the past. A second chance to do everything over. What would you do?
For Ashlyn, being reborn five years in the past is both a boon and a bane. She’s reborn in the wreckage of tragedy, forced to deal with a life that she messed up before. Now, all she has to show for her life is five years of accumulated knowledge in the greatest virtual reality game ever released - Elysium - and the pain of friendships lost.
This time, Ashlyn is going to make a difference. This time, she’s going to fix the mistakes she made and save the relationships she lost. And to do that, she’s going to use all the knowledge she gained from the future to blaze her way to the top with a new class: the Mystic Mage.
My Opinion: 393 pages, $3.99, Available On Kindle Unlimited
This is a slice of life story where the main character (MC) goes back in time, five years, to relive her life just as the VR game she’d dedicated herself to learning the secrets of the game once it opened to the public. She uses her vast knowledge of the game to avoid the character creation traps the devs had laid for starting players, and gets a head start on creating a powerful character using secret quest lines, an understanding of the RPG rules, and exploits.
That’s the story really. No super serious plot to save the world, get rich, or save people using that foreknowledge. It's a casual and very detailed look into the VR game with some PvP and small group battles, but mostly just bunny killing (like 60% of the story) to get special rewards. You can tell there’s some setup for future relationships and bigger quests, but it’s mostly casual adventuring and XP grinding.
On the game mechanics side of things, everything is pretty detailed with lots of numbers and RPG mechanics in every chapter. That the MC knows the game inside and out is used well as she gets to explain the VR game to newbies and points out the good and bad character builds as well as how she plans to exploit what she knows about the game. It's good stuff that anyone that likes crunchy LitRPG will enjoy.
The big draw of the story, the regressor aspect, gives the MC a confidence that she didn’t have her first time around and it was interesting to see her compare her 1st time around with who she was after being sent back in time. I’d hoped for more IRL use of her future knowledge like investing in stocks, saving people from calamities, or making up for regrets. However, since 90% of the story takes place in the game and the MC didn’t go back in time far enough to save her parents from a terrible car accident, she instead focuses instead on becoming mildly powerful in game as the story tracks her first day there.
Overall, the story is well written and the adventures are entertaining. If you just need a serious plot, this might not be the story for you. But I don’t mind reading a slice of life story and the regressor aspect was interesting enough that I wanted to see what the MC would do next to take advantage of her foreknowledge.
Score: 7.7 out of 10