Summary
The following contains spoilers for Solo Leveling, Episode 11, “A Knight Who Defends an Empty Throne”, available onCrunchyroll. There are also major spoilers for the overall Solo Leveling story, available to read onTapas.
In the 11th episode ofSolo Leveling, Jinwoo encounters an interesting variety of enemies during his Job-Change Quest, which presents afar greater challenge than anything he has facedthus far. He struggles immensely in a battle against a higher-classed enemy: the Knight’s Captain, Blood-Red Igris, an entity inhabiting a suit of crimson armor who defends an empty throne room.
After an intense fight, Jinwoo successfully defeats Igris, and gains some great loot, but nothing he earns from that battle will prove to be as pivotal to Jinwoo’s character as the Ruler’s Hand Skill, which has not yet been explained in the series. Just what is the Ruler’s Hand?
The Cosmology ofSolo Leveling
Monarchs vs Rulers
Once upon a time, a primordial chaos existed before a certain deity went on to split light from darkness, resulting in the births of powerful entities called Monarchs; who are borne from the darkness, and Rulers, their ontological opposite. Eight beings were created on each side. Whilethis Absolute Being was a god of light, he was fundamentally evil, inciting a never-ending war between the forces of light and darkness. When the Rulers asked their god for intervention and invocation of his incredible power, he ignored their requests, and they realized that he didn’t help them because he simply enjoyed watching them engaged in aeons of warfare.
This realization led to a revolt in which 7 of 8 Rulers executed a plot to permanently remove him. Ashborn, the strongest of the Rulers, was the only one who tried to stop the assassination, but he was easily defeated. Ashborn was left for dead, but survived by becoming an entity known as the Shadow Monarch. This entity would seek to reincarnate, but in order to do so, an extremely powerful human would have to serve as a host. He selectsa human named Sung Jinwooto serve as his host, slowly building him up to be a suitable host through the System, a connection gained as a consequence of the Double Dungeon incident.
The Ruler’s Hand Skill
Initial Signs of Ashborn’s Influence
The Ruler’s Hand Skill is a weaker version of something called Ruler’s Authority, a telekinetic ability that is exclusive only to Rulers. Jinwoo obtains the rune stone for this skill after defeating Igris, but he doesn’t activate it immediately as he also received a Teleportation Stone in anticipation of the swarms of enemies that appeared. At full power, the skill is extremely powerful, costs zero mana, and has a large activation radius. It’s extremely effective, but not against opponents who are superior to the Skill’s user. Igris makes use of a weaker version of the Ruler’s Hand abilityduring the Job-Change Questafter knocking Jinwoo to the throne, using it to retrieve his sword from a distance, and his version is known as the Dominator’s Touch.
With telekinesis, Jinwoo stands to be much stronger than he has been up until this point, and the reason why the ability is made available to him after defeating Igris is because the knight was Ashborn’s most loyal soldier, soon to become Jinwoo’s very first shadow after he clears the Job-Change Quest. The Skill is proof of Jinwoo’s existence as a budding vessel for Ashborn, the Shadow Monarch, but beyond the various clues put into the 11th episode ofSolo Leveling, the series has been building up to this development for a while, particularly in the fight against Kang Taeshik when the murderous Hunter warned him about"gazing into the abyss", as well as his comments about the immense size of Jinwoo’s shadow. To those familiar with the direction in whichSolo Levelingis headed, these various elements are clues that are slowly leading towards the true plot of the series, which would place Jinwoo right in the middle of an aeons-long conflict.
The Shadow Monarch Is Born
Is Shadow Extraction an Evolution of Ruler’s Hand?
After the Job-Change Quest is complete, Jinwoo has earned the title of Shadow Monarch and, despite building himself up to be an Assassin Type, this development makes him a kind of Mage Class Hunter, which scared him at first because he thought that it would mean he wasted his time leading up to this point.
The good effort he put into the Job-Change Quest earns him the Necromancer title, which further evolves into a special type of Necromancerknown as the Shadow Monarch, who has the ability to “extract” shadows; the souls of the dead who become his soldiers and fight under his command. Jinwoo’s obtaining the Ruler’s Hand Skill was effectively foreshadowing his evolution into the Shadow Monarch, and perhaps the Shadow Extraction is a highly specialized variation of the Ruler’s Authority.
Solo Leveling
A-1 Pictures' Solo Leveling is an anime based on Chugong’s popular web novel. Set in an unforgiving fantasy world where hunters explore dungeons filled with monsters, the vulnerable Sung Jinwoo gains a significant power boost after he is picked to be a solo player by the System.
