The Fake Alchemist

[LiniaLunaria]

I would say this is one of those cases where the editor lets the mangaka do whatever he wants because whatever he's doing is kind of working, at least in Japan. As this manga is tracking well enough, with both volumes even ranking on Oricon with very positive reviews.

I mean, volume 2 sold like 15k copies in just 4 days, and this was only for the physical edition.

Good info sir..

 

[AlphaN3RDsIgMa]

This is just a shittier version of that one Pixie/Twitter series from two-ish years ago. Almost the exact same premise just different execution and this one is much worse. Feels like this should be tracking at a 6.0 and not a 7.5. Can't see this improving all that much, feels like the author will lose the plot by chapter 20 and this gets axed.

 

[xXPenisXx]

 

[eduplicate]

I do really want to see where this is going and genuinely have no idea what to expect. A full pickup translation job is probably going to be complicated because there's a lot going on, and it's not clear where anything is going.

 

[DemonHide]

This shit's confusing. There's some interesting concepts at work here, but it's hard to figure out exactly what's going on half the time. Part of it is the piss-poor scanlation for most of the early chapters, but even when it's decent, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

 

[SixthTheIntellectualSense]

This one is a real doozy.. Stuff went from 1 to 10 to pi to e to cake to 🚦 faster than you can comprehend

 

[Sorenmageofmareth]

The bitches be crazy. Only Pettan is love.


His choices are legit for a guy not aware he's in death battle. And wanting to make a living.

The save ability is hehe life saving.
If he didn't care he could just ditch the ingrates in the mirror.

He's been slowly gearing up and it's been effective. He's just not a gun guy.

 

[MangoGex4Life]

I like this story even tho the alchemy recipe explanation is lots of words and always make me wanna sleep.
The main dude aughhhhh this man is DUMB AF.
This gOd is telling you to pick skills cuz ur being deployed to another world…and you see all these magic/combat etc skills…
its safe to assume that things are gonna be dangerous so Don’t Choose Dumb skills!
Alchemy or magic durrr ill choose the real boring one cuz I watched Full Metal Alchemist and it looked KOOL
Magic maybe close to Alch, however, it just you being limited to scrounging around for recipes vs you doing the same with magic, but its up to your mana endurance hmmm come on. Idk I could be wrong, maybe Im overthinking Alch.

Our boy here was chuggin that nice-guy, simp sauce too much.
Glad he has Nora to make up for his lack of testosterone. I agree with other commentors that shes really the MAIN.

As for psycho anti-meat, civil rights, murder but-not-murder-cause-I-think-what-im-doing-is-right crusader…she needs to be put down.
Sadly, along with rabbit/cow as they can speak to the authorities.

Cant say much about that Alch mage hooters lady other than I wanna know what the Mochi Elf did to get that treatment. It better be good for that level of disrespect.
Honestly if it was me I would get my shit together and see how Alch can be used defensively, try my best to heal Mochi Elf, and then GTFO of Dodge.

 

[LiniaLunaria]

Im reading it on pixiv on the author's page. Its bonkers full of crazy characters ahahhaha it doesnt conform to traditional storytelling and it makes things interesting by making you think it goes like this but goes south so fast its like hand feeding a lion some meat..

 

[taenuarhew]

WTF It was good even if the main character is bland as fuck ( "cheat ability" my ass he's the weakest of the weakest -> if you can do anything can't you do things that make you powerful little by little so you stay hidden and you can afford it ? (try using luck potion on you first for instance))

I've just finished ch 4.4 and wtf is that cheat and unsensical character coming out of nowhere ? Alchemy, magic, hex, ect she can also see the future ??!!! And to top it off : ONE OF HER MAIN GOAL IS TO FORBID PEOPLE FROM EATING MEAT
One of the most unsensical character I've ever seen ...

PS : Are you fucking stupid ?! Out of everything you coud have picked you chose a fucking crystal that makes you go back time but erases your memory ?!!!!

The only clue would be that the crystal you just made is now broken (I'm assuming), so you need to do something different than what your current plans were in order to avoid a repeat. Still a very dumb power since you won't even know why you died and apparently you randomly lose additional memories on top of it.

 

[taenuarhew]

I would say this is one of those cases where the editor lets the mangaka do whatever he wants because whatever he's doing is kind of working, at least in Japan. As this manga is tracking well enough, with both volumes even ranking on Oricon with very positive reviews.

I mean, volume 2 sold like 15k copies in just 4 days, and this was only for the physical edition.

Just like how One Punch was drawn by an amateur who made a really nice story before it got syndicated by a major artist, this one was also an unskilled artist being picked up. The new artist has followed the original story extremely closely apart from the number of chapters being reduced (from 38 down to 11) by putting more pages in each chapter and fitting the cells into the pages better.

So it already had huge following and they didn't want to piss fans off by messing with whatever made it work.

 

[jeremymd]

I've read up to Ch22 of the preserialized version. It was an absolute pain skimming through all the "worldbuilding" that is 100 percent done through expository walls of text. I'm not kidding. Literally walls and walls and walls of text. I have to admit that there really was a genuine attempt here and that's pretty much what had me endure, but I can only take so much. You'd expect that all that exposition would end at some point, but it just kept going and going and, I'M NOT EVEN KIDDING, chapter 22 and it's still going. Almost every single event, EVERY SINGLE EVENT has to be explained by exposition.

The tediousness of reading this finally overpowered me and I'm dropping this for good, but not before stating that there was a genuine effort here. But what this author needed, more than anything, and as one other poster here mentioned, was an editor.

 

[GhostX64]

This is a great story, a very care free one covering very heavy topics. Because the story isn't realistic but it's still a good read.

Let me point out one such issue. Historically, slavery is a point of convenience. The owner has the convenience of a person he isn't liable for any reason, the slave having the convenience of not earning his survival. The situation is different for African slaves imported through sea routes as it detaches the slaves from their motherland potentially leaving them no choices with a way to return home. [1] We will call the first case a free slave and the second helpless slave.

But here the slave is bound by magic so the slave falls into the second category. But the magic is a hex that gives sorta employment rights to the slave. OK that part I understand. As even irl slave has been converted to modern employment. But in this world if a person unfairly treats or abuses contracts of the slave even the owner can become a slave. This is absurd. [2] The corporation or magic foundation who would push this philosophies would go out of business. Nobody would bother buying this slaves. Any country that would make such policies would rather abolish slavery altogether.

This is a case of virtue signalling, imposing modern rules on a time that the author has no idea about. That's why even tho this manga covers very heavy topics, it feels very plastic.

 

[GhostX64]

This is a great story, a very care free one covering very heavy topics. Because the story isn't realistic but it's still a good read.

Let me point out one such issue. Historically, slavery is a point of convenience. The owner has the convenience of a person he isn't liable for any reason, the slave having the convenience of not earning his survival. The situation is different for African slaves imported through sea routes as it detaches the slaves from their motherland potentially leaving them no choices with a way to return home. [1] We will call the first case a free slave and the second helpless slave.

But here the slave is bound by magic so the slave falls into the second category. But the magic is a hex that gives sorta employment rights to the slave. OK that part I understand. As even irl slave has been converted to modern employment. But in this world if a person unfairly treats or abuses contracts of the slave even the owner can become a slave. This is absurd. [2] The corporation or magic foundation who would push this philosophies would go out of business. Nobody would bother buying this slaves. Any country that would make such policies would rather abolish slavery altogether.

This is a case of virtue signalling, imposing modern rules on a time that the author has no idea about. That's why even tho this manga covers very heavy topics, it feels very plastic.

Now many people will hyper fixate on the irl slavery or the slavery part in general completely missing the point I was making. So anyone who is mentally challenged enough to focus on the slavery part rather than the logic of world building part, le me elaborate on his "cheats" :

As most Isekai get riddled with broken cheats, this a different pie, here this cheats are so ass it ain't even cheat no more.

The protagonist only gets two powers off a catalogue and he doesn't choose fighting ones because he hates fighting.

[1] Ability to create a save that activates upon breaking a crystal. 1)If the crystal isn't broken and he dies, he stays dead, no restart no REGRESS. 2)He doesn't retain memory after the time h made the save when he breaks the Crystal and loads the save. If you don't understand, in layman's term, after you load the save to you, its just a overcomplicated perspective check with the bare minimum of something might cause me to break the crystal while having no idea why And it may fail altogether if you didn't break the crystal before your demise.

[2] An all encompassing alchemy book that makes you alchemize whatever with just ingredients regardless of skill. Now you might be thinking"Isnt this op? ". No. 1)He can't skip the process nor does it automate. It just gives you the info on how to do it and streamline the process by removing luck factors from the equation. Now from Chemistry of our world, we can say with well enough knowledge, anyone can remove luck factor for a yield.
2)He can only create one at a time. It even means for a pair of earrings, it will create one and botch the other aka it can never create any number of sets. Now if you have ever worked with fine machineries, you'll know how small is the margin of error on so many parts. And This guy can't create a second instance of something much less a batch. Again a mechanized could probably do a better job. 3)He needs to know the name of the thing he is making. Like you are poisoned, he can't say I want the antidote of this, he has manually diagnose the poison, find what is the antidote for it, write it in the book and get the ingredients, spend enough time preparing it even if it takes months. You have to realize knowing the name of something is already going a mile of finding what it is. So this isn't the all knowledge book you are thinking. It's just a personal Google.

You have to realize he wasn't forced with this power. He chose them from a catalog. He wasn't deceived, this powers were properly explained in catalog according to his recount of his past. So that means the other powers in that catalog was equally ass or our main Mc is dumb as brick. Even the local people have better power than these skills. Why are these even called cheats? Idk.

 

[GhostX64]

It has a lots of ups and downs, but if you can make it past the generic bits that seems about to turn into generic shonen fan service or grim-dark genres, there is some depth that's developing that makes it worth exploring.

I've only read up to ch 4.4 so far, but it is definitely staying on my reading list, and I'd suggest at least putting it in your "want to read" list for later if you like complex world-building. The author is trying to thread a difficult "realist" middle ground here, and if he can pull it off past the set-up stage, it might be worth exploring this manga past the set-up stages. It looks like we'll see a massive stage with lots of character arcs. I definitely like how slavery isn't being glamorized or treated lightly, the way some other manga have done.

This Manga has made the worst and unrealistic setting of slavery in manga I have ever seen. This coincides with the fact that you have read upto 4.4 yet didn't complain about that SJW Vegan character. Get your virtue signalling aahh away when recommending Mangas.

 

[inkyntk]

Dude, the one writing this thing is nuts, the theme of this manga is the world sucks and everyone got some screws loose, not a single sane character in this manga I tell u, they r reasonable but not completely.

 

[rockmochi]

I uh...what is happening in this manga? I don't know if it's the translation/editing or not but i genuinely got confused sometimes.

I'm not really sure what the point of the story is?

• The reveal of that glasses girl being a dangerous extremist and that black haired girl being an enemy/necromancer is super anti climactic and confusing
• The relationships are weird. Why would he still trusts and works together with his enemies? He literally got his eye poisoned.
• The MC is super lame. He literally burned his cheat skill so that he can be a "real alchemist" aka just a regular guy, when he knows there are people out there hunting down and stealing from specifically reincarnated people. His good point is that he is kind which is sure just like literally thousands of other isekai protag.