Eryk Vieger and Fay Valstine on the left, Kari Astralia on the back, Lin getting the Lap Pillow treatment.
WIEDERGEBURT: Legend of the Reincarnated Warrior is an original English-language Dark Fantasy Harem Genre Light Novel series by Brandon Varnell (creator of American Kitsune among others). The books are illustrated by Mykel Ferguson. The novels entered publication in 2019.Years ago, Eryk Vieger lost everything when the Great Overlord of the Seventh Realm razed the city where his adventuring sect was located and murdered his wife Kari and their daughter Kayli. He trained alone to avenge them ever since, and when the two titans finally meet again, the power unleashed in their clash shakes the foundations of reality itself. Eryk blacks out, and when he regains consciousness, he's back where it all began: the city-state of Nevaria—his and Kari's Doomed Hometown on the far side of the Endless Desert, destroyed in a massive Demon Beast attack decades earlier.
Armed with foreknowledge of the future but none of his former power, Eryk resolves to Set Right What Once Went Wrong and help Empress Hilda and her daughter Kari build a Nevaria that will not fall when the Great Overlord and his Sekbeist allies eventually come calling.
Tropes:
- Adventure Guild: Called "sects" in The 'Verse. Kari and Eryk were introduced to the concept when they settled in Vesperia in the Bad Future, and found one called the Nevarian Braves in the new timeline.
- Alchemy Is Magic: Alchemy in the series consists of combining ingredients ranging from plants to monster parts and imbuing them with mana to create pills that occupy the niche typically occupied by Magic Potions. These range from simple and easily crafted restoratives such as Blood Clotting Pills, to complex preparations requiring dozens or hundreds of difficult-to-acquire ingredients that are used to reach the Third and Fourth States of Spiritualism.
- Always Chaotic Evil: The Sekbeists seem to have no greater motive in life than to destroy or subjugate all intelligent life that isn't them.
- Bifurcated Weapon: Eryk's weapon of choice, the "ruler", is essentially what you'd get if you took Guts's Dragonslayer and broke it up into interlocking separable segments. On its own it can crush its way through mundane objects with sheer brute force, but Eryk can charge it with lightning to extend its reach and control it like a whip.
- Cute Monster Girl: Lin is a lamia, with the torso of a human that transitions to a several-meter-long snake body below the hips.
- Dark Is Not Evil: Downplayed. The darkness element is strongly associated with the evil Sekbeists but there's nothing inherently evil about it: Lin's poison magic is partially based on it, and she's one of the good guys.
- Dude Looks Like a Lady: Eryk mentally complains when he wakes up as his past self that between his scrawny untrained body and his long hair, he looks like a girl. It becomes a minor running gag for people (especially children) to think he's a girl on first meetings.
- Earth All Along: The series is set up as being set in a Constructed World, but then volume 9 reveals completely in passing that one of the ruined cities in the Demon Beast Mountain Range is Bucharest, Romania several dozen millennia After the End, which by extension makes the mountain range itself the Carpathians. This has no significance at all to the characters, who are all from the work's present day.
- Ecchi: Unlike most of the Japanese-written Light Novels that clearly inspired it, Wiedergeburt tends to contain two or three explicit sex scenes per volume, and not just involving Eryk and his harem: one volume has a scene of Empress Hilda getting it on with her husbands. The artwork does sometimes depict the sex scenes, but strictly at an R-rated level.
- Elemental Fusion: Lamias have affinities to both the earth and darkness elements, which they naturally combine to produce their trademark poison spiritual attacks.
- Fantasy Contraception: Female Spiritualists are able to use the movements of their body during sex to power a spiritual technique that prevents conception. In the original timeline, Kari eventually turned it off because she wanted a baby, even though Eryk had said he didn't want one yet. Also, it's traditionally passed from mother to daughter, causing Fay to have a Surprise Pregnancy in volume 14 because her mother died in childbirth and neither Kari nor any of her female relatives thought to teach it to her.
- First Girl Wins: Kari was Eryk's One True Love in his first life, and is the first girl added to his harem in the new timeline and becomes Top Wife.
- Flashback B-Plot: Enforced. Multiple chapters per book open with flashbacks to the Bad Future, which Varnell started doing because it gave him an excuse to write sex scenes for Eryk before he formally got together with his harem in the new timeline, which takes until about volume 6.
- Foreign Language Title: "Wiedergeburt" is Gratuitous German for "rebirth".
- Healing Hands: The Water element is used to heal injuries, explicitly because the human body is 70% water.
- Heir-In-Law: Hilda requested the right to marry the former Emperor of Nevaria's son as her prize for winning the Grand Spiritualist tournament. The Emperor later abdicated the throne to her, and she's been The High Queen ever since.
- Ideal Illness Immunity: Spiritualists rarely become ill, with Second- and Third-State Spiritualists being virtually immune to all disease.
- If It's You, It's Okay: Until about volume 10 there's no indication any of the main cast are anything other than straight, but then Eryk has Three-Way Sex with Kari and Fay one night. Some days afterwards, Kari is surprised to discover herself thinking about her old friend in a sexually attracted manner.
- Mermaid Problem: Addressed with Lin: she has humanlike genitalia right below her hips, above where her skin transitions to scales.
- Morning Sickness:
- In the Bad Future, Kari has to make a sudden run for the bathroom in the middle of a sect staff meeting and realizes she's become pregnant.
- In volume 14, present day, Fay has a Surprise Pregnancy, signaled when she develops a vomiting fit. Eryk recognizes it from Kari in the previous timeline and quickly confirms it.
- Naked First Impression: Lin first starts living with Eryk having been reduced to the form of a large snake after she was attacked by wild boars. When she gets strong enough to resume her true form, she understandably has no clothes on, and is baffled when Eryk tries to explain how she should.
- Our Nudity Is Different: Lamia have no cultural nudity taboo, so Lin is initially confused when the human characters tell her to Please Put Some Clothes On. Her bottom half is a particular problem since she has no legs, so she ends up essentially wearing a set of wraps to cover her breasts and a sarong across her genitalia.
- Peggy Sue: Eryk goes back in time at the start of the series with all the knowledge he gained in his previous life and tries to use that to prevent the Bad Future he originally came from. However, he doesn't keep his power as a Spiritualist and has to regain it all over time, though his future knowledge gives him a leg up.
- Phlebotinum Overdose: Using too much spiritual power all at once can cause a lethal condition called spiritual poisoning, where the spiritual pathways in the body become clogged (like fat deposits blocking an artery). It can be healed with the right knowledge, which results in the pathways becoming more resilient to such damage. Fay is suffering from spiritual poisoning when Eryk meets her near his training area, and is able to cure her with knowledge he gained in his previous life from his Second Love, a woman who in volume 14 is confirmed to have been Fay after surviving with her condition for decades.
- Pretty Princess Powerhouse:
- Kari is a buxom blonde princess, and also terrifyingly effective with her light element and ranseur.
- Lin, the princess of the lamias of the Endless Desert, is a Cute Monster Girl who can conjure whips of poison.
- Psychic Dreams for Everyone: Kari, Fay, and Lin start to remember parts of the Bad Future in their sleep as the story goes on, and Kari in particular re-learns rune crafting as a result.
- Royal Harem: Gender-Inverted by Empress Hilda Astralia, Kari's mother, who has three husbands with one child from each. Kari's biological father Valence worked together with his co-husbands Rainer and Dante to help raise her and brothers Mykkel and Geirolf.
- Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Volume 12 states that the Demon Beast Mountain Range extends for "several million kilometers". This would be nuts even by fantasy standards, especially since the characters are exploring the place on foot, but factor in that volume 9 revealed it was Earth All Along and it becomes patently absurd. Maybe the author meant square kilometers?note
- Serendipitous Survival: Eryk's unnamed Second Love in the original timeline incurred spiritual poisoning during training and left Nevaria to search for a cure, and therefore wasn't in town when it was destroyed in a Demon Beast invasion.
- Sexually Transmitted Superpowers:
- After his partner Kari was murdered in the original timeline along with their daughter, Eryk gained access to her light element. He assumed at the time that Kari somehow gave it to him in her final moments, but in the new timeline he eventually figures out that it's a combination of 1) him being a half-"godling" who 2) has sex with someone with a different elemental affinity and 3) ingests their blood—the latter of which he did when he kissed her as she lay dying. Drinking a cup of one's partner's blood also happens to be part of the traditional Nevarian marriage rite, which he and Kari never underwent in the original timeline; Eryk suspects the tradition comes from "godlings" who fought in the previous war with the Sekbeists thousands of years ago. In the new timeline he has so far gained access to the Darkness and Earth elements via Lin, and can be reasonably expected to get Light from Kari and Fire from Fay.
- For their part, Kari, Fay, and Lin appear to be reacquiring their memories of the Bad Future in their sleep through their relationship with Eryk: Kari re-learns rune crafting, while Fay remembers some of her former self's advanced alchemy techniques. They regain the rest of their memories by consuming his blood, either before or during the wedding.
- Shadow Walker: Wielders of the darkness element who have reached the Second Stage of Spiritualism can hide inside patches of shadow and darkness and move through them.
- Time Skip: Justified when a couple years pass between volumes 14 and 15. After marrying his four wives, Eryk plans to leave Nevaria with them to establish ties with Spiritualist settlements he and Kari had encountered in the previous timeline, but Fay had become pregnant before the wedding and they have to wait a bit for her son to be old enough.
- Writers Cannot Do Math: Volume 8 states that only two thousand people survived the Sekbeist attack on Vesperia, said to be less than "a thousandth of a percent" of the previous population of 550,000. Actually, that's 0.36 percent.
- You Killed My Father: Eryk to the Great Overlord of the Seventh Realm: "You killed my wife, and my daughter, and my friends, and my whole civilization..."
