Character · Solo Leveling
Sung Jinwoo
Ranked the weakest hunter alive, kept taking the worst jobs available, and then something started handing him quests.
In Otakana the clue reads: Weakest hunter who started leveling alone
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Solo Leveling
- Letters
- 6 · Easy
Sung Jinwoo went into dungeons because his mother was ill and his sister was in school, and E-rank work paid. He was so far below the other hunters that his colleagues called him bait. A double dungeon almost kills the entire party, and what he wakes up to afterwards is a floating window offering him a daily quest, with penalties for refusing it.
From there the story is a video game played straight. He levels, allocates stat points, unlocks a class, and the class turns out to be necromancy: every enemy he defeats can be raised as a shadow soldier that never tires and never disobeys. The pleasure of the thing is watching a hierarchy that publicly ranked him last fail to notice how far past it he has gone.
Chugong published the novel on Kakaopage in 2016, the webtoon followed in 2018, and A-1 Pictures animated it in 2024 to enormous numbers. It is one of the clearest cases of a Korean web serial travelling all the way to a Japanese anime production, which is a climb worth as much as the one inside the plot.
Spelling JINWOO
JINWOO is six letters and ends in a double O that Korean romanisation puts there for the vowel 우. Otakana wants it as one word, so the hyphen in Jin-Woo and the space in Jin Woo are both wrong on the tiles. The family name Sung comes first in Korean order, so JINWOO is the given name despite appearing second in English.