Why Couldn’t Jinwoo Turn the Ice Elf Barca Into a Shadow?

Solo Leveling Season 2 -Arise from the Shadow- got off to an explosive start with the Red Gate Incident in its first two episodes, which gave us a first glimpse at Sung Jinwoo in action as the Shadow Monarch, with his army of Shadows making him even more formidable. The standout scene in the first two episodes of the second season of Solo Leveling is Jinwoo’s fight against the Ice Elf Barca, which was a brilliantly animated bout showcasing Jinwoo’s mastery over his various techniques, including Shadow Extraction.

However, despite managing to eke out a victory against a more powerful opponent like Barca, Jinwoo was unable to add his Shadow to his collection, missing out on what would’ve been an unfathomably powerful new ally to have. Why did the extraction fail?

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Solo Leveling: Shadow Extraction, Explained

Sung Jinwoo’s Shadow Extraction is an incredibly powerful ability that makes use of his fallen enemies. How does it work?

A Recap on The Mechanics of Jinwoo’s Shadow Extraction

After the Job-Change Quest of episodes 11 and 12, Sung Jinwoo gained the Shadow Monarch title, which came with the Shadow Extraction ability. This ability enables him to remove the essence or “Shadow” from the corpse of a recently killed enemy and command it as a personal soldier. Using the command “Arise”, Jinwoo gets three attempts to extract the Shadow from a corpse before the opportunity is lost to him forever.

Shadow Extraction makes use of Mana to call forth the Shadow of the recently deceased from the void, and higher-level targets require much more effort to summon, as seen when Jinwoo first got the ability and used it on Igris the Bloodred, who took three attempts and a speech from Jinwoo to extract successfully.

Shadows derived from higher-ranked targets also tend to retain aspects of the personality they had in life, as seen with Igris and even “Tank”, the Shadow of White Tiger Guild A-Rank Tank Kim Chul, who had an intense personality. During the Red Gate Incident, Jinwoo managed to gain many new shadows, including the Boss of the region’s Ice Bears, which he unleashed in his return to the Demon Castle Dungeon in Solo Leveling Season 2 -Arise from the Shadow- episode 3.

Jinwoo has a finite amount of “space” for his Shadows, so he initially had to purge a few of them before storing new ones, but as he levels up, his Shadow storage capacity increases. Unleashing the Shadows in combat has a rather steep Mana cost, which Jinwoo saw in his battle against the Ice Elves.

Rank Differences, or a Symbol of Something Greater?

Jinwoo’s ability to gain strength from his battles has been integral to his survival of various tough fights against opponents more powerful than himself. He has managed to dispatch several enemies whose names were displayed in red by the System’s HUD, so it has been important to his quest for power to be able to extract the Shadows of such foes.

However, the level difference between himself and the target is the most obvious barrier to extraction. Even if he managed to kill them in battle, it doesn’t translate to the same kind of reverence that we saw with Igris every single time.

Even Igris’s extraction was against the odds, and due to the Shadow’s recognition of Ashborn in Jinwoo, even during their battle. Barca recognized Jinwoo as a monster like himself, noting that he can even understand the language of monsters, not to mention the fact that he described their battle as the first one he’d enjoyed in a long time, so even if Barca was a higher level than Jinwoo, there was still a possibility that the extraction could succeed. Perhaps it’s possible that Barca’s Shadow simply couldn’t bear the thought of expressing fealty to a human, but it’s more likely just to be the difference in levels between Jinwoo and his target that made the extraction impossible.

Solo Leveling

Release Date

January 7, 2024

Directors

Shunsuke Nakashige

Writers

Noboru Kimura

Cast

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  Taito Ban

  Shun Mizushino (voice)

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  Genta Nakamura

  Kenta Morobishi (voice)

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  Haruna Mikawa

  Aoi Mizushino (voice)

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