Solo Leveling starts from one blunt premise: a hunter's rank is measured once, when they awaken, and it never changes. Sung Jinwoo is an E-rank, the lowest grade there is, and everyone around him knows it. The story is what happens when that rule breaks for exactly one person.
What he becomes is the Shadow Monarch, a king of the dead who raises the things he kills and keeps them. The army behind him has a logic: who gets raised, what the grades mean, why two knights called Igris and Bellion matter most, and what the war between the Monarchs and the Rulers has to do with it. Here is that logic, and where it turns up across our own Solo Leveling collection.
Hunter ranks and gates
Roughly a decade before the story opens, gates began appearing: doorways to dungeons full of magic beasts. Some people awakened with abilities in response and became hunters. A gate left uncleared for about a week breaks, and whatever is inside comes out, which is why hunters are paid to go in first.
Hunters are graded from E through D, C, B and A to S, and the grade is a measurement of magic power taken by the Hunters Association. It is not a career ladder: the number you awaken with is the number you keep. Gates use the same scale, so an S-rank gate is a national emergency and an E-rank gate is a job for people who need the money. Jinwoo is one of those people, known as the weakest hunter in the world. The rare exception is re-awakening, where a hunter's measured power changes after the fact, and that climb is the subject of the Hunter Path tee and the Solo Levelling tee.
The double dungeon and the System
The turning point is a D-rank gate hiding a second dungeon inside it: a temple lined with stone statues, a giant seated statue of a god at the far end, and three commandments carved into the wall. The party misreads them and the statues begin killing. Jinwoo works out what the rules require, gets the survivors out, and is left alone with the statue.
He dies there, and something offers him a second chance. A message window appears, in the style of a game, and tells him he has been chosen as a Player. From then on he has a level, stats, an inventory and quests, starting with a daily routine of push-ups, sit-ups, squats and a run. He is the only person who can see it, and the only hunter whose strength grows. The statue is the whole subject of the Statue of god tee.
The Shadow Monarch
The System is not a gift from nowhere. It was built to find and train a vessel for a specific power, and that power belongs to Ashborn, the King of the Dead, the original Shadow Monarch. Jinwoo's job change quest, which turns him from a Player into a necromancer and then into the Shadow Monarch, is where the inheritance begins.
What the title grants is command over shadows. Jinwoo can pull a shadow out of a corpse and make it a soldier, store any number of them inside his own shadow, summon them from any shadow he can see, and trade places with one across a battlefield. Soldiers that fall are not lost; they return to the shadow and recover.
That version of Jinwoo, a figure in a black coat with violet eyes, is on the Shadow Monarch tee, the Shadow Monarch: No Limits tee, the Monarch Gaze tee and the Shadow Reign tee.
Shadow Monarch pieces
Arise
"Arise" is the single word Jinwoo speaks to extract a shadow, and the mechanics are stricter than the word suggests. Extraction only works on the dead, it can be attempted three times on any one body, and a strong enough opponent can refuse all three. The stronger it was in life, the harder it is to raise, so his best soldiers are usually enemies that nearly killed him.
A raised shadow keeps its shape and its skills but not its will: it belongs to him completely. The army is graded, from ordinary soldiers up through elite, knight and general grades to marshals, with a single grand marshal at the top, and a shadow can be promoted as it fights. That rising is the moment the Arise from Shadows, Arise, Shadow Monarch, Arise Monarch's Call and Shadow Rise tees are drawn around.
Arise pieces
Igris and Bellion
Igris is the first shadow anyone remembers. He is the red-armored knight who guards the throne room at the end of the job change quest. When Jinwoo wins and speaks the word, Igris rises as a knight-grade shadow and stays at his side for the rest of the story. He never speaks; he kneels and fights, and that silence is most of why readers love him.
Bellion is the other end of the same line: the first shadow Ashborn ever created, grand marshal of the original army, outranking every soldier Jinwoo raised, Igris included. He appears only once Jinwoo has fully inherited the title, having waited to see whether the new Monarch is worth serving. Between them the two knights map the army: Igris is what Jinwoo built, Bellion is what he inherited. Igris is on the Igris Knight of Honor tee; Bellion has a tee and a pair of sweatpants of his own.
The two knights
The Monarchs and the Rulers
The gates were never random. They are the spillover of an older war between two sides made by the same creator: the Rulers, beings of light, and nine Monarchs, kings of the dark, each commanding a race of their own. Antares, Monarch of Destruction and king of dragons, leads them; Baran rules the demons, Rakan the beasts, and Querehsha's insects are behind the Jeju Island raid. The Rulers eventually turned on and killed the being that made them, and the war moved to Earth.
Ashborn was one of the nine and switched sides. That explains the plot: the Shadow Monarch fought alongside the Rulers, and when the war reached this world the Rulers built the System to raise a vessel for his power. Jinwoo is the result, wielding a Ruler's telekinesis with a Monarch's army behind him. The final fight is against Antares, and it is won with the Rulers' help.
Then Jinwoo rewinds the world to before the first gate opened. He keeps his memory and his shadows; for everyone else the war never happened. It is why the artwork is nearly always a lone figure against the dark, as on the Shadows tee, the Divine Rise tee and the Shadow Flame Rise tee.
How this translates onto cloth
Solo Leveling's palette is black, violet and a single point of light, which takes to a garment well. A figure in a black coat with glowing eyes reads from across a street, and a row of silhouetted soldiers holds its shape at any scale.
Every piece linked above is printed with a bonded matte finish on garment-washed cotton, so the dark areas stay dark rather than catching the light as a glossy rectangle. Where the artwork sits on the garment is stated on each product page.
Measurements for every size are published on the sizing page rather than left to a generic S, M, L chart, and the whole set is in the Solo Leveling collection.
Read next: summoned servants with grades of their own are the subject of Jujutsu Kaisen domains, shikigami and cursed energy, and a numbered hierarchy of the dead runs through Bleach bankai, hollows and the Espada.
Torazen designs are independent fan-inspired work — not affiliated with or endorsed by the rights holders. Character and series names are used to describe what the artwork refers to.