If you are tired of protagonists who grind for years to get strong, it's time to switch to the plunderers. Whether they use a broken system interface, a sci-fi AI chip, or straight-up demonic devouring, these main characters don't learn skills—they take them.
Here is the ultimate breakdown of the best ability-stealing, talent-extracting series, categorized by exactly how the MC breaks the power scaling.
1. Pure Talent Copying & Plundering (The Purists)
These series feature the ultimate expression of the trope: the main character encounters an opponent, interacts with them or defeats them, and permanently duplicates their innate talents or bloodlines.
- Your Talent Is Mine — The gold standard of the genre. The MC can physically look at someone, view their talent panel, and clone high-tier cultivation speed, elemental attributes, or swordsmanship permanently.
- I Can Copy Talents — A massive fan favorite with a near-identical premise to Your Talent Is Mine. The MC uses a tracking panel to systematically copy and fuse the ultimate biological and combat talents from both humans and alien invaders.
- Global Kill: I Can Plunder Talent — A brutal video game reality merge where defeating enemies allows the MC to directly strip and harvest their SSS-grade innate abilities.
- I Can Extract Everything — Features an extraction system that goes beyond basic skills; the MC can pull out raw attributes, hidden item stats, and enemy techniques to stack his own power.
- I Can Extract Proficiency — Instead of just stealing a skill, this unique system allows the MC to extract the literal experience and muscle memory (proficiency) out of people and legendary items, instantly mastering complex martial styles.
2. Devour & Monster Assimilation (The Predators)
If you prefer a darker, more visceral take on progression, these series feature protagonists who grow stronger by consuming monsters, beasts, or spiritual entities to physically assimilate their traits.
- Evolution Begins With a Big Tree — The MC is reincarnated as a massive spiritual willow tree. By consuming mutated beasts, he actively absorbs their genetic traits, elemental resistances, and unique domain powers to build an army of monsters.
- Devouring Evolution: I Reborn as an Arctic Wolf — A survival-driven reincarnation story. The protagonist climbs from the bottom of the food chain by physically hunting down predators and consuming them to force custom evolutionary mutations.
3. High-Tier Korean Series (System & Regression)
Korean manhwa tend to lean heavily into Tower-climbing, Hunter Guilds, and Regression time loops. These protagonists exploit their deep knowledge of a system interface to hoard rare classes and skills.
- SSS-Class Suicide Hunter — Starts with an S+ grade ability that copies a target's skill—but it only activates if the MC dies by their hand first. It elevates the trope with phenomenal psychological writing and emotional depth.
- Solo Max-Level Newbie — The MC is the only player to clear a hyper-brutal virtual reality game. When the game becomes real, he uses obscure easter eggs to aggressively farm, plunder, and combine hidden classes and boss monster skills.
- I Obtained a Mythic Item — A Norse-mythology system gives the MC an artifact eye that lets him view hidden status requirements and forcefully bypass constraints to claim mythic skills.
- The Max-Level Player's 100th Regression — Over 100 grueling time loops, the MC systematically strips the timeline of its strongest defensive and offensive abilities to perfectly optimize his build.
- The Player That Can't Level Up — Trapped at Level 1, the MC compensates by making contracts with living, sentient ego weapons, absorbing their direct combat stats and legendary elements.
- The Genius Assassin Who Takes It All — A fast-paced regression story entirely centered on a protagonist who ruthlessly front-runs historical heroes to intercept and steal their fated talents, legacies, and equipment.
4. The "Global Apocalypse + SSS-Grade" Manhua Formula
These series follow a specific, highly popular Chinese manhua archetype: a sudden global disaster hits (a freeze, an invasion, or a game merge), and the MC awakens an absolute rule-breaking system that allows for infinite extraction, speed, or evolution.
- Global Survival: Infinite Resource Extraction — The MC breaks the apocalypse economy by using an absolute extraction system, stripping high-tier stats, hidden attributes, and rare components out of mundane gear and fallen monster corpses.
- Global Survival: 100 Times Cultivation Speed — Trapped in a dog-eat-dog survival game, the MC completely bypasses his lack of natural talent by unlocking a permanent passive multiplier that forces his cultivation and skill mastery to grow exponentially faster than anyone else.
- Global Catastrophe: I Became the World Tree — A massive plant-evolution story where the protagonist transforms into a world-spanning, mythical tree, aggressively expanding his roots to absorb planetary energy and control entire ecosystems.
- Global Beast Tamer: I Can See the Path of Evolution — A data-driven monster taming series. While ordinary tamers rely on guesswork, the MC's cheat interface lets him see the precise, hidden evolutionary pathways and rare trait requirements for his beasts.
- Worldwide Beast Taming: I Can Design Evolution Lines — Taking beast-taming a step further, this system allows the protagonist to act as a literal creator, manually scripting, building, and assigning custom SSS-grade traits to his combat summons.
- Global Freeze: I Created an Apocalypse Shelter — Less about classic martial theft and entirely focused on pure resource hoarders. The MC uses his system and future regression knowledge to build a hyper-advanced, self-sustaining bunker to survive a global ice age.
5. Parallel System & Cultivation Masteries
While these series are less about literal "theft," they carry the exact same "cheat-code" progression satisfaction. These protagonists use ancient knowledge, futuristic memory data, or hidden system loopholes to replicate supreme martial arts or sign-in rewards instantly.
- Logging 10,000 Years into the Future — The MC can fall asleep and log his consciousness into a future apocalyptic timeline, allowing him to practice, steal, and bring back ten thousand years of highly optimized martial arts techniques to the modern world.
- Age of Terror: I, City God, Start To Sign In — Set in a ghost-infested world, the MC utilizes a location-based "Sign-In" system to continuously extract divine protection skills and evolve into a traditional deity.
- Top Tier Providence: Secretly Cultivate for a Thousand Years — The ultimate low-profile cultivation comedy. The MC rolls for SSS-tier innate karma/talents at birth and quietly stacks passive skills to stay completely overpowered while avoiding trouble.
- Apocalypse Online — Features a fast-paced game-like system interface where defeating dynamic enemies grants points used to force rapid skill evolution and tactical acquisitions.
- I Am Carrying Gold From the Post-Apocalyptic World — A dual-world hopper story where the MC brings high-tech weapons and biochemical enhancements from a wasteland back to the real world to replicate an artificial "awakened" status.
🏆 The Verdict: Where Should You Start?
If you want pure talent copying: Read Your Talent Is Mine or I Can Copy Talents.
If you want an elite storyline + copying mechanics: Read SSS-Class Suicide Hunter.
If you want ruthless min-maxing and gaming knowledge: Read Solo Max-Level Newbie.