The author uses the West in this setting as a tool to examine and deconstruct a self-admitted generic Murim setting. The central thesis of this work is 'The Murim in Wuxia is bad at war'.

The Murim characters have fighting skills, but they have little experience with mass combat. The story points out that a self defense weapon like the sword, and no one favors powerful battlefield weapons like the polearm because no one goes to full on battlefields. Their concerns are an elite assassin strike team rather than entire squadrons... more>> of enemies.

The Murim are set up as civilians and smaller local powers living in a long period of relative peace. They do not use practical battlefield equipment techniques because it would draw suspicion from the imperial government. They focus more on nurturing a few high level talents rather than mass producing 'good enough' talents for large scale confrontations.

The West is set as a contrast- it is a meat grinder locked into a forever war that has little room for the flourish or the exponential growth of a single individual seen in most Wuxia. The yet to be revealed villain appears to have a similar mindset, but they still lack the practical experience and decades of institutional combat knowledge that the protagonist brings into the picture. <<less

A cool premise, though I'm not a fan of the execution. The entire gimmick of this book is that the MC is a western medieval knight in an eastern Wuxia land, but the author sadly leans away from all the cool and interesting parts of being a medieval knight that would actually set this book apart. It might as well be called "Average Modern Day MC with OP Sword Technique in a Martial Arts Novel".

I think it would be awesome and totally different if the MC actually leaned into the... more>> chivalry and whole crusade vibe, because the character interactions and cultural clash with the Wuxia culture would be really entertaining to see. It would certainly spice up the character interactions, because the dialogue is completely generic and akin to every other Wuxia novel. Right now this book does nothing unique; the MC is practically a medieval knight in name only, and it has no real effect on his personality. The author just uses the medieval knight trope to justify scaling the MC's power level up from the start since his swordsmanship is exotic, as other reviewers have mentioned.

With that said, the book is still fairly entertaining as a slightly different than usual Wuxia; there is the whole subplot of the world actually being from a novel. I give it a 3.5, though it would be a 4.5 if I wasn't bigly disappointed by the lost potential and the resulting generic dialogue. I really feel this could have been totally unique and exciting, and maybe even a classic since the author's underlying writing skills are good, but it ended up milquetoast unfortunately. <<less

Enjoyable novel. Basic premise is MC is transported to a novel world, where he first appears in an anachronistic, fantasy medieval Europe as a knight trainee. He is forced to join the Crusades, and over a two year period, fights in many battles, killing thousands. However, he is captured and sold as a s*ave; Chapter 1 of the novel starts with him on a s*ave ship that he has captured (with help from others). However, the ship is shipwrecked, and he is the sole survivor. He washes up on unknown... more>> shores, is rescued by an obviously Chinese female martial arts trainee, and realizes that in fact he was transported into a sh!tty murim novel that he had read in the past, and the martial arts group that rescued him is destined to be wiped out shortly. And the story goes from there.

As noted in other reviews, the basic premise of a Korean possessor who becomes a medieval knight that is then cast into a Chinese martial arts world is an interesting setting. Also, it is clear the author did some research, as he references various longsword techniques (primarily from German fencing), including Ochs (mistransliterated as "Ox"), Mordhau, etc. And the author tries to imbue the combat scenes which pit longsword techniques against fanciful Chinese swordsmanship techniques with at least some topical plausibility.

The MC is a solid character- it is a strong to stronger type novel, and at the start, MC has had extensive combat experience and is very skilled. He is straightforward, decent, and never a coward or beta - which is pretty bloody rare in novels nowadays. Thus, while still early, this gets 5 stars from me based on current trajectory. <<less

So far it's pretty good. I haven't seen too many "European knight/warrior in Wuxia-land" stories so it's a bit refreshing in that sense. There also doesn't seem to be any "cheats" other than the somewhat unexplained "only took two years to reach this high level of magic/martial arts" (though I'm hoping that is explained a bit more) and some external knowledge from his previous life. This is seemingly limited for now to things like "I heard swords could be broken this way during this time period maybe I'll try it"... more>> and not pulling out "time to make handguns" McGuffins, and I hope it continues that way.

I appreciate that right off the bat you see him be like, "s*avery bad". I don't appreciate that the first thing he thinks when he sees (who seems to be) the FL is "omg big b**bs" when it has no other bearing on her character. I don't mind when people describe how someone looks but that just felt like a "*wink wink nudge nudge* hey guys, get interested" tactic. Fortunately he isn't constantly commenting on how she looks like some other stories do, so I'm hoping it doesn't become a thing. <<less

Read up to date til the free chaps. It's a a nice novel. It doesn't do anything new exactly (besides the westerner MC thing), but the development is decent or better worded, nice to read. It makes you wanna read more though, which is troubling, since the rest of the chapters are locked behind a paywall by the TLs.. Oh, good job to them too. They did a nice job on translating this.

May be unrelated, but this is by the same author as "I Realized It Was an Academy Game... more>> After 10 Years." I didn't like that one, but did like this one. So for both readers who read that novel and liked/didn't like it, can try this out. <<less