while the first half is lloyd dedicating himself to fixing up his estate and either avoiding or accidentally stumbling into some plot points from The Knight of Blood and Iron (the novel he transmigrated into) the second half is him doing everything in his power and even beyond from stopping fate from correcting its course and destroying everything he's worked so hard for.

turns out when you change a world's plot it doesn't like it very much! lloyd finds out that some events that he changed, like his family dying at the beginning of the plot, the queen turning an evil tyrant, some side characters dying off as the plot progresses, etc, are just, , , meant to happen. no mater how hard he tries, he can only delay them or avoid them for a little while, but fate will always try to reestablish itself.

except. there is way to stop it. see, when he changed so many events of the original plot, he accidentally sidelined the original MC and turned into a protagonist, so now the world is freaking out because it senses two different protagonists running around when there's only mean to be one and it's trying to correct this by jumpstarting the original plot all over again. so if lloyd wants to stop the restoration of fate he simply has to make it so there's only one protagonist in the world again. he only has to kill javier, his best friend, or kill himself. easy peasy.

ofc lloyd refuses to accept this and the rest of the novel is him trying desperately to find a way to avoid either of those outcomes. all without telling javier about it because god knows that guy would immediately throw away his life to keep him and his family safe and that's a no-no for lloyd.

the emotional and narrative climax of the novel is both javier and lloyd self-sacrificing themselves for the other in a desperate attempt to keep the person they care the most about alive. it is insane and I love it. I won't put any details because god it is a thing meant to be experienced without biases but, , , , jesus f*cking christ in a bicycle. i've read romance novels less tender and heartfelt than whatever these two have going on.

alas it is not a bl. as someone has pointed out above lloyd does get married to a woman, but it doesn't really help that the most emotional scene of the entire thing is between him and his best friend and that also the novel does end focusing on just the two of them.

Suho's a Korean Transmigrator who complained a lot about having to clean up about the mess that OG Lloyd left him, and I was kind of feeling sympathetic for him and thought he would be like others.

Chapter 7 and 8 stopped me from my tracks. There's this guy, Ulrich, weak-skilled soldier who abandoned the OG in the novel, the author explained it like it was justified lmao. The soldiers hired by his father were reluctant to work as construction workers because... surprise, surprise that's not the job they signed up for. Of course, our protagonist needed helpers to do heavy work for the constructions, you know what his great plan to make these soldiers do his bidding? Select the aforementioned guy who was also visibly unwilling, suddenly bash him on the head and beat the heck out of him using a shovel until he's bloody and half-dead (I forgot to say that the guy was so disoriented right after he got bashed and could only take the ab*se if I remember right). It makes one's heart quite chilled ah. If you can stomach this, I guess you're good to go. I think I need to pause for a while. Did it make the soldiers more willing to obey him? Well, who wouldn't after witnessing something terrifying such as the young master suddenly attacking someone who defied his wishes? I know this is supposed to be a fictional but compared to other isekais, it happened in a peaceful setting... making it more difficult to- I wish I had gotten a warning lmao maybe then I wouldn't be so against it because I know what I signed up for.

An additional context: In the transmigrator's modern Korea, there's this superior who finds fault with him and once cursed his parents with profanities because he found Suho lacking. Guess what he did to shut him up? Suho struck him with a shovel too. He said he felt quite refreshed, one can only wonder why he didn't get locked up for assault in the Modern World. Like I would want to hit someone who insulted me and my loved ones too but like--- I don't know but it left a really, really bad taste.