Release That Witch

by Er Mu, TransN (Translator)

Chen Yan travels through time, only to end up becoming an honorable prince in the Middle Ages of Europe. Yet this world was not quite as simple as he thought. Witches with magical powers abound, and fearsome wars between churches and kingdoms rage throughout the land.
Roland, a prince regarded as hopeless by his own father and assigned to the worst fief, spends his time developing a poor and backward town into a strong and modern city, while fighting against his siblings for the throne and absolute control over the kingdom. Join Roland as he befriends and allies with witches and, through fighting and even farming, pushes back invaders from the realm of evil.

Genres: Fantasy, Romance, Light Novel, Magic, Action, Fiction, Drama

12834 pages, ebook

Published May 15, 2017

Reviews

[Umaiya ❄️Ramblings of a Scattered Mind❄️ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ooooooh! Again I'm totally blown over!! I NEVER expect chinese manhuas to be any good, plot wise. Usually they're pretty trashy and flow the same cliche plot with it's overused twists. So when something like this comes along, I'm all Kyaaaaa~

But alas! My ship pretty much sank and I will forever be devastated. >_<

*Starts petition!*

-clears throat-

Down with Anna!

Down with Anna!Down with Anna!

Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!

Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!

Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!Down with Anna!

[Masoud Irannejad · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 star
I enjoyed the story , character development , Art and the names of the characters !!!
I have read up to chapter 242 of the Manhua, and then I lost my interest just because it's tooooo long .

[Wahyu Awaludin · Rating 5 out of 5]

the best of the best light novels I've read so far.

Strengths:

1. An incredibly interesting premise. There are witches but not just random jerks. Witches are used as production factors to create the industrial revolution.

2. A very complex story. At first it was very simple, which was to expel the mutated animals in Border Town, but the ending involved the multiverse. This is a very large story size.

3. Countless plot twists. For example, about mutated animals / demon animals. Initially, readers thought the demon animals were subordinates of the devil, but it turned out they were mutated by creatures of the Sky-Sea Realm civilization.

4. Hundreds of characters. This is satisfying because the complex structure of this story is well-built. Unfortunately, character development only occurs in a few characters such as Nightingale, Anna, Lightning, Ashes, Andrea, etc. Roland himself doesn't get much character development.

5. The ending is really good and not rushed. It's just that in the 5-year timeskip, there are still many characters whose fates are not known. The only ones who appear in the timeskip are Agatha, Isabella, Tilly, Ashes, Lightning, Maggie, Lorgar, and Joan, Roland, Garcia, Anna, Nightingale, Valkyrie, Hackzord, Serakka, Zero, and Fei Yuhan. There are still hundreds of characters whose fates are unknown, such as military personnel such as Iron Axe, Carter, Good, Manfeld, Brian, etc., as well as witches in the union such as Lily, Mystery Moon, Annie, Iffy, etc., or officials such as Barov and Edith Kent.

Btw, overall this story is really crazy and the adaptation to the manhua is also excellent, getting a rating of 8.3/10. Luckily this is not like Jiang Chen's story in I Have a Mansion in Apocalypse Times. Even though the novel is good and complex, the manhua adaptation is really trash. Well, this novel - Release That Witch - is really good and recommended.

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the best of the best light novel I ever read so far.

Keunggulan:

1. premis yang luar biasa menarik. Ada penyihir tapi ga asal jedar jedor. Penyihir malah digunakan sebagai faktor produksi untuk menciptakan revolusi industri.

2. Cerita yang sangat kompleks. Awalnya sih sangat sederhana, yaitu mengusir binatang mutasi di Border Town, tapi ending ceritanya melibatkan multiverse. Ini ukuran cerita yang sangat besar.

3. Plot twist yang tak terhitung jumlahnya. Misalnya soal binatang mutasi / binatang iblis. Awalnya pembaca mengira binatang iblis adalah bawahan iblis, tapi ternyaa mereka termutasi oleh makhluk peradaban Sky-Sea Realm.

4. Karakter yang berjumlah ratusan orang. Ini memuaskan karena struktur kompleks cerita ini jadi terbangun dengan baik. Sayangnya pendalaman tokoh hanya terjadi di beberapa karakter saja seperti Nightingale, Anna, Lightning, Ashes, Andrea dll. Roland sendiri malah kurang dapat pendalaman tokoh.

5. Endingnya bagus banget dan ga buru-buru. Cuma di bagian timeskip 5 tahun masih banyak tokoh yang gak dikasih tahu nasibnya. Yang muncul di timeskip cuma ada Agatha, Isabella, Tilly, Ashes, Lightning, Maggie, Lorgar, dan Joan, Roland, Garcia, Anna, Nightingale, Valkyrie, Hackzord, Serakka, Zero, dan Fei Yuhan. Masih ada ratusan karakter yang ga ketahuan nasibnya kayak orang-orang militer seperti Iron Axe, Carter, Good, Manfeld, Brian dll, juga penyihir-penyihir di serikat seperti Lily, Mystery Moon, Annie, Iffy dll, ataupun pejabat seperti Barov dan Edith Kent.

Btw secara keseluruhan cerita ini gila banget dan adaptasi ke manhua nya juga jempolan sampe dapet rating 8.3/10. Untungnya ini gak seperti cerita Jiang Chen di I Have a Mansion in Apocalypse Times. Padahal novelnya bagus dan kompleks, tapi adaptasi mahua nya sampah banget. Yah pokoknya novel ini - Release That Witch- bagus banget dan recommend.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing (and lengthy) series that's hard to categorize. Isekai, urban fantasy, military fantasy, LitRPG, magical realism, Eastern mysticism all lend a hand here as well as the cultural perspectives of mainland China.

[Murugesan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the best web novels I have read. The plot is good and moved at a great pace. Even though the details are done for each character even some of the main characters are lacking, the plot and the detailing of the whole world and philosophy behind the civilization are great.

[Agustiuddin M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Science and magic? Because why not...

[Isaiah Lee-Shim · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best web novels available. Qidian has botched its release, sadly.

[Joe Palffy · Rating 4 out of 5]

First of all I’d like to say that Er Mu is above his peers in many aspects, his characters are pretty good and have plenty of development, he shows/tells the story from many different people point of view.

The Good:
- Good-to-great characters
- A great sense of camaraderie, loyalty, friendship (and love) between them
- A long well thought out story
- Weeks of entertainment
- Good story (if you don’t mind war stories)

The Bad:
- 15-20% of the story is filler or doesn’t add anything
- Not the best story telling skills
- Many questions left unanswered at the end
- The story ends too soon, the 3 side-story chapters don’t add anything
- No epilogue (after story) chapters
- The explanations at the end were not very good (vague, not logical enough, not clear enough)
- While it’s better than machine translation it’s still far from good
- A typical asian unnatural fascination with horror, which resulted in scenes being more graphic then they needed to be.
- Too much detail (believe it or not)

The Characters:
Like previously mentioned, the characters were more than decent and they had plenty of development time, but then again there also where a ton of them, but that was never a bad thing, what was bad though is the way they were introduced, like we were already supposed to know them (this wasn’t restricted to just characters).

I very much liked the interactions between them, they gave a very satisfying feeling, they were loyal, friendly, funny, lovable, adorable and competent, they grew and they grew on you.

Even the antagonists were acceptable, which most authors/stories fail to do right, just like in real life there aren’t really people who are evil for no reason or want to destroy the world for stupid/selfish reasons. Everybody had a reason for what they did, even if some of their bad choices were a result of their fear and stupidity, but be it greed, arrogance or just a desire for survival they made sense.

As for the MC, he is not OP, in fact he can’t even use magic in a world that has magic. All he relies on is his knowledge of his previous world and his personal engineering background and experiences.

The synopsis calls him a time traveler because he ends up in a world that is similar to the 12-16th century Europe, but where he ends up is not Earth, not even close. He’s a space-time-soul traveler if you wanna define it.

The Story:
It’s mostly a war story told by a geek/nerd who’s way to into the early technology (and the way of doing things) of the 18 and 19 century. It’s also mostly a story of magic vs science.

The story is good, it would make for a great Game of Thrones style 10 season TV show, but war stories are not really my thing so it was a little tedious, I was actually hoping it would end sooner and continue with their after-stories and explain all the things that were brought up, but we didn’t get any of that.

I liked how the story was told from many different angles, not just the MC’s, but all the major characters and even the antagonists. And every 6 months or so a new arrival/refugee would arrive in his quickly developing city and tell us of all the changes and the awe they felt would actually make you proud somehow (and also give you a feeling of superiority to some extent).

The ending was good I guess, I liked how some of the last battles ended, it felt natural, but the explanation at the end was not good enough, it wasn’t clear enough, nor did it explain enough, some of it was even contradictory, it was confusing and I had to read it multiple times to be able to make some sense of it.

SPOILER (kinda): Some gray robed guy wasn’t liking how to universe was gonna end in trillions of years (everything going dead and quiet) so he and 175.000 other civilizations gathered together and pushed 1/10.000th of the universes mass into a single cramped spot in order to tear a whole in space. Why ? How was that gonna fix anything ? nobody knows, but the end result was that they succeeded and through that whole magic power entered our universe from a higher realm (or a universe with different laws) which whipped out all sentient life (why didn’t it kill simpler life-form ? not explained, or why it killed any life forms).

But before all this happened the gray robed man and friends created an artificial life form, why ? to carry out experiments in the new world with magic that they had no clue existed. This new life-form did not die of magic thanks to being an artificial life form and he later became the caretaker of an artificial world, called the Cradle, where his task was to use the library of past civilizations to create and evolve living beings that could survive in this magic filled world, and to speed things up he put more than 1 race together with others to promote competition and what better way to do that then to wage war against each other...

This was still not fast enough so he introduced legacy shards, which when stolen from the loosing race would give the winning race all the knowledge of the losers. But this STILL wasn’t fast enough so he also introduced a 4th race that was controlled by him and provided more pressure when he felt like it and every 450 years or so he would raise magic levels to its peak, symbolized by the arrival of the red moon.

Sadly the author likes to explain things too much and go into too much detail, this would normally not be a problem, but he explains how reinvented things work, like steam engines, which don’t match to reality all that well (because they are built differently, like with magic, or with different materials) and sometimes are complete b*llshit, like steam engines working faster if you add more water, but if you don’t it’s fine… it’s not fine, a steam engines without water does NOT WORK AT ALL, and adding water will just make it run for longer.

He also likes to explain anything he can get his grubby little hands on, like completely obvious things (like that going uphill is harder than going downhill… facepalm), and lots of other things like peoples reasons for doing what they did, which are either obvious or should have been left for the reader to ponder over as small mysteries, but no, he often treats the reader as if they are an elementary schooler, which is quite insulting.

This is a common bad habit of non-japanese asian authors (from the few I’ve read), but others do it much more and much worse, he only wastes 15-20% of your time but others go up to as high as 50% and I’ve only read a few of the better light novels so far.

I believe the reason for all this filler is because of need/greed for money. More chapters means more coins since these light novels are usually published online where you have to pay per chapter, but also can be sold as more volumes.

The Translation: It’s honestly not that bad, but it bothers me way more than it should, because of my ADHD, it’s way better than machine translation but still very subpar, but this is made by a team of amateurs who probably do it for free, but that is no excuse to some of the things they do, like using very obscure/rare words when they could be easily replaced with common ones (most of the time), this contrasts badly with many simple sentences that barely make any sense, and s quite a few times even saying the complete opposite of what should be said, like fortunately instead of unfortunately and vice-versa.

Conclusion: Should you read it? Yes, especially if you don’t mind war stories, as almost the entire time there is some kind of battle being thought somewhere and with the MC not being OP it’s fairly anxiety inducing and some characters do actually die.

The ending is also satisfying enough but some after stories and more/better explanations would have helped it a great deal. I mean he does marry the girl he falls in love with way before the ending, but nothing really changes since the war doesn’t permit it, in short there is no honeymoon.

There is also the 2nd love interest who makes an agreement with the 1st love interest, which might or might not lead to a harem situation but it’s never explained, although you can vaguely guess (and that’s annoying). There are many other things which are never explained, like why only some women can use magic.

There also many annoying things (to me anyway) like how the MC refuses to tell people that he is not the real Roland even after most people have figured it out, it’s just stubbornly annoying because of how pointless hiding it is, eventually he does tell his wife at least.

Rating:
Characters: 9/10
Story: 7/10
Story-telling: 5/10
Total: 6.5/10

[Francisco López · Rating 5 out of 5]

Estamos sin duda alguna ante uno de los mejores isekai que alguna vez se haya escrito y vino de China, la historia es fascinante uno pensaría que sería el típico isekai donde el protagonista es poderoso, extremadamente poderoso y que tiene como misión derrotar al rey demonio, nada más equivocado, es un enfoque científico hacia un mundo lleno de magia el desarrollo de la civilización y como la humanidad puede aprovechar ese poderoso poder que es la magia. Es una historia fascinante que recomiendo muchísimo.

[Qi Dian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Website : qidian china
Views : 3.71 million
Rating : 8.5(1471)
Chapters : 1026
Status : ongoing
rank : 33
Word count : 2.23 million
author rank : great

[Erika Masr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely my favorite web novel in kingdom-building genre!

The premise starts with a modern man transmigrating into a fantasy European based Middle Age era where witches are hunted and he is an unlikable prince. He is given his own desolate territory to rule and takes the opportunity to bring into it modern weapons, improved transportation, education, sciences, etc. Although the book has witches with supernatural powers, they have a lot of limitations (each witch has her own specialty) and those powers are used to quickly bring the territory to the modern times.

Although this book is light, there's also a lot of knowledge contained in it about the evolution of combustion engine and its uses as well as chemistry and various materials' uses in gunpowder creation, weapon, etc. As someone who doesn't know much about it, I was truly fascinated and throughout the series I could see that the author truly did try to make many things as logical as could be done.

Recommend!

[Ahja Hawkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

definitely a weird one. initially, it was a great kingdom building novel. i see a lot of complaints about Roland being a gary stu and somehow remembering everything from his past life, but i didn’t mind it. i really like kingdom building novels, and all the processes were very detailed (maybe a little too detailed sometimes) and extensive.

the romance wasn’t the best. i think Nightingale should’ve been the obvious choice over Anna, who’s barely a character and is barely in the story. but eventually i just found Nightingale’s hyper-fixation on Roland to be kinda creepy and stalkerish. it made me not really like her character in the end.

anyways, i just think the author played his cards too soon, because as soon as the crown prince succession and evil church stuff ends, it starts losing steam and then the story becomes really convoluted and detached from the inital plot.

my verdict: the first 700ish chapters are great kingdom building stuff, after that, uhh…

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great story, somewhat bogged down by typical web novel translation quality, meandering plot elements, and very generic antagonists.

It fills the gap of tech uplift fantasy that for me Daniel Black has left empty.

Minor complaint about the politics, I felt like there was a lot about societal changes the author left empty and could've expounded about but couldn't because reasons. Oh well.

The most annoying part of it for me (mild spoilers) is that the author, for some reason, added an isekai within the friggin' isekai. I honestly wish that whole aspect was removed entirely and the whole overarching plot was resolved in some other way.

[Nagisa Urchin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This series had a pretty strong start, the characters were unique and the way the main character breaks norms to protect witches and use them for scientific advances was really cool. Sometime after the main character got the mental world power things felt like they were very slowly progressing and I didn't end up finishing it

[Hector Peña · Rating 3 out of 5]

Empezó excelente, de mis novelas favoritas, por alguna razón (aparentemente por censura) el autor tuvo que, estando en los capítulos finales, darle al turbo, y lo que aparentemente iba a terminar en otros 200 capítulos terminó en 20. Qué decepción.

[Florescu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome, a rare find. Extremely well written.

[Varien · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's the cherry on top, the light at the end of the tunnel. I honestly don't see any series ever replacing this as my #1 book until I die.

[Grandparaves · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing, absolutely love it

[Dhawal Joshi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Initially the book was interesting but after 1000 or so chapters it went boring. I couldn't bring myself to finish the last few hundred chapters. Overall it's a good one time read.

[Orkit · Rating 5 out of 5]

Дуже цікава фантазія про використання навиків сучасної інженерії, в тому числі воєнної, в середньовічному фентезійному світі з магією.

[Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

4

[Tùng Mai · Rating 4 out of 5]

The end doesn't hold up much to the build up

[Cuong Le Cao · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book, suffer same issues that plagued Chinese webnovel like ideal protagonist, weak 2nd half ...
Still very interesting and creative science x magic realism.

[Soumya Moharana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Something new and interesting apart from the cultivation and fights....

[Abhiram Manikonda · Rating 4 out of 5]

683

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

烂尾网文

[Sourov Roy · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

[Erik Nylander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Long and satisfying story, that ends quite rushed - but not unsatisfaying or without answering the important questions.

[Ahmed · Rating 3 out of 5]

This took so long. And I definitely procrastinated with it. Regardless it was a fun read. Things spiralled from the untitle point but I suppose I should have expected that.

[kapan aku wisuda? · Rating 4 out of 5]

found this gem even before i found Dr. Stone.

In contrast with that this world filled with magic and stuff. However, modern knowledge help a lot to build civilization and prosperity.