Is Release That Witch worth reading?

Is Release That Witch worth reading? Among readers who like their fantasy with blueprints, Release That Witch (放开那个女巫) is close to a default recommendation. It's also the book they warn you about the moment the chapter count comes up.

What Release That Witch is

A kingdom-building novel with an engineer inside a prince. Roland Wimbledon is a prince of Graycastle so unpromising that his father sends him to govern Border Town, a scrap of land at the kingdom's western edge, beside mountains that spit out monsters every winter. The man now living in Roland's body was a modern engineer, and the first thing he does with the job is stop the church from burning a witch. Her name is Anna, she can make fire do things a forge can't, and she's the start of a plan: gather the witches the church is hunting, treat their powers as tools, and turn Border Town into something the continent won't recognize. Nightingale, a witch who walks through fog and can hear a lie, becomes his shadow. The opening hundred chapters are about steel, wheat and gunpowder.

What readers love

The building. Readers who usually skim the economics in web novels say this is the one where they didn't, because each witch's power solves a specific problem that was set up before it's solved. The witches, who get jobs and opinions rather than slots in a lineup. And the restraint: there's a large cast of women around Roland and the book mostly declines to make that a harem, which readers mention with audible relief.

Is Release That Witch worth reading for you?

It divides on length and on the back half. Once the town is a city and the enemies stop being human, the book becomes a war story with a larger scale and, for some readers, a smaller heart. Plenty say the ending feels rushed after such a patient middle, and a smaller group finds the science lessons a little tidy, with the engineer always right and the medieval world always waiting to be taught.

The complaints, though, are the shape of the book's virtue. It's a novel about compounding, and compounding is thrilling right up until the numbers get too big to feel. The first six or seven hundred chapters are as satisfying as this genre gets, and we'd take a rushed ending over one that never came. If you like watching a plan work, start tonight. If you need a sword fight every chapter, this one will test you.

Based on reader reviews; we'll write our own once we've finished it.

If you enjoy it, support the author where it's published: Qidian. Licensed English edition: Webnovel.