Yeah, just finished reading and (spoiler alert) it apparently went something like: king marries a maid of a noble family and has ML. Seems like a happy story, but ML’s mother dies and the new empress sends ML to a “camp” of some sort (I kinda catched that it might’ve been masked as behavioral rehabilitation camp) in which they tortured and brainwashed the children into becoming obedient assassins. Thing is, that ML got out of the brainwash but stayed and learned until he became strong and enough to get vengeance for himself and kill everyone involved in the whole thing. It honestly seems like many things were left unsaid in that past story because the “vengeance” involves way too many people and there seems to be a fallen kingdom involved (which wasn’t part of the vengeance, it’s said that there was a bit of a chaotic political situation when the vengeance took place, so that might be why the rebels are after ML). Idk, it would’ve been better to have a clearer view into that past, but that’s just what I understood of what I read. It’s up to the individual (each reader) to judge whether they consider the ML to be innocent or not ╮(￣ ◡ ￣)╭
(Might contain spoiler alert)
By the way, nothing is really mentioned in the story (that I noticed) and this is just an opinion/conjecture of mine, but I think that ML’s mother might’ve been killed by the “new” empress that sent him to the torture camp. And, judging by the little glimpse (just one memory frame, if I remember correctly) that we got of the other empress and her golden hair… (I’ll leave it at that, anyone that has read the story, feel free to connect the dots if you’d like)
I can’t get my head around the ML killing so many people (were some of them innocent?) so I can’t exactly support his happiness like I keep holding myself back from feeling happy for him but after reading some spoilers here, it seems all the people he killed may have been involved in torturing him in the past? Guess I’ll stick around for the big reveal of the emperor’s past.