Warning: story contains suicide, murder and occasional mild body horror.
This is the story of the strongest known man and head of a martial arts union of different organizations. MC mysteriously finds himself to have suddenly swapped bodies with some kid from a scholarly sect. It quickly becomes apparent that this kid had been suicidal for a long time and thus been kept under strict watch. MC is confused and attempting to figure out how to proceed to find out who did this to him and how he can get back to his own body. Alas his body shortly dies because the scholar kid noticed he was no longer being guarded and ends his life in the body of this old man. It's rather tragic if you think about it, but it's rather quickly implied and then moved on from. MC's grief when he receives the news of his own supposed suicide it pretty much just played for comedy, the story refusing to really go into how truly tragic this all is. MC moves on after some tears to train and convince the rest of his family that he's not suicidal anymore. It's compelling and I found addicting, for once MC acts like the old man he is, although he is a pretty open minded old man, but yeah. There's the usual beating of people that aren't MC's enemy, but for some reason it's fine and garners him no hard feelings. It really bothers me that it just normalizes such violence. Especially against his new younger brothers, like wtf, they weren't even abusive to MC, they were just exhausted and hurt and depressed. <_<;;; A lot of the comedy in this is kind of a miss for me, tends to be a bit too obnoxious, but that's definitely more a matter of taste. It's not more excessive than anything you'd find in say Inu-yasha, I just couldn't seem to laugh at it the same. I do like it enough to continue with the plot though. As of ch 69 there's still no progress on who and how MC ended up in his new body. Also he's confided in no-one despite running into quite a few acquaintances so far. I don't require my MC's to be morally good, but somehow on occasion I do find myself pulled out the story and not liking MC's choice to kill someone. Like he's presented as righteous and shit, yet... I dunno in recent chapters it felt like he killed someone a little too lightly? Like it made me go: wait what? He actually killed him? Why?? What made him deserve that? Usually in these stories the author make sure to bring the audience on board with the MC's actions, mostly by keeping him consistent with the character presented, and yet here it felt weirdly out of place. Like why??? Anyway, I'm hoping i was just missing something and later new chapters will put me at ease again, cause otherwise it's been pretty ok.
Actually now that I think about it even in the beginning MC's retaliations on occasion have been... um... extreme in a way? Like he didn't seem the type but he still does what he does. I dunno, it's weird.
The art is good, the translation is understandable and also avoided a lot of inconsistency by being pretty much all by one scanlation group. Which is nice. I like the way the action is depicted through Mc's perspective in a way that we see what he sees, like for examples, which attacks are illusions and faints and which are real.
Also so far there hasn't been any love interests. MC doesn't even entertain the idea and unlike in other stories where an adult finds himself in the body of a teenager, MC doesn't blush and is otherwise unaffected by children making moony eyes at him. It's so tragically refreshing considering the amount of these types of stories where the older MC just sort of... reacts to children like they are viable love interests despite acknowledging their previous age, which they clearly identify with more. 9_9 Like this is how you handle romance in this kind of story. If you're having your middle aged or whatever grown ass adult somehow end up in the body of a teenager, interacting with other kids, the way to have romance is to not have romance.
Heavenly Grand Archive’s Young Master