Transmigrated Into Murim: Novels You Can Read in English

Want a story where a modern man gets transmigrated into murim? The Korean one you're probably thinking of has no English edition we could find, so here's what you can read instead. We opened four English-language Webnovel originals with that exact setup on October 14, 2026, read the first two or three chapters of each, and ranked them by how well they start. The Evil Bastard of Murim is the one we'd open first.

Image: Webnovel covers for Murim Is Cringe, The Evil Bastard of Murim and The Hidden Wolf of Murim

The Korean One First

The title people type, A Modern Man Who Got Transmigrated Into the Murim World, is a Korean web novel with a Kakao webtoon. Our explainer on A Modern Man Transmigrated Into Murim covers the Korean source and where the webtoon stands; the short version is that we found no licensed English text. Everything below is written in English for Webnovel, by authors who clearly grew up on the same manhwa. If "murim" itself is new to you, our guide to what murim means takes two minutes.

How We Ranked These Transmigrated Into Murim Stories

Every pick drops someone from our world into a Korean-style martial world of clans, sects and qi. We read the opening chapters and asked whether we'd keep going. Chapter counts, ratings and update dates come from each Webnovel page and chapter list as we saw them on October 14.

The Best Transmigrated Into Murim Novels, Ranked

1. The Evil Bastard of Murim

Image: Webnovel cover for The Evil Bastard of Murim, by MASKO

Kang Junho is 23, alone since his father's funeral when he was seven, and bleeding out on a Seoul road while a crowd watches and nobody calls an ambulance. He wakes up in a moving prison wagon next to a chubby boy who tells him, as if it's obvious, "We are in Jianghu." What sells the next chapter is that Junho has read the same manhwa you have. He knows the rules, so he waits for his system window, rubbing his hands and grinning while the guards decide he's lost his mind. What finally materialises out of the sparks is a tiny ghost who introduces himself as Ma Cheon Jo. Chapter 1 is literally titled "The Worst System Ever."

It's the best-built opening here: a real reason to feel for the hero, then a joke that only works because he knows the genre. It's also young, with the first entry posted four months ago, and the story so far is the shortest of the three picks. Start here if you want the classic "modern guy, murim rules, no idea how he got there" setup played straight enough to care about. The Evil Bastard of Murim on Webnovel.com

2. Murim Is Cringe

Image: Webnovel cover for Murim Is Cringe, by Neonkilz

The prologue is a single argument, and it's the funniest thing on this list. A system announces itself as "the strongest heaven and earth system," hands the newly arrived hero a mission to beat up the men bullying his Ye family, and he says no. He calls the mission shitty, tells it he's nobody's puppet, and lectures it on how cringe and clichéd these stories are until it reports that it can't handle him and shuts down. Down the hill, the town he was supposed to save starts to smoke. He drops the name Ye Xiang on the spot and calls himself Neon.

The next two chapters turn into something else: Neon as a teenage "Seer" in a black straw hat who predicts a tavern fight down to who dies and how, then sits there annoyed that blood got in his noodles. He's numb to the murim's cruelty because "He had read oh so much," which is the whole joke of the book. It's crude (the profanity is constant and the page is marked for adults), and the newest entry in the chapter list, "(Season Four[End])," went up a year ago, so expect a long run that may have stopped rather than a live serial. It is by far the longest of the three, and the only one with a rating, if you want something to sink into. Murim Is Cringe on Webnovel.com

Neon's rejected "heaven and earth system" is the genre's favourite device.

What Is a System Novel? The Game Menu in the Hero's Head →

3. The Hidden Wolf of Murim

Image: Webnovel cover for The Hidden Wolf of Murim, by Son_Goku_4885

Kang Jun is 29, ignored at work and bullied since school, when a black portal opens on his walk home and drags him through. He comes out as a newborn in a mid-sized murim clan that names him Hēi Lang. Chapter 2 is the baby working out where he is from servants' gossip, deciding "This time, I won't stay weak," and then hearing "[System Initialization Complete.]" Both chapters are short, closer to a scene outline than a scene.

It's the most generic opening of the three, and we'd only pick it for one reason: it's the one that's actually moving, with a new chapter the day before we checked and the first one only seven months old. If you want a murim reincarnation you can follow as it updates, it's that. The Hidden Wolf of Murim on Webnovel.com

Skip: The Legendary Engineer in Murim World

The premise is the best on paper: an engineer, Lan Su, is pulled out of his lab into the murim and fights with inventions instead of qi. The chapters don't deliver it yet. Chapter 1 is four short paragraphs that get him from the lab to "the unknown," and chapter 2 dispatches a bandit camp with a rockfall trap in four more. Every chapter in the list went up three years ago and nothing since. The Legendary Engineer in Murim World on Webnovel.com

What Readers Found Elsewhere

The Korean side of the shelf has more of these, and readers keep finding them. A July 2026 r/noveltranslations post sold Dropped Into the Murim with an Instant-Kill Skill on exactly this premise, a hero "struggling to balance the values of his former world with that of the strong-makes-right martial world." One reader came back to report "They are not kidding when they called this a hidden gem"; another warned "The second half of this novel is truly atrocious." The thread points only to fan-translation sites, which we don't link, so it can't go on our list.

We'd read that split as the usual pattern for these: the arrival and the first teacher are the fun part, and the long middle is where they lose people.

If you want licensed murim with a hero who's already strong, these come from WEBTOON's catalog instead.

Murim Novel With OP MC: Five Picks Worth Starting Today →

Our Take

Open The Evil Bastard of Murim first: it gives you a hero worth rooting for and the best joke about systems in the bunch. If what you actually want is someone mocking the whole genre from inside it, Murim Is Cringe has more chapters than you'll need and a prologue worth reading even if you stop there. The Hidden Wolf of Murim is the fallback for readers who want a story that's still updating. Leave The Legendary Engineer in Murim World alone until it reads like chapters rather than notes. For a female lead instead, try our murim novels with a female MC.

How We Checked This

On October 14, 2026 we opened the Webnovel page and chapter list of each novel, and read the first three entries of Murim Is Cringe (prologue, "The Seer Of All," "Classic Murim"), the prologue and chapter 1 of The Evil Bastard of Murim, and chapters 1 and 2 of The Hidden Wolf of Murim and The Legendary Engineer in Murim World. We also read the Reddit post and its top comments. A fifth Webnovel title, Occultist in Murim, didn't make it: its newest chapter went up three years ago.

References

• Webnovel: The Evil Bastard of Murim
• Webnovel: Murim Is Cringe
• Webnovel: The Hidden Wolf of Murim
• Webnovel: The Legendary Engineer in Murim World
• r/noveltranslations: Dropped Into the Murim with an Instant-Kill Skill