Release That Witch Review: Read It for the First Half

The short Release That Witch review: it's worth reading for its first half, and that half alone is a long, satisfying book. The pitch is hard to beat in transmigration: an engineer wakes up as a useless prince in a medieval town, finds out witches are real, and decides they're not evil but an energy source. If you want kingdom building without cultivation, start here. Just know where you're likely to stop.

The novel is Er Mu's Fangkai Nage Nuwu (放开那个女巫), and it's complete in English on Webnovel. This Release That Witch review is built on the opening chapters we read ourselves and on what readers who finished it say about the rest.

Screenshot: Release That Witch on Webnovel, October 22, 2026

Release That Witch Review: At a Glance

What we read: chapters 1 to 6

We read the first six chapters on Webnovel on October 22, and the book shows its hand in the first scene. Cheng Yan, a draftsman who collapsed after three straight days of overtime on his blueprints, opens his eyes on an iron chair in a public square. He's now Roland Wimbledon, Fourth Prince of Graycastle and lord of Border Town, and he's expected to sign off on a hanging. The woman on the gallows is a witch. His solution is to act like the spoiled prince he's replaced: "I'm tired. The judgement shall be postponed to another day. Court's dismissed!"

The setup is clean. King Wimbledon III has announced that "The heirship of this kingdom will not be based on age, but instead, the capability to govern," and sent his five children off to run territories for five years. Roland drew the worst one.

Chapter 2 has the joke that tells you what kind of transmigrator this is:

Screenshot: Release That Witch chapter 2 on Webnovel, highlight ours

No system arrives. Everything Roland gets, he has to build. By chapter 4 the witch, Anna, has explained that her own father turned her in for the reward (25 gold royals, a fortune for a crippled miner), and then she sets the dungeon on fire to show him what she can do. In chapter 5 Roland writes out the second law of thermodynamics for his own amusement and realizes this world breaks it: "It could produce magic power out of nothing, which was much more impressive than a perpetual motion machine!" A death-row prisoner goes to the gallows in Anna's place, and Anna goes on the payroll at a gold royal a month.

That chapter-5 moment is the whole novel in miniature. Roland doesn't see witches as a moral problem first; he sees free energy, then people, and Er Mu lets both be true.

What works

An engineer, not a chosen one. Roland has no powers, only a modern education and a prince's authority. Webnovel reviewer Corty put it simply: "The MC has no superpowers, no cultivating he is just a mortal thats all." The catalog shows how fast he moves: chapter 33 is "The Gunpowder," chapter 38 is "The Era of Firearms," and both are still in the free range.

The witches carry the argument. The Church calls them the Devil's emissaries; Roland's case to his minister is political, not moral, a bet that a town where witches live freely will beat his siblings. That keeps the rescue plot from turning preachy.

It reads like a builder's diary. Corty again: give it a shot "if you like intelligent stories and don't mind spending 3 or 5 chapters learning how to build steam engines." That's the right test. If that sentence sounds like a chore, this isn't your book.

What it costs you

Length and the paywall. Only chapters 1 to 39 are free on Webnovel; from chapter 40 every chapter shows a lock. One reader review on the page, from DNV, opens with "Regretfully dropping RtW" and blames the coin system rather than the story: "all ruined by the qidian system."

Screenshot: Release That Witch table of contents on Webnovel, October 22, 2026

The second half. Readers who finished it are blunt. On r/noveltranslations, u/shyevsa loved the beginning's "kingdom building stuff" but said "the last half of the story has too much plot hole or forced plot, especially the ending." In another thread, u/VortexMagus called it "immaculate, a 9.5/10 up until he finally overcame the church," and u/ZantetsukenX lost interest once "the weird dream world stuff" arrived, while u/ArmorTiger stayed to the end and said "the author rushed the ending so much." We'd treat that as the main risk: the agreement is about where the book weakens, not whether.

Smooth sailing. Webnovel reviewer error101 liked the world but named "what I think is the biggest flaw of RTW is smooth sailing syndrome," with healing powers that "destroy any feeling of danger." In the six chapters we read, the plan does work out on the first try.

The lechery gag. Roland keeps up the old prince's habits as cover, which in chapter 2 means groping a maid, and by chapter 6 Anna's work clothes are chosen "to satisfy his lewd tastes." It's played as comedy. It aged badly.

Release That Witch Review: Who Should Read It, Who Should Skip It

Read it if you liked The Mirror Legacy for its patience but want one sharp protagonist, or if you came to our sect-building list wanting a whole territory to run instead. It's also the cleanest example we know of the transmigration setup played straight: a modern mind, an old body, no help.

Skip it if you need combat progression or a power ceiling to chase, or if 1,400-odd paid chapters is more than you'll spend on Webnovel coins for one story. The free chapters are enough to decide.

If you came from the 2026 donghua, which Thundray produced for Bilibili and Crunchyroll, the novel is where the full story lives. u/Stardomu had waited since "the first trailer dropped in 2021"; the book has been finished far longer.

How we checked this

For this Release That Witch review, on October 22, 2026 we read chapters 1 to 6 on Webnovel, went through the novel page (status, chapter count, rating, tags, synopsis) and its full table of contents, counting the free and locked chapters, and read the top reader reviews on that page. We also read the English Wikipedia page on the manhua and donghua and two r/noveltranslations threads. We haven't read past chapter 6, so everything said here about the second half comes from the readers quoted; several of the Webnovel reviews are years old and some complain about a translation we can't judge from the opening chapters.

Related Reading

• Best Sect-Building Novels
• The Mirror Legacy Review
• Transmigration vs Reincarnation vs Rebirth

References

• Webnovel: Release That Witch
• Webnovel: Release That Witch table of contents
• Webnovel: Release That Witch, chapter 1
• Wikipedia: Release that Witch (manhua and donghua)
• r/noveltranslations: Crunchyroll dropped the Release that Witch anime trailer