Murim manhwa: what murim means, and where to start

What murim means

Murim (무림) is how Korean pronounces the Chinese word 武林. The first character means martial and the second means forest, so the word pictures a forest of fighters: everyone who lives by martial arts, with their own rules, rivalries and reputations, mostly outside the reach of the government. Its Chinese cousin, the jianghu ("rivers and lakes", gangho in Korean), is the same idea, and you will see both words in translations.

Most murim stories borrow the setting of Chinese wuxia fiction: an old, imagined China of sects on famous mountains, wandering swordsmen, roadside inns and grudges that last for generations. In manhwa the word is used in two ways. Usually it means that setting, so "a murim manhwa" is a martial arts story set in that world. Sometimes, as in The Breaker, the murim is a secret society that survives inside modern Korea, and an ordinary teenager stumbles into it.

Where murim stories come from

Korea has had its own martial arts novels, called muhyeop (무협, the Korean reading of wuxia), for decades. They began with translated Chinese wuxia and grew into a Korean genre with habits of its own. Web novel sites made it one of the most read genres in Korea, and many of the murim webtoons people read today are adaptations of those web novels.

That is why murim stories feel Chinese in setting and Korean in style. The places and sects come from China: Mount Hua, Shaolin, Wudang, the Beggars' Union. The pacing, the comedy and the game-like power-ups are very much Korean web fiction. If you are new to Korean comics in general, our guide to what manhwa is covers the format first.

Words you will see

Murim fans use a lot of borrowed terms. These are the ones that turn up in almost every series:

• MC: short for main character. Fans use it everywhere, not only for murim.
• Sect: a school of martial arts, usually tied to a mountain or a temple, with a leader, elders and disciples. Mount Hua, Shaolin and Wudang are the famous ones.
• Clan or family: a powerful family with its own fighting style and its own politics, like the Namgung or the Tang. Families and sects often compete for the same territory.
• Orthodox, unorthodox and demonic factions: the "righteous" sects and families, the outlaw groups, and the Demonic Cult, led by the Heavenly Demon. Good stories make the lines between them blurry.
• Qi or internal energy: the energy a fighter builds through breathing and meditation. It is often counted in years, as in "sixty years of internal energy".
• Dantian: the spot below the navel where internal energy is stored. Breaking someone's dantian takes away their power.
• Meridians: the channels qi travels through. A hero with blocked meridians who cannot train is a common starting point.
• Ranks: fighters are called third-rate, second-rate and first-rate, then reach higher realms with grander names. The exact names change from series to series.
• Regressor: a character who has gone back in time to an earlier point in their own life, keeping their memories. Murim is full of them.

Common setups and tropes

Most murim manhwa start from one of a handful of setups. Knowing them helps you pick what you are in the mood for:

• Back to the past: a master dies, or nearly does, and wakes up as their younger self with decades of knowledge, ready to fix their mistakes.
• New body, same soul: a legend wakes up in someone else's body, sometimes a century later, and has to start again from a weak beginner.
• Rebuilding a fallen sect: the hero's old school is poor and forgotten, and he drags it back to glory, usually while bullying his juniors into shape.
• The hidden master: an ordinary kid meets a master who teaches him in secret, and the rest of the murim slowly notices.
• Inside the Demonic Cult: the hero belongs to the "evil" faction, which turns out to be more complicated than the righteous sects say.
• Revenge for a master or a family: someone was betrayed, and the hero spends years getting strong enough to answer for it.
• An outsider in the murim: a modern-day person, often a gamer or a monster hunter, falls into a martial world and brings game logic with them. Log-in Murim is a well-known example.
• The usual furniture: tournaments, stolen secret manuals, elixirs that add years of internal energy in one gulp, and poison specialists you should never share a meal with.

Murim vs wuxia vs cultivation

The three overlap, and fans and sites use the words loosely. This is the difference most readers mean when they use them:

A quick test: if the strongest people are still mortals who grow old, and the story is about sects and grudges, it is wuxia or murim. If the goal is to become immortal and the power ladder keeps climbing towards gods and heavens, it is cultivation. Some murim titles mix the two, and AniList tags several of them with both Martial Arts and Cultivation. Our guide to cultivation manhua explains the realm ladder in more detail.

Where to start

These are our picks for the best places to start, in no particular order: well-known series with different flavours, so you can find the one that fits you. Each title links to its AniList page, where you can check the details and see official places to read it. Nothing below goes past the setup of the first chapters.

• Return of the Mount Hua Sect (also called Return of the Blossoming Blade). Cheong-myeong, a swordsman of Mount Hua, dies just after cutting down the Heavenly Demon and wakes up a hundred years later in a new body. His sect has fallen to a shadow of what it was, so he sets out to drag it back to the top. Start here if you want fights and a lot of jokes in the same chapter.
• Nano Machine. Cheon Yeo-un is a son of the Demonic Cult's leader, but his mother is not one of the official wives, so he has no standing against his half-siblings. Then a descendant from the future injects him with a nanomachine. Science fiction meets martial arts, which makes it a good next read after Solo Leveling.
• The Legend of the Northern Blade. The Northern Heavenly Sect once kept the martial world safe, until its leader was accused of working with the enemy and the sect was broken up. His son, Jin Moo-won, grows up watched and alone, then trains in his father's art in secret. A serious, slow-burning revenge story, and it is finished.
• Gosu. An older, finished series that is often recommended to newcomers. It sets up a revenge story and then turns into a wandering adventure with plenty of comedy between the fights, which makes it a gentle way to learn the genre's sects, styles and rivalries.
• Volcanic Age (also called Hwasan Jeonsaeng). Ju Seo-cheon survived a great war mostly by luck and became an elder of the Mount Hua faction, but he dies full of regrets. Then he wakes up young again. A finished regression story, and an interesting contrast to Return of the Mount Hua Sect, which uses the same sect.
• Return of the Mad Demon. For readers who already know the murim basics and want a lead with sharp edges. A notorious fighter gets his younger years back and spends them chasing the title of the strongest, with a dark sense of humour and no patience for manners. Expect brutal fights and a lot of swagger.

Can't remember the name of one?

Murim titles are easy to mix up: half of them have a Heavenly Demon, a Mount Hua swordsman or a regressor in the first chapter. If you have a screenshot or a panel, the manhwa finder crops it and sends it to SauceNAO, Google Lens and other reverse image search engines in one go.

If you only remember the story, open Find by description with martial arts manhwa already picked, then add a tag you remember, such as Reincarnation or Revenge. Our guide to finding a manga you forgot the name of walks through the rest, including how to ask other readers in a way that gets answers.

Found it? Many of the big murim titles have official English releases, and the Read on links in the live list above show where each one is published. Our guide to reading manga and manhwa legally lists the apps and what they cost.