He's a social genius, not a war one. He knows how to manipulate people and situations to his advantage, without the morality that would cause others to stop and with enough caution and humility to not sink his feet too deep. He's also been shown to basically always lose in chess to his soul-mate strategist woman; he's always been overshadowed in these kinds of games.

Hell yeah. That's the way to respond. I would've been severely disappointed if the MC just bowed his head and accepted the premise considering everything he's done up to this point, but he straightforwardly said it all aloud. Good on him.

Asleep and/or drunk. Even without the pretty obvious tells from the things she's said, look at the panel where she's leading him to the bed in the first place. Rose petals in the shape of a heart, with their shadows overlapping into one.

Sure, in real life. It's a common trope in fantasy, though.

It's pheromones, so technically not. He's not messing around with what people see, he's messing around with how they interpret what they see. If the person isn't actually there for the pheromones to hit them, though (such as through a camera or recording), then it won't work.

. . . Another manhwa I'll have to drop due to an abrupt change in the art I enjoyed. This just doesn't convey the same kind of tone as the original, and ends up making the plotline feel far more whimsical and contrived than it used to be.

Ugh. This tiresome cliche. I really don't care for the whole "I'm putting up walls for your own good" development, and it feels kind of ill-suited here besides.

The one who asked Corrin to stop the villains was the head druid who professed to be neutral and was giving them all of the quests up to this point, not Doomnorix. It's an easy mistake to make, though; I made it myself and had to double-check.

He's basically requesting for his ghost to not hold any resentment towards him in the afterlife.

Uhhh, it's hard to tell how bad he is with this bait and switch tactic (the girl was "unharmed", which means the ears weren't hers), but I certainly wouldn't call him good. It's a little bewildering why he would lie about that rather than just doing it, but a potential soft spot doesn't make any of his actions up to this point noble or anything.

Remember that time when Adeshan asked Ronan to tell her past self to give up the whole military thing and become a tailor? I do.

Honestly, it's seems to me the author had a good idea as a foundation, but hasn't actually fully planned things out. The longer the story goes, the less I see of the previous threads and the more it falls into typical shounen guardrails.

It's unfortunate it got axed before then. I'll have to look up the novel.

I was pretty worried, too. Super pleased to see the slime didn't get shunted out into space after that.

I think it's pretty safe given what we've seen of her abilities' limitations (only one active at a time, two if she harms herself doing it). Besides, we still have the other guy to worry about, so the plot's probably about to move right along.

The main reason it's getting focused on here is because the author painted himself into a corner. Arell is so talented that he could probably accomplish just about anything if he needs to—he helped win a war, stop a disease outbreak, resolved his frozen territory, and helped stop a big necromantic uprising, for crying out loud—but he's also such a lazy sod he's not going to proactively do anything that isn't more or less forced upon him. Marriage is just the most convenient low-stakes way to forcibly get him interacting in a social environment where he has to play the social game, which allows for an introduction to other characters and dynamic tension in the story he can't just MC-power away.

I know this story is pretty fantastical as is, but... this and the previous chapter have really jumped the shark. Trying to cram too much development, too much action, too much "whoa, look at this!" in way to short a time.

How are you classifying the arcs? By location? Because right now, it seems like there are several different arcs even if they're still in the same location, and you can usually identify them based on which characters rotate in or out of the spotlight. For example, we had the Heavenly Flame Emperor arc of sorts when he was first introduced, the Ryu-Cheong arc when he dueled Yeon and there was an injury, causing him to subordinate himself to her in penance, so on and so on. Rising action, climax, resolution, and then on to the next arc. Right now it looks like we might be on a Yeon arc (starting from chapter 73), considering how it's drawing the focus on her medical state, how she inwardly feels about her medical state, and how those around her view her and said state. Notice how we're getting to see a lot of characters this time around, but they spotlight Yeon's medical state before she has to continue on her path to meet other characters.

It's the maid Charlia threatened to beat at the end of the previous chapter, before Kiyoung came along and had a conversation with her.

Ran is 17. Her body got taken over by Hwa at 14, but she's still been able to perceive and mature over the three years that followed. As for Hwa, she's not even human, and the mechanisms behind her "age" aren't normal, either. If a 60-year-old grandma died and turned into a zombie, we wouldn't look at the zombie and say it's an infant.

I still don't understand why MC decided to work with Baron in the first place. He knows Baron is a POS loose cannon with an ego problem, and never had positive relations with him in the past, either. There were plenty of other people who could have been brought on board. Sure, sending the invitation out to make inroads with the girl makes sense, but he should have dumped Baron at the meeting afterwards when he was clearly uncooperative; at that point, the girl would've stayed on board regardless, and there would have been nothing bad to say about MC because the kicking was justified.