Return of the Mad Demon: What to Know Before You Start

In Episode 1 of Return of the Mad Demon, the lead stands on a cliff edge and asks an enemy officer whether he should throw the stolen treasure over it. The officer apologises and tells him to continue. A few pages later the Mad Demon announces "I'm going to take a big shit on you", swallows the treasure instead, and says it tastes like peaches. That is the register of the whole series: a murim veteran who is both terrifying and a clown, and who knows which one the room needs. The one tip that matters before you start: read to the end of Episode 3 and decide there.

Image: WEBTOON, Episode 1 of Return of the Mad Demon. The swallowed Jade of Heaven gets its review.

The English edition is a WEBTOON Original, with the Episode 1 title card reading "Adaptation by JP / Art by Ihy / Original Story by Yu jin sung". MangaUpdates lists the same people, names LINE Webtoon as the English publisher and Naver and Studio JHS as the original publishers, and says the comic is based on a web novel. Episodes 1 to 3 opened for us without an account on November 8, 2026. Each one starts with a warning card for "strong language and depictions of violence".

Return of the Mad Demon: 205 episodes, ten of them app-only

WEBTOON's list shows 205 public episodes, about 69M views and about 739K subscribers as of November 8, 2026. Episode 1 is dated December 14, 2021, together with Episodes 2 and 3, and the newest, Episode 205, is dated November 8, 2026 (Korea time). The banner on top says "10 new episodes only on the app!", so a reader on the website is ten behind.

MangaUpdates says 219, and 205 plus ten app-only episodes makes 215, so four chapters are unaccounted for between the two sites. We can't say whether MangaUpdates is counting ahead on the Korean side. The schedule is simpler: the page says "EVERY SUNDAY", and in Korea time Episodes 203 to 205 are dated October 25, November 1 and November 8, all Sundays. WEBTOON shows list dates in the viewer's time zone, so a reader in the US may see a new episode from Saturday evening local time.

Return of the Mad Demon Episodes 1 to 3: what you are signing up for

Episode 1: the funeral that fails. The Mad Demon is hunted across the land by the Demonic Cult and has killed more than a hundred of its elite fighters. He boasts about his skill with stratagems, lying and alcohol tolerance, and an officer suggests the honey traps failed because the women were never interested. The Jade of Heaven goes down his throat, and the cult closes in. He fights on with a wound he complains about, falls off the cliff while the officer's men rush to the bottom to find his body, and spends the fall wondering why he never got to date a beautiful woman. Then an old man in white tells him the souls of countless masters were trapped in the jade and are now stuck to him. Asked why he ate it, the Mad Demon says it was to stop the cult's leader, and "he doesn't see people as people". The old man's last line is "In due time, it will become a gift", and the next page is the inn he lived at when he was younger.

Episode 2: the errand boy. He wakes in his old room as the inn's errand boy, with more qi than he had the first time and a technique he recognises, the Journey Through the Distant Golden Land. An off-hand answer about his savings ("my dream is to hear a song from Chaehyang at the Plum Blossom Pavilion") had turned into a rumour that he was saving up to sleep with her, and he was beaten up for it a few days before the reset point. He decides to go and clear up the misunderstanding, a polite phrase for what the episode does next. A man sneers that he is too pathetic to set the Pavilion on fire, swings first, and ends up slammed to the ground. The episode closes with the errand boy walking into the Pavilion demanding the hospitality a customer is owed: "You have a customer!"

Image: WEBTOON, Episode 2 of Return of the Mad Demon. The joke that was nearly his death sentence.

Episode 3: the drink. The Pavilion's manager, Seongtae Cha, says a customer is a customer, orders a large table "for Jaha Inn's errand boy" and tells the staff to treat him with the utmost hospitality. The Mad Demon asks for something expensive, is served what the server calls their best Dukang wine, and judges from the flavour and colour that it is low-quality booze. Chaehyang arrives and tells him that no pile of silver will buy her ("I'm not a whore"); he answers that he never said he was saving money to sleep with her, only that he wanted to hear her sing. The scene turns when the thugs laugh at him, he reminds them they are hometown friends and asks, "Am I really that much of a joke to you?", and the fight that follows leaves a smashed table and bloodied men. It ends on "Am I still a joke to you?"

Image: WEBTOON, Episode 3 of Return of the Mad Demon. The last panel of the episode.

The pattern in all three episodes is the same one: someone underestimates him, he lets them, and the payoff is the look on their faces. If that rhythm bores you by Episode 3, the rest of the run will not change it.

What readers say about the later episodes

We have not read past Episode 3, so what follows is attributed to the people who have. One thread worth reading: on April 22, 2025 a reader asked r/manhwa for rom-coms "just like" this series. u/Bloomberg12 answered: "I don't think this is a romantic comedy under any definition. It is really good but I can't think of anything else that is good for the same reasons as this manhwa." The same commenter suggested Myst, Might, Mayhem for a similarly crazy lead. Another reader, u/Terrible_Peanut_184, said it "wasn't building into romance" even in the most recent chapter at that time.

On March 17, 2026, a reader who had just reached Chapter 6 posted in another r/manhwa thread that they loved how the lead talks. In that thread u/Ultenth wrote that the lead "is actually a pretty complex character", who rage-baits, acts like a goofball and then acts like a serious badass, "and sometimes all in the same scene". That fits what Episode 1 sets up: the lead who eats the treasure out of hatred for a cult leader is not only the clown.

The counters give a size, not a verdict. Likes run from about 74K on Episode 1 to about 4.9K on Episode 204, and we can't separate readers who left from readers who arrived later. If you want more murim after this, our Murim Login reading guide and the Return of the Blossoming Blade reading guide cover two other long-running series.

Our take

I would start tonight and give it exactly three episodes. Episode 1 is the best action, Episode 2 is the best joke, and Episode 3 is the one that tells you whether this is your kind of comedy: it is a revenge story that gets its laughs from the lead refusing to take offence until the instant he decides to. Do not start from the newest episode. Without the Jade of Heaven scene and the Plum Blossom setup, Episode 205 will read as a man being strangely polite to a room of enemies.

Two warnings. The violence is real, since the warning card is there for a reason, and the swearing is constant. And if a friend sent you here after calling it a rom-com, tell them what the r/manhwa readers told one another in 2025: the romance is not the point. For where to read, Where to Read Manhwa Legally in 2026 compares the official options.

What we don't know: why MangaUpdates counts four more chapters than WEBTOON's list plus the app banner. We haven't read Episode 4 or later, or the ten app-only episodes, so we can't say how the story handles the Demonic Cult leader the Mad Demon hates or whether the comedy keeps its pace.

How we checked this: on November 8, 2026 we read Episodes 1 to 3 in full on the WEBTOON viewer, went through the series page and its first and newest list pages, read the MangaUpdates entry and the two r/manhwa threads quoted above.

References

• Return of the Mad Demon on WEBTOON: episode list, counters, synopsis, app banner
• MangaUpdates entry: credits, publishers, chapter count, rating
• r/manhwa: "can u recommend me romcom manhwa just like this one", Apr 22, 2025: reader comments
• r/manhwa: "Return Of The Mad Demon", Mar 17, 2026: reader comments

Related Reading

• Murim Login Reading Guide: seasons, gaps and where to read.
• Return of the Blossoming Blade Reading Guide: where the seasons start.
• Myst, Might, Mayhem Reading Guide: arcs and where to start.
• Where to Read Manhwa Legally: nine sites compared.