Is Returning With Absolutely Nothing Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Quick facts
Format	Manhwa, 106 chapters
Run	2022–2025 · completed
Community score	AniList 7.4 · MangaUpdates 7.3
Content	Violence

Overview

Lee Sungmin is an ordinary middle schooler when he's summoned to the world of Eria. He spends decades there with no talent, no powers, and no shortcuts, clawing through hardship after hardship until he dies, still unremarkable, still overlooked. Right before the end, he obtains the Stone of the Past Life and regresses back to his youth with full knowledge of what's coming. There's just one catch: he's still exactly as talentless as he was the first time. No hidden power awakens. No genius bloodline reveals itself. He just gets to try again, armed with nothing but memory and stubbornness.

What it does well

That single choice is what makes this stand out in an oversaturated genre. Regression manhwa almost always pair the second chance with a cheat skill or a secret bloodline that makes the grind a formality. Sungmin doesn't get one. He's still separated from the geniuses around him by what the story calls "the wall," and that wall doesn't come down just because he knows the plot in advance. That choice keeps the stakes real in a way genre norms usually undercut -- every gain Sungmin makes, he earns the hard way, and the story treats his inferiority complex as a genuine, ongoing weight rather than a problem solved by chapter ten.

The art has real personality too, with an expressive, slightly rougher style that separates it visually from a lot of same-looking regression manhwa. And because Sungmin's struggle is the actual engine of the story rather than a prologue to a power fantasy, his small victories land with more weight than the usual instant power spike.

Where it falls short

The unavoidable caveat: this manhwa was cancelled by its production studio, Kidari Studio, and stops at chapter 106 without reaching anything like a real conclusion. If you're the kind of reader who needs a story to finish what it starts, that's a serious problem here, not a minor asterisk -- you're investing in an arc that doesn't pay off.

The supporting cast also leans harem-adjacent, with multiple women drawn into Sungmin's orbit, and that dynamic sits a little oddly next to the story's otherwise grounded, unglamorous take on struggle and perseverance. And because the whole hook is incremental, hard-won progress, the later chapters can start to feel repetitive -- more of the same grind without always finding a new angle on it.

Verdict

Returning With Absolutely Nothing earns its reputation as an underrated regression story specifically because it refuses the genre's easiest crutch -- there's no cheat skill bailing Sungmin out, just persistence against real, ongoing disadvantage. That's a genuinely compelling hook for a hundred-plus chapters. But the cancellation is a real cost: you're reading a story that stops rather than ends, and that has to factor into whether it's worth starting. If an unresolved ending is a dealbreaker, wait and see if another studio picks it up. If you can live with that, the journey up to that point is worth taking.