This is a chinese webnovel that I recently spotted as a manhua (and later read the webnovel chapters).
傲世九重天 -
傲世 (Ao shi) - Belittling / looking down on the world
九重天 (Jiu Chong Tian) - The nine lands in the in-text story. There are 3 regions (if I'm not wrong), lower region, central region and the upper region, which constitute as the 9 lands.
Protagonist Chu Yang (楚阳 - basically his name is comprised of surname + sun) starts off as an exceptional swordsman who has discarded his emotions, ultimately turning his back to his one true love in order to pursue a higher level of swordsmanship with his weapon, Nine Calamity Sword.
Ultimately his lover dies due to his carelessness and he gets betrayed by his best friend much later (later explained in story why the betrayal happened, pretty much cause and effect,
). Even though he achieves a greater level of understanding of the sword, he faces too many opponents and ultimately goes out with a bang.
Obviously story can't end that way, and lo and behold, our protagonist has gone back to when he's around 16 years old. The countdown begins to change his fate.
This novel tickled my funny bone so hard. Our protagonist obviously doesn't get his powerful body when he's like 30+ years old, so he had to start from when he's 15-16 years old.
At the same time he started to work on saving his one true love who's around 8-9 years old. I had to stifle my laughter when he had trouble being a lolicon (they met when they were 20+),
In order to prevent future tragedies, he took up a position of power by leading a high position in the government, and rooted out enemy spies. His subordinates, even though they were older than him, screwed up in an important mission (enemy was like 10 levels stronger), and he almost died.
Out of all the webnovels I read over the few years, this was the one that me laughed so much I had problems breathing. My goodness. It's super entertaining to see how the protagonist deal with his opponents far above his levels with wit and dry snark.