I finished the series a while ago, and while I enjoyed it, I still feel a bit disappointed about the ending.
I hoped, that we might see some combination of the main cast or just アイシャ herself going into the “holy land”, where the rice and everything that follows it come from.
As you learn over time, ユーマ was there for a long time, but he says, that he can’t really remember anything in particular and if he does, the thoughts feel more like a blurry dream. But since アイシャ is a descendant of a person from that land, I expected her to be able to go there and find whatever truth lies there and also remember it. At some point in the story she even contemplated about going there or following the cloud of locusts. And since it was kinda obvious that at some point she’s going to become the new 香君, I really thought that she would go to that place, maybe even in the role of the 香君.
Instead at what was more or less the climax of the story, you get a five year jumpcut to “everything is pretty much fine again”. The final chapter almost felt like a lore dump with some guesses of the characters added just to give some sort of closure to the story and to explain a few open plot points in the story. It’s not necessarily bad, but for me personally it just fell a bit flat, since the ending (or rather the last chapter) almost felt rushed or too short for what it was trying to be? But that’s just my opinion.
On another note, one thing that surprised me, was that イール actually tried to kill オリエ. Poisoning her and weakening her body and thus the power she had in her position was one thing, but I was quite surprised to see her recovery taking pretty much five years. Had it not been for アイシャ, she would’ve most likely died in that room. Originally I thought, that イール and his entire side of people wanted her out of commission for some time, so that she wouldn’t interfere with their businesses/plans and that she wouldn’t influence the public, but straight up trying to kill her caught me a bit offguard.
Other than that, the worldbuilding was really nice, even though the whole political aspect was a bit hard to follow sometimes (at least in the beginning, it did get a lot better over time), but that’s also what made it feel more realistic IMO. And obviously, the way all the smells, views, etc. are described, definitely makes the story feel alive. I also liked the maps you got at the beginning of each book, that really helped with making the story feel more real. Even though it was quite a long story (around 900ish pages I guess), I still think it was really worth it.
