Thoughts
I'm not interested in the story. It's not my cup of tea. It's a novel that's targeted toward women anyway, and from the beginning I have low tolerance for palace intrigue/period dramas.
You did not write LitRPG. This is an automatic plus. I have a low tolerance for period dramas but an even lower tolerance for LitRPG stories.
Deaths are memorable and not meaningless. They create ripples that impact the story and other characters, as they rightfully should. I think there is too much focus on almost everyone feeling bad because someone died, but to each their own.
The obsessive love and tragedy elements are a bit much for the beginning. Within ten chapters, twice I read about a woman who does not reciprocate romantic feelings, twice I read about a man who does not take no for an answer, and twice I read about the man killing the woman after she married somebody else.
I was initially surprised to see the second lady's attempt to fight since I expected her to offer almost zero significant retaliation. However, it ended the way I previously expected. Even though the second woman apparently learned martial arts, she performed so poorly it almost felt like a staged token defense, like she was only taught martial arts in name. In one moment, she draws her own sword and seems competent enough to disarm his sword and distance him from his weapon. Nice. But in the next moment, he somehow manages to retrieve the sword unpunished. Then she promptly dies after shielding her child from a fatal blow. What happened to her sword? The intention of this part of the story is probably to sway readers to feel bad for the women but when reading I felt more disinterested instead. I'm not the target audience for this but I think at least some of your audience would consider this series of events too melodramatic.
Irrelevant to the thoughts above, although the Joseon king says the Ming Dynasty will pay (even though he was the perpetrator and the making of this tragedy was entirely his own fault), I wouldn't expect anything significant to change. As a tributary state a political escalation in this case would more likely backfire, and this is more of a domestic issue anyway. Since it looks like the crown princess ran off on her own and the Ming weren't even aware a runaway princess was living in their territory. For better or worse, this addition of dialogue confirms the king's already confirmed immature personality, and is a good example of show-not-tell. As for me, I think its a sign of more irredeemable assholes to come, and I've already been subjected to two of them.
Feedback
- The capitalization of every character in Chinese names is unorthodox and was slightly annoying to read. If a given name is two characters only capitalize the first. If you want to guarantee readers are not misreading character names you can use hyphens or apostrophes.
- Too many people, too many relationships to track. While this is the nature of the story you are trying to tell, you introduced too many characters or names in quick succession. To complicate matters, you have names in Chinese and Korean, and many of the characters are referred to by different titles and nicknames dependent on who is calling them and their position. I will show an example of points 2 and 3 together below.
- You need to clarify certain topics in order that minimizes a reader's confusion when a reader reads chapter 1 to chapter 2, beginning to end. Don't write about someone sending letters to someone else without identifying the recipient. It's confusing. As an a short example of points 2 and 3, let us review how you introduced these points from a portion of chapter 2, in the order it is revealed to the reader:
- You introduce the Queen, who sends a letter about the death of her best friend, Hae-ju.
- You introduce Do-hyun, the recipient of said letter.
- You reveal the Queen's best friend is the child of Do-hyun's father's friend. Do-hyun had promised his father to protect Hae-ju.
- Do-hyun is introduced with his unnamed wife who calls him Yaebo, his unnamed steward, and his bodyguard named Kim Gyu.
- Do-hyun sends a secret letter to a random village.
- In a conversation between Do-hyun and Kim Gyu, you reveal the recipient is Do-hyun's father, and the letter is about the death of Hae-ju.
- Kim Gyu calls Do-hyun "Lord" and Do-hyun's father "Master."
- You reveal the Queen's name. It is Seo Yeon. You reveal this with the introduction of Soon-i who is probably the Queen's servant.
- In a conversation between Seo Yeon and Soon-i, Do-hyun is revealed to be the Queen's brother.
- Soon-i calls Seo Yeon "Your Majesty."
- In the same conversation you reveal Do-hyun apparently has a son who consoled him.
This is too much backtracking. Combining the disorganized sequence of information with the sheer size of the cast in less than ten chapters, I can't remember even half of the character names and their relationships, and I had to re-read chapters thrice to understand. The solution is to make each character memorable enough to distinguish them from the others, but there wasn't enough time to build up these characters so a lot of them and their information becomes either forgotten or mistaken. On the first read, I only remembered the names Hyun Yeol and Haojian because they assholes, and the names Xiuyan/Hae-ju and Xianlian because they were the ones those assholes killed.
I suggest slowing the story's pace down and reorganizing your exposition.
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