Disclaimer: I read a few recaps and skimmed past episode 41.

I was watching this when it first aired. I watched around ~25 episodes before life got distracting. Years later, I was idly scrolling through my dropped dramas and decided that if I was still curious about Chu Qiao’s fate after all this time, I might as well give it another go.
I’m not curious anymore. The entire reason I came back—to watch Chu Qiao rediscover her identity and realize her true potential—is so irrelevant it can hardly be called a side plot. They spend so much time ignoring what makes these characters interesting in favor of convoluted politics and half-baked romances and cheap conflicts. I didn’t even technically finish all 58 episodes and I still couldn’t tell you what happened in the episodes I DID watch.

The entire first half of the drama serves next to no purpose. Assuming you hadn’t read the novel, you’d never guess the trajectory of the story from the first ~30 episodes. Is it about Chu Qiao’s past? No. Is it about her toppling the system that turned her and so many others into slaves? Nope. Is it about her revenge, after that system takes the lives of her adopted family? Uh-uh. Is it about her finding a middle ground with her master/mentor/love-interest, and them teaming up to root out the corruption within the empire? Hardly.

It’s about the second-lead, Yan Xun—who you’d think is the love interest based on the sheer amount of screentime he spends with Chu Qiao—and how his soul is blackened by the assassination of his family after the Emperor’s betrayal. Which doesn’t sound half-bad, conceptually. Except it takes another 10 or so episodes (3+ years drama-time) before he can do anything interesting about it, and there’s no payoff because he brutalizes innocent people, betrays his allies, and loses Chu Qiao’s trust to make it happen. The rest of the drama, as far as I can tell, is about:
1. Everyone being in love with Chu Qiao and saving her at the critical moment
2. Yan Xun being hellbent on destroying the capital of the Empire, even if he has to forsake his homeland to do it
3. Princess Chun’er, who was formerly in love with Yan Xun, going insane and seeking vengeance against Chu Qiao because she considers Chu Qiao the catalyst to the series of events that destroyed her life, love, and virtue.
4. Chu Qiao feeling used and conflicted about where to place her loyalties
5. A montage of generally unimportant characters doing generally unimportant crap, just to stir up trouble and remind us that they exist.
And then everyone dies.
I’m kidding. A lot of people die, including (maybe), the main love interest. Chu Qiao ~almost~ dies and potentially remembers who she is, but we’ll never know, because that’s it, folks. Nothing has been resolved. We’re just left hanging alongside a landslide of loose ends, because that’s what happens when you dive into a dozen different plot lines and can’t keep track of them.