That’s exactly what I thought! I started this 2 or 3 days ago and just finished today, and you can see, with the lore and the political landscape that the story was carefully planned, but the pacing was all over the place.
I started looking for the novel cuz I'm sure (well i hope) that everything I found lacking was more developped in it because there is a lot of potential in this story!
It has a 4.5 rating on novel updates so it looks very promising! Cramming 200+ chapters of a novel into 74 webtoon chapters seems like an odd idea for sure, we've definitely skipped over a lot of lore. I haven't found the time to start it yet, but I hope we both enjoy it when we get around to reading it!
It does, it actually cut out some stuff (especially Eyra's bday gift from Yanu which he accidentally "destroyed" it lmao.
Anyways, some chunks of scene are missing, there's even a slight mystery to whose the killer (Erya didn't found out the mystery spy first, it was Yanu) and I personally think the manhwa failed to make us feel Yanu's desperation and struggles in the final fight (it was more intense than here and there's even the citizen's pov of the fight) and Erya's anger and disgust towards his family's murderer.
So I'm around 50 chapters in and this webtoon definitely suffers from the "adaptation" curse most novels turned webtoons have. I have not read the novel yet (definitely planning to though bc the story is very interesting) but I can feel us not getting half of what the novel contains. While the art is nice (except for the occasional character looking like they have a lazy eye lol), the pacing is a bit off; it definitely feels a bit rushed. The most glaring issue here, though, is how casual the culmination points or the grand reveals feel. Like give us some more pizzazz, something more than just the MC's eyes going wide for one panel. I sure do hope the novel covers these parts nicely; there's nothing less exciting than glossing over an important part of a story. That's my thoughts so far, but I am excited to continue reading to see how everything resolves.