Ooh this is a difficult one to rate! First off, the art is lovely, full of absolutely stunningly beautiful men (especially as the volumes go on) - sadly the historical real-life characters on which some of the stories are based probably didn't look quite so stunning....

There are some gripping stories in the mix here too although this is a bit more uneven IMHO. You're not always that invested in the characters of the stories - kind of inevitable when they're of short duration - and I found myself a little impatient at times to get back to the main story.

Sehara is a very sweet character, but I found it really hard to get invested in the relationship between Sehara and the Sultan, Shahryar. This is after all someone who is chopping off a girl's head every night....and the reasoning/explanation eventually given for why he's gone off his trolley and started this mass killing spree does not seem nearly sufficient enough to redeem him/make him more sympathetic at all!

At one stage I was going to give up, but then would come along a story I really got into. I especially enjoyed an absurdly complicated story set in ancient China that's based on an historical text and would presumably be a lot more accessible to an audience more familiar with the main historical figures (Clamp's Gate 7 suffers from the same problem) - I spent some time backtracking to try and work out exactly who everyone was and how they fitted into the rather complicated timeline and feel like I have an enhanced knowledge of Chinese history as a result (albeit a rather madly constructed shoujo-manga alternative universe version, but hey).

So overall it kind of annoyed me in parts, kind of lost me in parts, but then gave me a huge amount of enjoyment in parts - one of *those* kinds of manga/manhwa!