I'd finished this volume. The original plan had been to take two days off to plan out the final volume.
It was just that only a week had passed since my last break, so taking another one didn't look too good. It seemed a little too frequent.
But that last break had been for something unexpected. I couldn't just grit my teeth and keep writing because of that. After all, it was time to wrap things up; every plot point mattered, and I couldn't keep padding things out with transitional arcs.
Last time, some people even said that now that my results had improved, I was always taking breaks—had I gotten carried away or something? It was completely baffling.
With my previous book, I regularly took three days off every month, and even my proportional breaks were always right on schedule. Before I got sick during this book, I hadn't even taken that many days off over the New Year.
So I was drifting downward, was I?
But after getting sick, my energy really hadn't kept up. The most obvious thing was that I kept forgetting things, and sometimes I just ran out of steam. There wasn't much to be done about it except rest and recuperate.
The original ending for this volume should have been Shushan being surrounded, then Chu Liang going through a major arc. After around twenty-odd chapters, once Penglai had been defeated, the volume would end. That had been the original plot.
But I hadn't thought it through. After Shushan was surrounded, no one wanted to read another arc, and the pressure on me was immense too. If I wrote another twenty-plus chapters of dungeon-crawling, I'd be cursed into the sky. I could only hurry and shorten the plot, rushing through the Sword Domain Heavenly Palace