--"Ascending the Heavenly Ladder" Volume Summary
As usual, let's run through the numbers. Starting from July 10th to today, October 10th—July's waning heat to October Golden Autumn—exactly three full months have passed. An eight-hundred-thousand-character volume was forged, averaging nearly nine thousand characters a day, every word poured with painstaking effort into this "Ascending the Heavenly Ladder."
Ascending the Heavenly Ladder, soaring straight up ninety thousand li.
First, the volume title has its own meaning:
1. The Gao Ying Competition national semifinals were the "Ascending Heavenly Ladder Battle": the arena was the ladder, each match another rung, all the way until the king was crowned.
2. The open and hidden struggle with the Clear Sky Sect was the "Sect Heavenly Ladder Competition": the Chen Clan advanced from overlord of Fasinuo Province toward becoming a continental Super Power, challenging the existing sect structure and fighting for that supreme ladder of status.
3. The life-and-death battle with the Crimson Church (the Blood Desire Cult's counterattack) was "Severing the Ladder of Chaos": cutting off the ladder by which it infiltrated and spread, ending the regional threat, and protecting the hard-won results.
Thus, the word "ascend" signified the settled outcome of key battles, while "heavenly ladder" implied that the road ahead was still long and the peaks remained, avoiding any sense of a final ending.
The previous fifth volume, "Dragon Rising," this sixth volume, "Ascending the Heavenly Ladder," and the next seventh volume, "Soaring to the Nine Heavens," formed the trilogy of the Chen Clan's official rise, with the Gao Ying Competition serving as the dazzling main thread and backdrop of the era running through them.
Second, as usual, this is still divided into two parts: family and individual.
1. At the family level: stepping out of Fasinuo and spreading across the continental map.
Breaking