First of all, there will be a regular update today as well, but it'll be a little later. Little Orange recommends reading it tomorrow instead—staying up late is bad for your health.
I originally wanted to put this in the author's notes, but it got too long, so I decided to post it as a separate chapter.
How should I put this? Writing this side story was a little harder than I expected.
On one hand, there were personal issues caused by my terrible schedule.
On the other hand, the creative difficulty itself was a factor.
This plot was simply too close to Naruto Uzumaki's Dragon Vein mission timeline. What the protagonist had given Naruto Uzumaki wasn't enough to change the people around him, which meant the plot would basically be the original story's plot.
But as a fanfiction author, charging readers for simply serving up the original work would look really bad, so I had to make it different.
That was why Little Orange even moved some later-outline settings into Naruto's side story, things like using the Breathing Technique to guide natural energy.
The battles were another major source of agony. They had to be different while still making sense. Little Orange was seriously put through the wringer.
Most importantly, Little Orange couldn't write those original dialogue scenes. If I did, it would seem like padding, but if I didn't, it would feel choppy, so I could only keep finding ways to compensate and streamline things.
Still, thankfully, I finally finished writing it. (I won't have to suffer through it again for a while—throwing flowers.)
Little Orange's original plan was to write a side story once every month or two, continuing until Naruto's world in the side story and Mu Yue's world crossed paths again.
As for how they