I'd originally expected it to take fifteen chapters to finish, but I condensed part of the fighting scenes along the way, so this arc ended up wrapping in thirteen chapters. So, thirteen chapters it is.
I'd actually read all of everyone's chapter comments, including those saying things like the Dao Lord had lost his aura, or that the fighting wasn't interesting. I felt deeply ashamed about that as well.
I had to admit that by this late stage of the book, especially with a Restart Simulator cheat, it was almost inevitable for once high-end characters to be brought down a notch. Besides, as the protagonist's cultivation grew ever higher, he was bound to interact with characters on an even higher level. The more he interacted with them, the less mysterious they became, and naturally, their aura faded.
I'd always felt that aura came from the unknown and from power.
Once a character was no longer unknown, once his personality became increasingly distinct and the gap between him and the protagonist grew smaller and smaller, that aura would naturally shatter. It simply couldn't be maintained.
Take the Sword Lord, for example. I had basically decided on the character settings for every Dao Lord from the very beginning. Dao Lords were people too. Once the mist was cleared away, their personalities were actually more extreme than most. Although many people felt the Dao Lords had become a district, I felt that under Chu Sheng's rule, they should have been like this, so I thought it was fine.
So now that the story had reached this point, most characters no longer had much aura to speak of. It was more about their interactions. On the contrary, in the next life, I would focus on writing about the protagonist's current "aura" in the eyes