Let me say this up front: there won't be a chapter in the early hours today. I think the next chapter is very interesting, and I want to write it well, so I'm sorry, truly sorry.
I'm not posting this single chapter to fish for sympathy. I've never done that. I just want to say a few words from the heart.
The author's skill is limited. I'm not like those typing monsters who can casually churn out a lot, but I write every chapter with care. Sometimes I have to polish a single descriptive passage over and over for ages.
I know some readers may have the habit of reading silently, and if two identical words are too close together, it can affect how smoothly a sentence reads. So I've always tried my best to pay attention to this issue. Every time I need to express the same meaning, I rack my brains to come up with several different words. This really affects my writing speed.
As for things like descriptions of appearance, some readers may think I'm padding the word count, but writing these is what takes the most effort. Who would pad a story in such an exhausting way?
There are also many things a lot of people don't care much about, such as the names of some martial arts techniques. I've thought about all of them carefully for a long time. For some techniques, I even went back and forth for a whole week, spending more than ten hours in total before I barely came up with a name I was satisfied with.
I know most people probably don't care about these things. They don't care whether the prose reads smoothly or about the name of a technique, but I still put a lot of thought into