I disappeared for a year.
For the first half of it, I was recuperating.
Normally, facial paralysis in healthy people basically recovered within half a month, but I drew the short straw.
A few months later, I went to the hospital for an electromyogram. Half my face still showed no signal, one eye could never fully close, and every day I could only rely on eye drops for relief.
After consulting a doctor, I learned that if there were still no signs of recovery after such a long time, things would be difficult from then on.
So I quickly prepared myself mentally to spend the rest of my life with facial paralysis, then gave up treatment altogether and just let myself rot.
And then, while I was rotting away, hey, it actually started recovering bit by bit on its own.
For a while, having grown used to using only half my face, I still only used half my face when making expressions. Every time, I would realize the other half could move too, then make it catch up. Delayed symmetry, that was what it was.
There were still some lingering effects now, but they no longer affected my life and were basically unnoticeable.
During that first half-year, aside from the facial paralysis, my body developed quite a few other problems. I used to think I was young and fearless, but after running myself into the ground, I just collapsed.
When you started reminiscing about your youth, it proved that youth had already left you;
When you truly understood the meaning of "I wish you good health" and no longer regarded it as meaningless politeness, it proved that you had lost it at least once.
At the time, a fellow author friend fell ill. He came to talk to me, and I comforted and encouraged him, telling him to maintain an optimistic, positive mindset. He did just that, and later, whenever we chatted, he made a habit of adding smiling emojis.
Then one day, I suddenly received the news that he was gone.
Actually, we were not that close. We were both homebodies and had only met a few times in real life. I still remembered the last time we met: after everyone finished eating and the server came over with the bill, I silently took half a step back so he would be exposed and pay for it.
Thinking back on it now... ah, I was such an asshole.
Even during the final stretch of his life, he still came across as open-minded and optimistic. But his passing hit me hard, and it just so happened that my own health was failing at the time too.
It turned out that the one encouraging him to stay optimistic and positive was a cowardly loser.
I think I was depressed during that period. When it was bad, I would wake up every night with heart palpitations. Every day, I either had no interest in anything or would suddenly become furious for no reason and want to lose my temper.
Whenever I thought about writing back then, I felt disgusted and afraid, shivering all over. The psychological trauma from that experience was simply too great. For a time, I thought my writing career was probably over.
After recuperating for half a year and recovering somewhat, I thought that I had never had time before and had stayed cooped up at home for months without going out, so I might as well travel around a little and clear my head.
Then I took a self-driving trip along 318 National Road. After coming back, I drove around Northeast China on G331 National Road. After coming back, I drove to Hainan. After coming back, I drove to Urumqi and circled Northern Xinjiang...
I was like an ant, crawling back and forth across a map of the country.
Until eventually, there was really nowhere left for me to go, and I actually began complaining in my heart about why our ancestors had not conquered a little more land back then.
The broken bridge over the Yalu River, the grandeur of the Changbai Mountains, the bold magnificence of the Qilian Mountains, the tranquility of Sayram Lake, the sandstorms of Inner Mongolia...
Really, getting out and traveling more did help.
I understood. Put artistically, I felt my own insignificance. Put plainly, I finally realized I was just a fart.
Then my hands started itching, and I rediscovered that urge to pour my heart out through writing a novel.
Although last time I said I would use the gap to study hard, make up for my shortcomings, improve myself, and so on...
I am very sorry to tell everyone that I truly have not improved in the slightest.
As an author, I had not read much for several years. Not only that, I realized I was becoming increasingly out of touch.
In the previous chapter, when Liu Yumei said middle-aged people lost the motivation to learn about new things, she was talking about me.
I went looking for books to read. With many of them, I could tell that the authors wrote well, that they were interesting and wonderful, but I simply could not keep reading. Some newer styles just did not suit me.
And I was unwilling to force myself to browse rankings, study, and analyze. Rationally, I knew this was slow death for a creator, that I was destined to be eliminated by the times. But emotionally, I felt I should just let myself rot.
Because the last time my body and mind both fell apart taught me that between being eliminated by the times and kicking the bucket first, who knew which would come faster.
I had known very early on that my style could not produce blockbuster hits. I was only suited for a niche audience.
So this time, I simply wanted to write about things that interested me.
Nantong was my hometown. I wrote my hometown dialect into the story. I knew this would likely make things harder for you to read, but it was fine. My sense of immersion was strong.
The homes of the characters in the book were actually the homes of my relatives back in my hometown. I had all the locations mapped out in my head: who lived in my maternal uncle's home, who lived in my great-aunt's home. Even Li Sanjiang's Home, which made a living from Paper Crafting, belonged to one of my relatives. When I was little, I often went there to watch Ultraman with kids my own age from his family.
So whenever Little Yuanhou and the others ran around the village, I had a god's-eye view. Oh-ho, they were "visiting relatives in the cloud" again.
Now that I was past thirty, I had finally reached the threshold where I could write period fiction.
Actually, I had wanted to write it for a long time, but it was not suitable before. Because I not only had to wait until I got a little older, I also had to wait until my readers got a little older too.
Thankfully, everyone had grown old.
Now we could happily indulge in some nostalgia.
A large part of what interested me about writing this book was that I would suddenly remember some old object from the past, write it into the story, then wait to see the chapter comments—waiting for readers as old as me to comment, "Ah, right, right, right. My family back home used this too."
Of course, there would inevitably be some differences in understanding caused by geographical factors or uneven development among rural areas in that era.
For example, when I wrote that there was a small river behind Li Weihan's house, I remember a reader came to criticize me that day, saying I was making things up. "A house built beside a river? Aren't you afraid it will get washed away?" Then I saw his IP address—it was a reader from Shaanxi.
That was perfectly normal. If I had not seen it with my own eyes, I would not have believed that towns could be built against cliffs. All I could say was that our country was simply too vast, and its landforms far too diverse.
Actually, most of the time, the supernatural elements were more like a thread running through this book. The beads strung on that thread were individual stories and individual people.
The traditional supernatural fiction as I understood it did not take a purely level-up route. Don't let it end with them breaking through barriers and ascending to immortality.
So the pace of this book would be very slow. Many things would be written in great detail. It would be very padded, flooded with padding, padded to an outrageous degree.
When I showed the opening manuscript to my chief editor, he warned me that the pace was too slow and would easily drive readers away.
I said it was fine. I did it on purpose.
If I was going to let myself rot, I had to have the attitude of someone letting himself rot. Readers who were not used to this style would be driven off early anyway. Those who remained... those who had made it all the way here to these premium-release thoughts had endured countless hardships.
Once I stopped demanding great results from the book, I felt I could actively choose my readers too. So this should be called finding people who resonated on the same frequency.
Our country had a huge population, and I was not some one-in-ten-thousand freak. I had always believed that if I liked things I found interesting, there would definitely be a group of people with the same taste as me.
After some readers had been driven off early, once the word count grew and the people remaining in the chapter comments were all like-minded friends, we could interact and have fun more harmoniously and happily. It would help create a more comfortable atmosphere.
Here, I would like to thank my chief editor, Yisou, and my editor, Zhusha. Since I had never been an obedient author, their tolerance and help had always meant a great deal to me.
I also wanted to thank Yintian, pp, Ya Shao, Fanfan, Miao Sang, Sisi, and the others. I suddenly said I was going to publish a book, then called them in at the last minute to help set up the operations team.
More than anything, I wanted to thank the readers who kept sending me private messages over the past year asking when I would return, as well as all of you who gathered here so quickly after the book was released.
I found that I was really getting lazier and lazier now. I truly could not bring myself to say anything sentimental. Look, I was even too lazy to name every chapter.
Of course, that was also because every chapter was so long that titles were not easy to come up with.
Throughout the entire new-book period, the only author note I wrote was, "There will be another chapter before midnight."
Other than that, I had not babbled another word. Because I felt there was no need. It was enough to communicate with everyone through the chapters themselves. If I added a string of my own words or thank-yous below, I felt it would ruin everyone's reading experience.
All right, after saying so much, it was time to wrap things up.
The next chapter would be the premium-release chapter. It would go up at midnight tonight, though it might be delayed by a few minutes.
Do not say I was slacking off and swallowed today's update. In fact, when I released the book, I only had three chapters saved up. From the third day onward, everything was written as I went. If I had any backlog, I would not have been insane enough to post update notices every day, and later and later at that.
My old readers all knew my writing habits on this point.
Also, for certain reasons, the premium-release schedule had been moved up at the last minute.
So today's update could only wait until midnight, when the premium-release chapter went up. Because if I huffed and puffed through writing today's update tonight, then I would not have time to write the premium-release update. The platform had arranged a premium-release event for me, and then everyone would look and go, oh damn, this guy did not even have a VIP chapter!
Finally, I was very lucky to have your company on life's journey. Everyone, please leave more chapter comments and brainstorm more. You might not be better than me at writing long stories, but I was not as good as you at coming up with wild ideas.
And finally, finally,
Don't panic,
Hold the dragon tight!
Before you continue