A Word from the Author (This Time It's Really a Word from the Author)

Thank you all for reading the story I wrote.

In the worldview of Harry Potter, seven is a magical number, so I chose to end this story here. A knightly novel's narrative ought to stop abruptly at the moment of victory. Perhaps everyone will feel it is sudden, even a little like a botched ending, but to me, Nall's story has not ended.

This is a story about challenging fate, being arranged by fate, and then challenging fate again. Every development in my plot was written according to those prophecies, yet under my pen, they would always, like true rebels, say no to fate. Now, as the author of fate, I have finished my record, and their fate is left to themselves.

The original reason I wrote this book was that several Harry Potter fanworks I had been following stopped updating. Out of frustration, I started a book myself.

The birth of the story came from a movie I finished watching in a taxi on some boring afternoon. It drained the last nine percent of my battery, letting me experience, amid Shanghai's skyscrapers, what it felt like to be a primitive man who could not communicate, could not consume, could not walk, and could not even breathe. At that time, I thought that in a magical world, a Muggle's experience might be the same.

That movie was called The Equation of Love and Death. It was an excellent film. Even now, I still vividly remember Zhou Xun with a cigarette in her mouth. It told a bizarre yet reasonable story: because a poet jumped from Kunming Guannan Overpass and killed himself, the fate of everyone in the film was changed.

His death was abrupt and independent, yet because of it, this orderly story began to grow in a brand-new form.