A Summary for Yanzu and Yifei

When May ended, I kept thinking about what I should write next.

Many friends told me that continuing with urban fiction would be the safest bet, as I still had some traction in that genre.

But honestly, that was the option I resisted the most.

I've been writing urban fiction for many years, and I feel like I've hit my personal ceiling. If I continued, I wouldn't be able to improve anymore.

It's because I poured all my passion into Jiang Qin and Feng Nanshu, exhausting my creative energy.

Writing another one would just be reheating old leftovers, continuing to exploit them, and exploiting the characters and events that everyone liked.

But in my heart, those stories belong to Jiang Qin and Feng Nanshu. I don't want to misattribute them to other characters.

After all, Feng Nanshu had such a profound impact on me that even after the book ended, I couldn't stop thinking about her.

I knew that if I wrote a similar story, with a similar world-building, her shadow would still be present in my mind.

I didn't want to repeat a similar story, nor did I want to stay in my comfort zone until I became outdated and slowly forgotten by everyone.

So, I chose another genre: Xianxia.

Actually, my decision to write Xianxia wasn't for the copyright or greater profit, as some might think. Fundamentally, I wanted to seek a breakthrough.

I wanted to try multiple perspectives, no longer limiting the story solely to the protagonist, but adding another thread that drifted outside the main viewpoint.

To put it plainly, when I wrote my last book, I always felt like the world only moved when Jiang Qin was active; when he was still, everything was static.

I wondered if I could write a story where the world was also moving while the protagonist was acting.

Some things might not happen because of the protagonist, but in reality, everything is in motion, ultimately converging into a vast network that points towards a final goal.

The reason I had this idea was actually because I discovered my own shortcomings in my previous book.

I wasn't very good at handling multiple perspectives.

For instance, in my last book, the story I designed for Young Master Cao and Ding Xue was quite sweet, but because I was constantly writing from the protagonist's perspective, their story couldn't be smoothly integrated into the main plot, and they ultimately had to be relegated to an epilogue.

And Zhuang Chen – I always wanted to give him a main storyline ending, but I couldn't fit it in.

The plot about Zhang Guangfa's fruits being unsellable was also glossed over.

I realized I only seemed to know how to write the protagonist's story, and that terrified me.

So, I knew I was still very green, not yet skilled enough, and needed to continue honing my craft.

I decided to do what I did when I first graduated: force myself to do something I wasn't originally interested in every week.

That's why I chose Xianxia.

Writing this book has been very difficult. I'm extremely dissatisfied with myself, to the point where I might rewrite a single chapter three times. My draft folder already contains tens of thousands of discarded pages.

Earlier, when I wrote about Kuang Cheng's high school days, a reader commented that results couldn't appear overnight. This was actually because I deleted three chapters about the protagonist going out to work but forgot to adjust the timeline.

Also, at the beginning, Old Qiu originally had a solo scene where he knelt and begged for help, meant to highlight the contrast between life and death, but I ended up deleting that too.

In fact, right up until today, I've been continuously revising the preceding text.

Before starting this book, I didn't consider what kind of results it would achieve, nor did I expect it to be as well-loved as my previous one.

But it's very important to me.

Because I'm tormenting myself, searching for a different path.

I mentioned in a previous interview that I'm not a naturally talented person. I've been writing for ten years, and six of those years were failures.

So, all I can do is be a diligent bird and fly early. I write about what I'm not good at, letting those weaknesses expose my flaws so I can correct them.

Writing books is my profession. I have no other job, no other identity, so I have no retreat.

Therefore, I cherish every book I write, every opportunity I get.

I don't want to be left behind by the ship of this new era.

So, regardless of the results, I will continue to write diligently.

Because I know that what doesn't kill me will only make me stronger.

This serves as a response to everyone's confusion about my genre change, a brief summary of the current story's plot, and a way to thank you all for your unwavering support.

Finally, as always, I'm asking for monthly tickets and continued readership. For an author like me in the new book period, these metrics are still very important... or2