It's finished!
When I started writing this book, I honestly hadn't done much preparation. I came up with an idea, sketched out a simple outline, established the stages of martial cultivation and the general shape of the world, and planned roughly one hundred thousand words of plot before I began writing.
Qidian was fiercely competitive. Preparing too much and stockpiling too many chapters could really hurt if the trial period went badly and I had to abandon the book. That was the reality of it, so I didn't prepare too much at the time. I thought that once I made it through the rankings, the book wouldn't flop, and I could flesh out the outline afterward.
As it turned out, the book really did take off, and the results exceeded my expectations. But because of that, the outline was never properly fleshed out. A lot of the time, I wrote whatever came to me, only finding time to patch in the later outline and the general direction of the plot when I got stuck. By the Inner Domain arc, the plot had become somewhat lacking, and the characters were no longer as vivid as those in the Borderlands and Inner Domain arcs;
By the time I reached the Taihao arc, there was really nothing left to write. The protagonist had truly become invincible. If I wrote the Taihao arc, it would amount to taking on disciples and showing off. But he had already walked the Dao and reached the peak of cultivation. The breakthroughs of weak disciples could no longer bring him any feedback, leaving only a single path: appearing to show off. The plot had lost all novelty, so ending it here felt just right.
The Taihao arc was short, but it was complete. Every hole that needed filling