A few important words for the endnote first: today's 7,000-word update is done. I'm taking three days off to rest and save my life!
Updates for Volume Three will begin on the eighteenth, and it will also be the final volume of this book! It will still be a travelogue-style story. Sherlock and Edward will both return in Volume Three. Iver will visit Iris and the Southern Continent, take a short trip to see the Dwarves and Frost Giants, and then head to Anxi—I'm not planning to write as far as the Primordial Beginning, since that would make the story's styles too inconsistent. As for Horus, we'll see how things go. He isn't in the outline for now, but if I have words to spare, I might go there.
Please vote for me!
—All right, the serious business is over.
Now let's chat a little, reflect on the problems in Volume Two, and share some of my thoughts on the creative process.
Volume Two was 1.72 million Chinese characters long and spanned 542 chapters, but the planned length was only 1.2 million. However, when I entered Volume Two, my mental and physical condition wasn't very good, which led to a meandering plot in the middle of the Theocracy arc. It ended up being quite a bit longer than expected... According to the outline, the Theocracy arc should have been only one-third as long, while the Antimony arc should also have been reduced by nearly half. That would have brought the total to a perfect 1.2 million characters.
I wrote 500,000 too many! If Volume Two had been dehydrated by one-third, the pacing would have been just right.
The narrative core of this volume was "my separation and reunification."
At the outline stage, A Mu's book wasn't originally called Shepherd's Secret