—Sifting gold from sand, picking grains from shells, extracting blood from water—all require skill and effort.
How long it's been...
From May 21, 2023, to August 7, 2025.
808 days, 4.2 million Chinese characters. I averaged 5,200 characters a day.
Although I took a lot of leave, I still made up all of it in the end!
This is the longest book I've ever written, without exception. It's also the book that exhausted me the most.
Every foreshadowed thread has been brought together, and the design of the "Sacred Number" ran from the beginning all the way to the end.
Aside from the originally planned storyline where I took Edward on a brief tour of the Dwarves and Frost Giants—which was cut halfway through because it didn't serve much purpose—nothing else collapsed. Everything from the outline I established when I started the book remained intact until the ending!
The outline had already been fixed when I began, and I didn't alter it through the entire four million characters. The difficulty of creating a work this way was truly immense.
Although the results fell for a while during the Theocracy arc in Volume Two, they had already begun to recover by the end of the volume, and Volume Three reached an even higher point. Because my health kept deteriorating, however, my updates became extremely unstable. I was too embarrassed to ask for votes, so my ranking on the monthly-ticket list dropped considerably, and after losing my perfect-attendance bonus, I could no longer get recommendation slots...
But after a year without relying on rankings or recommendation slots, my average subscriptions didn't fall—in fact, they rose a little. For a four-million-character book, that's already incredibly impressive.
This book's income has now surpassed the combined total of every book I wrote on Qidian in