A Quick Chat
I'd actually planned to talk about this when the book went premium, but I kept putting it off until now.
This story started out as a traditional urban cultivation novel. You could tell from the first three chapters. Aside from cultivating with high-voltage electricity, it wasn't all that different from other urban cultivation stories.
When I first sent it to editors, no one was willing to sign it. The premise was too dated. Later, editor Lu Ming gave me a hand and signed me.
I also took the initiative to change my writing style, leaning more toward everyday campus life. The results proved that the change seemed pretty good, and plenty of people liked it.
But quite a few problems came up as well. The opening chapters were too formulaic, full of that Immortal Emperor's Return vibe, which drove away many readers who had come for the slice-of-life content.
Readers who genuinely wanted slice-of-life saw the first three chapters—or even just the first chapter—and left right away.
Then there was the Ding Shuyan arc. It wasn't handled well, and those chapters are still highly controversial even now.
In the chapters that followed, I kept trying to avoid similar deal-breakers, such as whether cultivation could affect intelligence.
I'm a reader too, and I've read plenty of webnovels. I know lots of people complain that the protagonist is supposedly insanely intelligent on paper, yet acts like an idiot when it comes to getting things done.
So I directly established that cultivation couldn't change intelligence. I thought that would avoid the intelligence issue.
But it ended up causing a whole new pile of controversy...
As time went on, I realized more and more that it was simply impossible to satisfy everyone. All I could do was try my best to