Final Thoughts

It was finished. To sum it up in four words: it was written terribly.

My condition throughout 2024 had been terrible too. My health kept acting up—high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high blood lipids; a long-term subhealthy state accompanied by insomnia. Sometimes my mind was muddled, and everything I wrote felt wrong no matter where I looked.

Sometimes I even wondered whether that fever during the pandemic had fried my brain...

I never used to believe in the phrase "a talent exhausted," but now I understood it all too deeply.

My peak was when I wrote Villain and Cult Master. Back then, wuxia dominated the rankings, I earned over a million a year, and right after Twelve Heavenly Kings, I signed a top-tier contract.

When I was writing Villain, I was even still working a day job. From eight in the morning to five in the evening, I secretly used the company's crappy A4Tech keyboard and still managed ten thousand words a day. A colleague even tattled on me, saying I was chatting with an online girlfriend at work...

Back then, inspiration truly flowed without end. How was it like now, when squeezing out four or five thousand words a day felt like constipation?

The trends in web novels changed far too quickly now—so quickly that a new direction emerged every few months. If you failed to keep up with the times, you would be eliminated.

I was not the kind of author who relied on inspiration, and on top of that, my body had let me down. Though I had tried my best to catch the trends, I had actually been left behind by far too much.

In the past, I would always give a preview of my new book in the final thoughts. This time, I would