A game novel has to involve playing games, Orz.
There are many reasons I decided to finish the book here. For example, my body was starting to give out. I didn't know whether it was the weather, hormones, or something else, but I was so stuck that I wanted to cry. I felt depressed and disoriented. Could I take a day off from writing? That would only make things worse—the pressure would pile up until tomorrow, Orz.
For example, I had only outlined the story as far as the auction. When I started this book, I was confident that by the time I finished the auction arc, I would be able to come up with the outline for what came next. Hadn't I written my previous books that way, figuring them out little by little? But after finishing the first volume, I was lost, Orz.
For example, I deeply felt how lacking my cultural knowledge was. This book had a quasi-xianxia setting in ancient China, but my cultural grounding wasn't enough to support suitable dialogue, allusions, or even names. Could I simply ignore those details, since readers didn't care that much anyway? No. I had tasted the finest delicacies, so I couldn't lower my own standards. That was also the source of my writer's block. I had to spend ten times as long thinking and researching just to catch up, yet the gap often left me even more desperate, Orz.
But the most important reason was that I couldn't come up with interesting game content, Orz.
The next dungeon was the core of this book, but it was very difficult to make it interesting. Or rather, in a game novel, the next dungeon isn't the objective—the objective is the loot and upgrades afterward. But when you actually play a game,