I updated on the last day, but I didn't manage 4,000 words because many parts still hadn't been properly adjusted. I'll start working hard to maintain full attendance in the new month. Still, I felt it was necessary to explain the recent hiatus, so everyone could believe that I hadn't dropped the novel or slacked off—there were genuine difficulties.
I said before that after Frost Hua appeared, it became nearly impossible to write any tense, compelling plotlines in the Snow Kingdom. So I planned to skip over the church's development and briefly cover it from a broader perspective. But it was still terribly dull when I wrote it, and I got stuck for several days. So I concluded that I had to skip it entirely—not even a broad summary would work.
But I still got stuck for so many days afterward. The reason was that even if I skipped the later content and went straight to the next arc, I still couldn't write it. So I became very confused about why I couldn't keep writing.
At first, I was too close to the problem to see it clearly. I thought I was just in a bad state, and that if I took it slowly, I would eventually recover. Unfortunately, over the following days, I kept trying while the updates remained paused, but the results were never satisfactory. I became completely lost. It wasn't until two days ago that I finally realized this was probably a strategic-level problem that had made tactical execution difficult. So what was the strategic problem?
The answer came almost immediately: Tertia. Just as there was little left to write about in the Snow Kingdom after Frost Hua appeared, once Tertia showed up, every plotline across the Eastern Continent lost its tension unless it involved a True