And so the main text ends here. Thank you all for your support along the way. There will be afterwords, side stories, and the like, and everyone can also comment here to let me see which characters you honored readers would like to see side stories about.
Speaking of which, you might not believe it, but I wrote a version of this completion afterword at the beginning of the month. In the end, I underestimated how difficult finishing the book would be, and only managed to complete it today.
This was the first long-form epic I personally wrote, serialized for three and a half years, with 6.2 million words. At the beginning of the month, I had only one thought: after finishing it, I would never write another long-form epic again. But today, when I really typed the three words "grand finale," I suddenly felt a little reluctant to part with it.
Perhaps it was because I had grown older, but my energy was nowhere near what it used to be. When I was young, churning out extra updates every day was like playing around. Now, writing four thousand words made me feel as if my soul had been hollowed out, utterly exhausted.
In fact, when serialization first began, I was still full of motivation, because I wanted to convey the story in my heart to every reader with the fullest emotions and prose I could manage. Although the results during the new-book period were utterly ordinary, thanks to the broader anti-piracy environment, after it went on the shelves, the results grew by the day, multiplying dozens of times over. Under this positive feedback, both the plot and my personal condition reached their peak last year. Though I occasionally took leave, the daily word count of updates was still mostly