The Final Battle, with No Regrets

In early October, I took leave and said I'd be resting for a long time.

But in practice, I'd still be updating more than 200,000 words this month. That would make it thirteen consecutive months maintaining that record. It couldn't compare to some of those inhumanly prolific authors, but I felt I'd done right by myself and all my readers.

Honestly, I'd wanted to keep updating slowly until the book was finished, letting it come to a gentle end.

Finishing everything that needed to be written would have been a success in its own right.

This was the book with my best opening subscriptions and highest ongoing subscriptions. It was my first book to reach ten thousand subscriptions, and my first to reach thirty thousand. It was the support of all my readers that had brought it this far, one step at a time.

It was also the book I'd worked hardest on, put the most care into, and updated fastest. I'd managed several months of daily updates exceeding ten thousand words, and my highest monthly total had topped 400,000 words.

Thirteen months, 3.4 million words. Yeah, it was almost over.

I started writing this book a week before I got married. People always said creativity slumped for a while after getting married, but for me, it had been a new peak.

I'd started updating more casually a few months ago, and the numbers really weren't as dazzling as before. But they weren't bad now, either. Its sales ranking was steady—sometimes a little higher, sometimes a little lower, but it hadn't fallen much.

Still, now that the ending was close, I couldn't help having some lingering hopes.

In the end, I wanted to go out in the thick of battle. I wanted to find again the feeling of this book