A new month had begun! As usual, I'll wrap up last month and announce the giveaway results.
There didn't seem to be much to summarize for February, really. It was already a short month, and I took so many days off for the New Year, so there wasn't much to talk about. I won't say too much, then.
As for the story, I wrapped up Volume Two and started Volume Three.
Personally, I wasn't particularly satisfied with the interwoven undercover and secret realm plotlines in Volume Two. On one hand, I might not have properly established the importance of the fox demon secret realm, which made some readers feel that it was just an ordinary dungeon and wonder why I spent so much time writing it.
Then, during the undercover arc, I was constantly suffering from insomnia and in terrible condition, so I didn't come up with especially clever plot developments. The middle portion ended up progressing a little too hastily. Comparing the two, I actually felt that messing around and pulling all sorts of nonsense in the fox demon secret realm was more interesting.
Volume Three would focus more on the competition itself. I'd realized that I always habitually wanted to tell two plotlines in parallel, switching things up now and then to refresh my mind. But that seemed to make the main plot less compact as I wrote, and the pacing ended up feeling loose.
This volume, I planned to try fighting against that habitual way of thinking, maintain the pacing of the main storyline, and see how well I could do. I didn't know whether it was because I was getting older or something else, but my nerves had become extremely frail. Basically, if I worked until eleven at night, I had a very easy time being