Writing this volume was exhausting. It wasn't easy to come up with "Heaven's Will has been hard to fathom since time immemorial." I'd already said before that I had the entire meeting between the Golden Emperor and Xiao Sang, and everything they said, mapped out in my mind. But figuring out how to write it so it landed like an explosion, so that as you read, a chill slowly sank through your heart, so that the Other Shore Beings felt inhuman, their Heaven's Will impossible to fathom—that was incredibly difficult. That's why every one of Xiao Sang's contingency plans and preparations, all her flawless calculations over the past few volumes, along with Wang Siyuan and Han Guang's long-standing madness and derangement, their resourcefulness and easy confidence, were all for this moment. It seemed they could contend with the Other Shore, play a game against Heaven, and unleash one hidden power after another. But in the end, they discovered that it had all still been arranged by the Other Shore Beings. The helplessness and despair went right to the bone.
Only then could I capture the feel of an Other Shore Great Figure.
And that has always been the tone underlying this book, a tone completely at odds with Little Meng.
As for the Black Emperor, the whole point of the original setup was to show how difficult it was to reach the Other Shore. Things wouldn't succeed just because someone had arranged them in advance; no matter how much forethought or preparation there was, failure was still possible. So his story ended abruptly.
All right, the next volume will be the last. Its title is "Who Controls the Vast Earth," and since it involves tying up the story and the Other Shore's contest, I can't let the Other Shore Beings