Whew. Before I knew it, this book had been running for four months, all thanks to the support of every one of you readers.
I still remembered the end of Volume One, when a flood of insults and hateful comments came pouring in. More than once, Pan Pan felt there was no need to keep writing. People kept leaving messages like, "Drop it, drop it, you can't keep this up," and some even resorted to personal attacks, their words exceptionally vicious.
But my editor told me: look at the data.
The steadily growing number of readers following along, and the subscriptions after the book went premium.
The vast majority of readers who were not used to leaving comments made me realize that I was not nearly as worthless as those people claimed.
So—
Write! Write it well!
For every reader who supported me, we went from three thousand first subscriptions to earning the ten-thousand-subscription badge just one month later.
At first, I did not understand the weight of that achievement. It was only later that I learned that, as of today, there were only a little over eight hundred novels across the entire site with more than ten thousand subscriptions—and including this one, there were no more than five American-comics-themed novels among them.
Pan Pan was not very good with words. I did not have many friends in real life and had always been used to keeping to myself. But after suddenly gaining such a group of readers, the happiness of being needed and the sense of responsibility it brought were beyond words.
I learned as I wrote. The various issues in Volume One came from my own unclear ideas, as well as being influenced by comments, which made my handling of things increasingly rough.
The next two volumes mostly