For some reason, the cooled boiled water I drank today tasted a little bitter. It reminded me of the salty, astringent seawater Gao Jie had swallowed.
Looking back on the writing of the entire ninth volume, it truly feels like a dream.
The Flower in the Mirror, Moon in the Water arc can be divided into two parts: the Demon Realm arc and the Lost Realm arc.
Although I had anticipated the difficulty of writing it and followed the writing plan strictly, it truly proved even harder to write than expected.
For me, the Demon Realm arc was an entirely new way of writing. With the protagonist barely appearing and only able to observe from the sidelines, I had to lay out the entire setting of the Demon Realm.
Could the first half perhaps be classified as a "behind-the-scenes" story?
Yet it could not deliver the satisfying moments of that kind of story. Playing a grand game of chess, pretending to be a pig to eat a tiger, jumping out to overturn the chessboard... none of that could be written.
Because Jiang Wang could not step out of the world within the mirror. The moment he did, he would have to say goodbye.
Compared to the countless powerful figures of the Demon Race, he did not need to pretend to be a pig—he already was one. He was only fit to be eaten.
And all along, he was targeted by the will of the Demon Realm. Any chess game he played was doomed to bear no result.
With the protagonist absent, the story driven entirely by new characters, vast amounts of setting needing to be established, and so many restrictions in place, how to make the story compelling and engaging was something I had to consider.
So after Jiang Wang