Volume Two had come to an end.
The next official update would be on January 1st, which was Si Qi (Qi Si)'s birthday. The book would also enter Volume Three, which could be considered a minor climax.
I wasn't particularly satisfied with how I wrote Volume Two.
First of all, according to the original plan, the Dialectical Game Instance was supposed to be part of Volume One, mainly to explore the relationship between Spirit and Flesh. But because this book's follow-up readership collapsed, I could only put it behind a paywall early and place this concluding Instance at the beginning of Volume Two, where it served as a bridge between the previous and following parts. This caused the volume's theme to shift to a certain extent, and the direction of the main plot became confusing as well. The Grand Performance Instance, which had originally been planned for the end of this volume, had no choice but to be moved to Volume Three.
While serializing this volume, I'd constantly been in a state of anxiety and indecision. After all, it was my first time putting a book behind a paywall, my first time directly seeing market feedback like subscription data, so I inevitably paid more attention to it. This book's subscriptions dropped badly. While my unstable updates were certainly one factor, the greater reason was still my own lack of ability—I wrote worse and worse.
Senior authors had said that unless you wrote to a certain word count, you would never know what problems you might encounter. This was the first time I'd written more than two hundred thousand words in a single book, and as expected, I ran into many difficulties. All I could do was learn and practice at the same time, feeling my way through the dark and