Volume Four had finally been written, stumbling and faltering all the way. This was probably the most painful volume I had ever written.
On one hand, my abilities had hit a bottleneck, and all kinds of problems began surfacing. Countless plotlines needed to be brought together near the end, only for me to discover that their progress was uneven and they could not be wrapped up together. All I could say was, digging holes was fun for a moment, but filling them was a crematorium. I finally understood why so many authors abandoned their books—because endings were genuinely difficult. Even though I had a rough idea of the later plot, how exactly was I supposed to jump from the current progression to those famous scenes I had planned? I had absolutely no clue.
On the other hand, I received a lot of feedback while writing, which directly caused the plot to drift away from the original outline. Chang Xu, whom I had originally planned to kill off only at the end of Volume Five, died in the Beast Arena Instance. It gave people the impression that a huge chunk of the middle plot had been skipped and the story had rushed straight to the finale. His character arc had not been fully written yet, so I had no choice but to stop updating and rework the earlier content, sorting out Chang Xu's storyline from scratch.
Some things also happened outside of writing. I fell out with Black Bar, and when I looked back on what had motivated me to write in the past, half of it had become a joke. Fortunately, I cut ties quickly. Seeing some of Black Bar's unhinged remarks lately, I only felt that it was good to realize early on that we were not the same