The Fourth War was over.
Honestly, how should I put this? Ever since I started writing Jian An, I'd known that I would definitely write the Fourth War someday, and that the Saber I summoned would absolutely be Jian An rather than Saber. But I never expected that Jian An, which I started writing in 2021, wouldn't finish the Fourth War until 2024.
The plan had been in the works for a little too long.
The foreshadowing had been laid from the very beginning: the fragment of Chalk that hadn't been retrieved after Jian An's Chalk shattered. Then Lawrence picked it up during the Caster Anno arc, and it became part of his collection. Later, during the Berserker Anno arc, Lawrence's descendant Selim traded it to the Einzbern Family.
You could say I took a very, very long road to set up the Fourth War. And now, everything had converged in one place.
The Fourth War that came out of circumstances like these—at the very least, I was satisfied with it.
From my perspective as the author, I was completely satisfied.
The changes were extensive, but not overwhelmingly so. It was still a story written within a controllable framework, and it truly let me see the changes I wanted to see.
What I wanted to see was this: after going through seven individual arcs, what kind of influence had the seven Annos—and the people surrounding them—ultimately had on the rest of this world? What new stories and changes had they brought into it? How had events that were originally meant to develop in one direction instead headed toward an entirely new and unknown path?
That was what I wanted to see.
And I did it.
So I was very happy.
Of course, I also hoped you were happy.
I let