A Word from the Author

Let's finish talking about the ending first. I actually wanted to wrap this up in January, but I kept dragging my feet until April.

How should I put it? There's nothing strange about this; there are plenty of unfinished books on Qidian. A large portion of them are abandoned because of poor performance. Authors who don't care about stats are few and far between, and I definitely don't belong to that small group.

Because of some inexplicable feeling, I always thought I should finish it no matter what; otherwise, I'd feel like I was letting down the readers who followed the story. So I kept writing, though I started rushing toward the end. Anything that could be skipped was skipped, and many plot threads I had originally laid out were discarded. If I had really wanted to, I could have written another few hundred thousand words.

Well, if you want to take the subscription money you saved on those parts and tip it to me instead, I certainly wouldn't mind!

Ahem...

Back to the point, this book definitely has many flaws, and I often reflect on them.

Many people probably found it hard to relate to Buggy, which likely discouraged quite a few readers. I'm not entirely sure, though.

Then there's the style. Because my previous One Piece novel left me with lingering regrets, I kept the style of this book leaning toward the original work. This included the island-by-island training method and the growth of every crew member, all of which needed to be depicted. Unlike an Infinite Flow story, the crew couldn't die, which took up a lot of space and made the pacing feel overly rigid and stiff.

Furthermore, I couldn't expand on any of the major arcs the way I had envisioned in my head.

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