Another year had passed in the blink of an eye. I started serializing this book on Qidian on July 9 last year, so it had been almost exactly a year. It was over 1.8 million words long. I didn't consider myself the most diligent author, but I figured I was at least among the harder-working ones on Qidian. To be honest, this book did much better than I'd expected. When I first started posting it, I was full of confidence, but reality slapped me in the face. Despite Naruto being such a popular subject, when this book went premium, it had only around 200 first-day subscribers. That was a clear sign that I'd botched it completely.
By rights, when a book's numbers were that bad, 98 out of 100 Naruto fanfic authors would give up and start a new one. I don't know if I was just unwilling to accept defeat or if I'd gotten used to failing, but either way, I gritted my teeth and kept writing. I wonder if any readers of this book were fans of my earlier work. If so, you'll know that my other novel, Brilliant Ace, hadn't finished yet. I started posting it in September, and it wasn't until early December that I finally finished it. During that time, on top of my day job, I had to keep up a daily total of 8,000 words across both books. It was sheer torture!
Thankfully, I stuck with it. Even now, I can't believe I managed to write 8,000 words a day back then. Writing 8,000 words for one book would've been easier, but these were two books with completely different plots and styles. For a while, I felt like my mind was so scrambled I was about to mix them up!
Of course, the