When I wrote these four words, my first reaction was not relief, but a sense of unreality.
<In Classroom of the Elite: Class D Has Me Besides Ayanokoji> began with one hundred thousand points in its first chapter and ended with a blank page in Chapter 200. Along the way, there were the points being reset to zero, the Sudo incident, the first class rule, the Uninhabited Island, the cruise ship, probing from other classes, the division of labor between the Dual Core, and those final choices that did not seem particularly earth-shattering, yet had to be confirmed by each person personally. It did not go as far as I had originally envisioned, but I still decided to stop here, because the most important question of this stage had already received Class D's own answer.
When I first wrote Gu Heng, I did not want to create someone stronger than Ayanokoji. Ayanokoji was already that monster lurking behind the scenes, capable of calculating everyone as chess pieces. If Gu Heng had merely worn a different face and repeated the same way of winning, the title would have lost its meaning. What Gu Heng truly wanted to prove was another possibility: a person could understand the rules, make deals calmly, and calculate risks in advance, yet still be willing to let others know what he was bearing, and willing to return choices to those who ought to make them.
This idea was far more difficult to write than to say.
In the early stages, Gu Heng often seemed to be arranging answers for the entire class, until he gradually understood that the person at the forefront was not there to decide for everyone, but to lay out the costs first, acknowledge that everyone had the right to refuse, and then step