This book has already passed three million Chinese characters. That might look like a lot, but it has actually only been serialized for a little over a year. Readers have kept telling me that the title was lousy and did not fit the content. This book really was never meant to follow a straightforward leveling-up formula, and there will not be too many cultivation realms.
The titles I came up with over several attempts were purely a matter of jumping on the bandwagon.
In fact, from the moment the "Essence Treasure" concept was settled on, Pomegranate never intended to attract readers through frequent level-ups. The "thousand people transporting water" that many readers complained about early on was actually inspired by watching ants form a single line, carrying food back to their nest to survive.
Madam Wen was the ant queen. On one hand, she devoured the common people's flesh and blood to strengthen herself. On the other, her estate and businesses also sustained the people of the area. She disdained bullying the common people-it was both exhausting and foolish-so she only established rules and a framework, allowing the estate to run on its own. It was precisely her provision that allowed Li Xian to survive the bitter winter. Naturally, once Li Xian entered her estate, he too had to offer up his flesh and blood.
I wanted to show that those at the bottom were merely hardworking ants. The idea of using human labor as a channel was meant to convey that martial artists' extraordinary might did not arise out of thin air. Trace it to its source, and it was still borne aloft by countless ordinary people. That also included martial artists having to engage in trade.
These concepts are a poor fit for leveling-up fiction, and they are