Volume one really was short. That sentence deserves a line of its own.
When I was thinking through the plot, I kept coming back to this: with all those "eat this and such-and-such happens" settings, if I didn't use them on the protagonist and only showed them through supporting characters, I'd be putting the cart before the horse. I might as well never have created those settings.
So I settled on one thing from the very beginning: the protagonist had to eat something. That also meant his early advancement would be a single leap into the heavens, progressing in jumps. The usual satisfaction of leveling up would have to wait until the latter half; earlier on, I would build other satisfying moments around that leap into the heavens. I've written similar moments before, but not many, so they felt fairly fresh to me, too, rather than becoming tiresome.
With that idea in place, volume one was never going to be long. If I dragged it out for a hundred chapters or more while Ding Songyan remained an ordinary mortal, with nothing useful beyond a decent head on his shoulders and a knack for dealing with people, the reading experience would probably have been disastrous.
Of course, that approach wasn't completely unworkable. I would have needed outside forces to bring the power levels down, allowing the protagonist to do more and participate more actively, instead of being completely controlled and manipulated in a way that left readers anxious.
After weighing it up, I decided to end volume one at around two to three hundred thousand Chinese characters-the length of a medium-length novel, just enough for one incident.
Once the writing actually began, I naturally made further adjustments based on how it felt to write and on you readers' experiences and feedback.