I made a mistake at one this afternoon and posted this volume-end wrap-up as a paid chapter. What kind of person does that?
Luckily, Huya Da Wang stepped in just in time. I rushed to finish the next chapter and replaced the wrap-up with it, so friends with auto-subscriptions wouldn't lose out.
So if you can't see the replacement text for the first chapter of Volume Two, press and pull down on your bookshelf to refresh and sync it, or clear the Qidian app cache (Me → Settings in the upper left → Clear Cache). If that still doesn't work, remove the book from your shelf and add it back. I'm sorry again for all the inconvenience.
Back to the point.
As the opening, Volume One carries a lot of weight in the book as a whole. It had to plant threads and lay plenty of groundwork for what comes later, so it inevitably grew a bit bloated.
The Evil Ghost was an early thread that brought the characters in and set things moving;
Hou Andu was a later thread that drew them back together and brought things to a close.
Along the way, one story after another played out.
Likewise, the characters introduced earlier naturally needed some attention later on. Since history provides the framework, they or their descendants will appear again someday.
There were also details and Easter eggs scattered throughout as several hidden threads.
The more obvious ones included the Old Beggar's schemes, the rise and fall of dynasties, the Hou Jing Rebellion (the Calamity of the Supreme Clarity), foreshadowing for Buddhism's flourishing in the Southern Dynasty, and a whole cluster of threads headed by Southern Jambudvipa. In short, if I don't look at my outline, I... don't think I can remember them all either.
Overall, though,