It has been more than ten days since Medical Unification ended. Many readers have asked why I haven't written an afterword or shared any closing thoughts. To be honest, I, Octopus, really do have a great deal I want to say, but whenever I pick up my pen, my mind feels utterly empty, and I don't know where to begin.
When I began writing Medical Unification in 2014, I was going through the most difficult and bewildering stretch of my life. I had been writing books since 2003 and had written more than ten of them, yet suddenly, not a single one remained. I imagine you all already know the reason.
The financial losses were secondary; the psychological blow was devastating. At least Officialdom of the Medical Way, at eleven million Chinese characters, had been completed. But Food and Sex Under Heaven, into which I had poured so much effort and placed such high hopes, was cut down halfway through. At the time, that book, just over a million characters long, had secured a place in the top ten on the Monthly Tickets rankings. Its print edition had reached volume four, and negotiations for various rights were underway. That plunge from such heights left me sleepless night after night for a time.
At least back then, I had never intended to write Medical Dominion. Yet the readers' eager hopes and my own love of writing brought me back to the keyboard, and that was how this book came into being.
Looking back now, perhaps I had not yet emerged from the shadow of the earlier censorship, or perhaps I was not fully prepared. At the beginning of Medical Unification, I did my utmost to make the writing more accessible and lighthearted. Yet I felt like a blind man on a