To all my friends, old and new, and fellow readers:
Since this book first began updating on March 6, 2023, 46 days have passed, with 100 chapters and over 200,000 Chinese characters of free content posted. At last, it's going premium.
Those of you who followed me over from my last book probably still remember how, over the preceding months, I suffered one blow after another: quarantine, unemployment, and a book that flopped. I nearly left web fiction behind to take up manual labor.
Fortunately, after learning from those painful experiences, I saved myself by writing two books at once and finally made it through.
How should I describe this book's performance? So-so, I suppose, but at least things have picked up. It's kept my web fiction career alive, and I've also found subject matter that suits me better and comes much more naturally to write. Going forward, I'll probably keep choosing themes like farming and development or academic achievers, gradually establishing a relatively consistent personal style instead of messing around with eerie mysteries and suspense anymore.
(I wouldn't dare, not anymore. But I do feel I owe the readers of my last book something, so perhaps I'll revisit it if I get the chance someday-when I'm financially independent and no longer under pressure to deliver results, or something like that. Then I could write one just for fun...)
As things stand, this book has gone through four rounds of official promotion and is officially going premium with over 9,400 bookmarks and around 800 active readers. I hope you'll all keep reading and subscribing, or even enable automatic subscriptions to every chapter to support it. Let's see whether we can keep advancing through the promotion tiers and growing, and perhaps earn a quality badge or something.
There's actually a very