Although I never expected this story to run very long, I did plan to write a million Chinese characters, so finishing it now caught me a little off guard.
But I genuinely didn't know what else there was to write, unless I dragged it out, opened up a new setting, raised the power ceiling, and kept repeating the same formula. In theory, I could have kept going.
But from volume three onward, I felt trapped in that formula: something happened, the protagonist chatted across servers, I planted some foreshadowing, and then I paid it off to save the day...
Maybe the readers weren't tired of it yet, but I was utterly sick of writing that formula, and I couldn't come up with a fresh twist anymore.
I simply couldn't find any creative passion, so I cut the part that would have repeated the cycle again. The plan was to raise the mortal world's power ceiling once more, then have another wave of enemies arrive from beyond Chaos after the Heavenly Dao descended. That could have filled another four or five hundred thousand characters.
Volume two was the one I was happiest with. From the Savior of the World to the old monk, then the Nuwa Painting turning the tide, and finally the protagonist's hidden trump card-the threads of karma that sent the Demon Ancestor into slumber-the foreshadowing ran all the way from the beginning of volume one to the end. I went over the outline many times and tried to account for every detail, so the result turned out pretty well. The number of readers paying for each new chapter reflected that, too.
But when I got to volume three, I realized as I wrote that I was repeating the previous volume's formula, and I immediately lost my groove.
Repeating