Sender: Tu Yixiao (Chonglou), board: xianlu
Subject: An inaugural offering to the board-Dust Along the Immortal Road as I saw it
Posted from: Two Sides to Every Story bbs (fri jun 3 18:33:19 2005), local site (lqqm.)
I offer this piece as a tribute to the author, and as a way of leaving my footprints on all of Lifebird's turf.
I began reading books online about five years ago. At first, it was only to follow Huang Yi's The Twin Dragons of the Great Tang. Between its published installments, and after the music ended and everyone dispersed, I quite naturally began exploring other novels online. My coursework was not heavy then, and I read like a man possessed. On weekends especially, I would basically read through the night-because the dormitory lights had to go out on ordinary weekdays.
Over those five years, I read quite a few books here and there. Not five hundred or a thousand at the drop of a hat, as some recommendation lists would have it, but the total probably approached three digits. Once that initial hunger, when I would swallow anything, had passed, my reading palate grew picky: on any given site-Fantasy Sword, for instance-I would pull up a list of recently popular titles and open them one by one. If a book failed to catch my interest within three minutes, I closed it immediately and never read it again. As a result, my reading was relatively narrow, unlike those heavyweights who turned nothing away: martial arts, fantasy, romance, cultivation...
My first encounter with Dust Along the Immortal Road came during winter break. It was not a website recommendation that led me there. I was simply so bored that day that I clicked on a book at random and began reading. As I started, I