My sincerest apologies. Starting tomorrow, I have a precious opportunity to return home to visit my family for a little over ten days, so Dust Along the Immortal Road will fall silent for a while. Over the past six months, I have spent almost all my spare time writing Immortal Road. Now that I am about to part with it for a while, I find myself feeling rather unaccustomed to the idea.
I imagine many readers have been following Immortal Road closely, so this temporary farewell leaves me quite uneasy. Still, I have been drifting overseas alone for a long time, and my parents back home are getting on in years. Given an opportunity like this, I very much want to go back and see them. I will also take this chance to refresh myself, body and mind, and sort out my creative ideas, lest I take Immortal Road down a wrong turn and stray onto a crooked path-perhaps the beautiful mountains and rivers of my homeland, and the warm smiles of my compatriots, will spark some wonderful inspiration.
By this point in Immortal Road, the protagonist has experienced all manner of things. But given the limitations of my writing ability and habits, as well as the objective demands of storytelling, it may be difficult for readers to notice all the groundwork laid in the book and see the course of its future development just yet. So I will use this announcement of my temporary departure to offer some clues about the future of Dust Along the Immortal Road in the form of questions. Perhaps this profusion of questions will help you grasp some of the main threads of Immortal Road's development. Until I actually write that far, the answers remain entirely unknown; these are a series of open questions.