Volume Four Summary and Leave Request
I imagine that when you read the end-of-volume afterwords of other famous authors—if they aren't famous, you probably wouldn't see them—you often see a very familiar argument: "The character has already slipped out of my/the author's control. I can no longer control what he does." Perhaps you all have the same question I do: author, aren't you the one typing the words yourself? Are you generating the text with some AI writing machine or something? How could you not control your own character?
But this statement could also be explained with the very popular AI art recently: the more "keywords" you add to the AI, the more the image it generates matches your requirements.
For a work, every character's "keywords" only grew more numerous and more detailed. So rather than saying the author could not control the character, it was more that when a character's completeness reached a certain level, she herself was already beautiful enough to match the author's requirements and imagination.
I revised the outline once, but the focus of the revision wasn't Volume Four—it was Volume Five. In the original draft at the very beginning, Ash was supposed to step into hell on his own to open up a new map and part ways with Sword Maiden and the others again. After all, this was the writing method I was familiar with, it was easy to write, and more importantly, the romance line would also be a bit more comfortable. But when I wrote Chapter 998, "Absence Sharpens the Appetite," I knew I was done for. I could come up with countless reasons for them to part, but I no longer wanted to let them part.
When I was conceiving the outline for Volume Four, I had already foreseen this scene.