From November to April, the fifth volume finally came to a close after half a year, almost as long as the second volume, the longest one, which I really hadn't expected. After all, in my plans, volume length was supposed to be like a young woman's skirt—the farther along we went, the shorter it should get. A major miscalculation.
Writing the fifth volume was torture. Not just mental torture, but physical too: in December I got ganked by COVID-19, in March I got ganked by kidney stone, and in April I got ganked again because I had to get my double-J stent removed... Now I drink two liters of water every day, rain or shine. Readers who've made it this far, go drink water right now!
Before talking about the fifth volume, I think it's necessary to first talk about what I expected of this book's romantic lines before I started writing it—namely, a comrades-in-arms relationship that stopped at ambiguity.
Yes, in my plans, Ash's feelings with Sonia, Diya, Vesir, Vishy, and the others should all have remained like moonlight until the grand finale: hazy and beautiful, shining but not scorching. Because that would have been much easier to write. Occasionally I could write some not-too-intense harem drama, keep their feelings forever at the level of school romance, and also avoid intimate scenes that are very easy to get ganked for. Just like Ren Suo in Small World, Ash would have stayed a virgin all the way to the ending—that was the route I was most used to and the simplest one.
But things started going off the rails from the third volume onward. To put it nicely, "the author can't control the characters anymore, awesome Listen to the Sun." To put it harshly, "the author's writing is too trash,