I woke up and discovered that the book was going premium at noon today.
With the deadline right on top of me, I lay in bed and typed up this note on my phone.
My heartfelt thanks to everyone for your support all this time: every comment, every monthly vote and recommendation vote, and the tips from quite a few brothers and sisters. I won't list you all individually here, but thank you so very much.
Thanks also to my editor, Good Luck. I hadn't written anything for over half a year since finishing my last book. If Luck hadn't kept nudging me, I probably would've gone on being a salted fish, eating my way through life and waiting to die.
What made me feel I'd let Luck down was that this book flopped.
Normally, a book would go premium at around 250,000 to 260,000 Chinese characters. Unfortunately, this book's numbers were lousy across the board, so that was moved up.
Because this book started much earlier in the timeline, it was rather troublesome to write. I kept speeding things up, speeding things up, speeding things up, but that also left a lot of problems behind. For instance, I couldn't explain the details very clearly; otherwise, it would've probably taken a hundred or two hundred chapters to reach the official start of the original story, and the whole thing would've felt like padding.
With those problems, the lousy numbers were honestly no surprise. That was also why I'd been too embarrassed to ask for votes.
My original plan was to go premium when the protagonist put on his Soul Hall guise, just as the original plot was about to begin. Unfortunately, plans couldn't keep pace with change...
That's enough idle chatter. Finally, a few things you might be interested in.