I suddenly realized it had been a long time since I last took stock. Maybe it was because I was busy posting updates every day. Although it was only six thousand Chinese characters a day, that was already enough to rack my brains over. Or perhaps, seven months after starting this book, I had gradually hit a bottleneck, a period of fatigue.
Since it came to mind today, I might as well take a little time to look back.
Since the Abyss arc, we have gone through the Unreality Disorder arc, the Earth arc, and the brand-new Nether Domain Calamity arc.
Although the Earth arc received quite a lot of negative reviews, its numbers, particularly the number of readers keeping up with updates, were the highest: generally over ten thousand, peaking at fourteen thousand.
The Unreality Disorder arc did not have many satisfying payoffs, and its ongoing readership was passable, generally staying above eight thousand.
Instead, the new arc I had racked my brains to come up with had the lowest ongoing readership.
Actually, I thought the recent plot had been quite interesting. The Mountain Giant and his wife, the archaeologist, the Dragon Turtle-all the new characters were carefully designed, and they would appear again later.
But the ongoing readership was not high, hovering around six thousand.
I knew why. The main storyline of this book from the beginning was "the journey home." That was the "hook" that drew readers onward. As long as the protagonist did not get home, that anticipation would remain unresolved, and readers could keep following along.
From the standpoint of performance, never letting him get home would have been the right approach.
Just like Ash Ketchum in Pokémon: once he won the championship, he could not even hold on to his position as the protagonist,