Here comes a big 10,000-character chapter. For authors who post 2,000-character chapters, this one would count as five. Recently, some readers have called me shameless for charging so much for one chapter, so I still need to explain: Qidian charges by character count, not by chapter. Other books cost you less because their chapters are shorter. For a book with 2,000-character chapters, even two updates a day really would cost less than one chapter of mine. Getting criticized is normal when you write books, but getting criticized for this still feels unfair.
Now that I've explained the pricing, let's talk about the plot arrangements.
Volume Two was really about laying the groundwork for the setting and expanding the world. Having Lianshan Xin visit the Divine Capital brought out the backgrounds of the characters there. Introducing the characters in an orderly way and leaving you with an impression of them means they won't feel like they've come out of nowhere when I write about them later.
But A-Xin couldn't stay in the Divine Capital for long yet. So far, he had only come into contact with Nine Heavens and the imperial family, not Great Yu's powerful ministers. The Divine Capital harbored crouching tigers and hidden dragons; it wasn't somewhere A-Xin could venture through at his current True Intent Realm. Just getting this far had already burned Thousand Faces out. If that burning continued, it would burn Thousand Faces to death.
Actually, my original plan for Volume Two was to kill Thousand Faces off. I'd already laid plenty of groundwork about Thousand Faces being on the last sliver of health and the imperial family's deep reserves of power, so that death would have followed naturally and made logical sense. But I discovered that quite a lot of readers liked Thousand Faces, and