I hadn't slept for a day and a night and was exhausted, but I still decided to have a chat with everyone first.
Those of you following the updates probably weren't surprised that the book ended... really, everyone understood that Seeing Wu Off was where the actual story ended; Crossing the Sea just wrapped things up for some characters and tied off elements of the setting.
At the ends of the previous two chapters, people were already saying this would be a fitting place to finish. That was probably what they meant.
My previous books were the same: once the main story was complete and reached a point where everything could be tied up, I ended them without further discussion.
But with that being the case, there were two problems with Exorcising the Dragon that were hard to avoid... impossible to avoid, really... one was that after my child was born, a recurrence of my hypokalemia happened alongside it, causing the update schedule to fall apart completely. In web fiction, updates are king, and a schedule like that deserved criticism; the other was that, in terms of content, I couldn't meet readers' expectations for high-powered martial arts fantasy.
I'd certainly been thinking about this myself over these past few years. I knew where to begin, but knowing where to begin was all I could do.
First of all, this book wasn't right even in the womb.
Actually, at first, I wanted to let myself loose and write a Western fantasy called Chronicles of Exterminating Dragons-the most classic sort of Western fantasy, something like The Elder Scrolls V. Quite a few longtime readers saw my original draft. At first, Du Meng was a Western-fantasy version of Big Black Cat... whereas my editor wanted me to keep writing historical fiction.
We couldn't