Phew, this volume was finally finished.
Time for the usual wrap-up.
The original goal was to finish it in seventy or eighty chapters: a story of a world in decline, its people scraping by, and our little Wang Ba painstakingly forging his own path and growing until, as the Little Cang Realm fell, he mended the heavens and saved the world.
Yes, very clichéd, but what could I do? I was getting older and didn't have that many wild ideas.
But while writing it and working through the main outline and detailed outline, I realized that using just seventy or eighty chapters to portray the protagonist growing from a Nascent Soul cultivator into a towering figure in the Little Cang Realm capable of mending the heavens would seem extremely implausible. (Not that it was particularly plausible now, either.)
It would feel like ending it just for the sake of ending it.
I didn't really want to give people the feeling of a botched ending, so despite my limited abilities, I went over it again and again.
I wrote tens of thousands of Chinese characters of detailed outlines for this volume, then worked through them again each time I wrote, until things more or less flowed.
But honestly, limited by my abilities and my slow brain, I didn't have time to mull things over carefully with daily updates. Looking back, there were many parts I wasn't particularly happy with.
For instance, Wang Ba predicting the Little Cang Realm's Great Calamity and then allowing Han Yanzi to complete the blood sacrifice: given time, I should have been able to write that part more smoothly, leaving everyone with nothing to pick apart. But the pressure of daily updates forced me to take a quick, direct approach, which left certain logical issues.
The same