After one year, four months, and one day, the story of this book had finally drawn to a close. As for whether that full stop was perfect or not, I would not judge it. I could only say that I had done my best.
Writing a three-million-character web novel was indeed an enormous challenge for a complete newbie author—probably.
According to the overconfident plan I had made before starting the book, it should have wrapped up at two million characters. But once I actually began writing, I discovered that word count was far less easy to control than I had imagined.
So the length of this book expanded just a tiny little bit—by a mere one million characters.
The inspiration for this book came from the old wizard novel Journey of the Wizard. Whenever I read Journey of the Wizard, I would always fall into a line of thought: what would Wizard Civilization have been like before the Civilization War?
Without being tempered by the baptism of Civilization War, Wizard Civilization should have been somewhat immature, and its rules perhaps would not have been suitable either.
Thus, the Truth Council from the beginning of this book was born—seemingly inefficient, yet sufficient for its purpose.
As for the protagonist and the Golden Finger... At first, I had planned to present the Golden Finger in the form of a system. But after thinking it over, I felt that with only those few functions, it did not quite deserve the name "system." On top of that, I was revisiting Dark Souls III at the time and had developed an inexplicable appreciation for fire.
And so, the Miracle Furnace was born.
The protagonist's initial design also leaned toward being a burly, fearless man—someone who could face anything bravely and without fear, no matter when