Chapter 194: Going Premium

Thank you to the few readers who have supported me from the very beginning. To be honest, without you all, I might have given up. This book has been flying completely under the radar since day one. No exposure means no readers, and without readers, an author has no way of knowing if their work is good or bad.

Now that I’m over 400,000 characters in, I feel that any readers I have are genuine, attracted simply by the volume of content. I’ve seen all of your feedback, and I will take your suggestions and opinions to heart. I will do my best to make corrections without changing the core tenets of the book.

Let me say a few words about this book. One of you actually guessed my inspiration. The idea for this novel came to me while I was rewatching *Wolverine*. The scene where Uncle Lang lives as a recluse in the mountains, keeping company only with wild beasts, truly moved me. My original plan was to write a story about a modern-day Knight, someone akin to an American comic book hero. However, I later found out there are many restrictions on the urban fiction genre, so I had to settle for a fictional future setting. I desperately wanted to capture Uncle Lang’s bleak, lone-wolf aura, but unfortunately, my writing is still too poor. Text is completely different from film. A movie relies on acting to create dramatic tension, while a story depends entirely on the author’s literary prowess. As of now, mine is far from sufficient.

I’ve learned a great deal writing this book. The protagonist’s personality is rather detached, which makes it hard for readers to feel a sense of immersion. After all, we are all just ordinary people in this world. Some of you have mentioned that it feels like something is missing. Besides my inadequate writing skills making it difficult to properly execute certain plot points, this is likely the main reason.

The current online environment is terrible. I used to think that an author only needed to write a good book. But I’ve discovered that the online world is just like the real one; from the moment you start writing, you have to rack your brain for ways to do promotion and marketing. To put it nicely, you call it "marketing." To put it bluntly, you’re just gaming the system for traffic. This means that books that don’t do this lose right at the starting line. That’s just how the external environment is, and one person is powerless to change it. Maybe that’s just life. We all eventually become the people we hate the most.

This book has received almost no features or recommendations. As an author, I have no promotional channels of my own. While my readership is small, most of them say the book is not bad, and that has been my only source of motivation.

From now on, I will do my best to release two Chapters a day. My readers have probably noticed that even though I write slowly, I never pad my Chapters with filler. If anything, the pacing is too relentless. A web novel needs a good rhythm, a balance between tension and release, and I’m working on easing up a bit.

I’ll stop rambling. If you feel this book is worth reading, please subscribe. It would also be a great help if you could recommend it to friends who enjoy web novels. Your support is my greatest motivation.