Hi guys, hope you've all been keeping well.

I know you were expecting a chapter and not another update. There's no easy way to say this, but here goes.

Currently, I've written just around half of book 3 and do have the plot planned out for all of it. I really enjoyed writing it, because, as mentioned in the notes of my last chapter, more of the world is introduced and explored, such as the Church in the Holy Kingdom, the giant race, etc (continuing from the ending of the last chapter).

However, I realised I had a bit of a problem.

When I first started writing this novel, I did not take the time to properly establish a lot of, in hindsight, essential elements to writing a long novel like mine, such as clear lore for the world and its regions, or even the cultivation system. I had general ideas about things, but I never fleshed out all the critical details. Part of the reason for why I didn't do this was because I had no idea if anyone was going to read my books, so I didn't see the point in wasting a lot of time on this background work, if no one was going to read it. As more people started reading it, I just went off of those general ideas in my head. And, to be honest, also because as an amateur author, I did not see the importance of trying to establish a lot of these things.

You may or may not have realised this, but even during the course of the last two books, I changed a few major things. To give you an idea of some of these changes and issues, for example, I changed how the cultivation system worked in my notes quite a lot.

Initially, I did not have the idea of "martial techniques" for martial artists to use at all, hence why for most of book 1, you don't see Holt, Elwin, or anyone using any martial techniques. I got this idea only in book 2. Then, in order to include it in book 1, I went back and haphazardly made Drake find the second half of his cultivation technique in the ancestor's inheritance, which listed a bunch of martial techniques. I think I had like 2 days before that chapter would be released from when I got this idea, so I just quickly wrote down some random abilities and said Drake now could start using all of them because he found it in this inheritance.

Those chapters leading up to and around where he found the ancestor's inheritance, with the demon tide attacks and related battle scenes, Henry getting the chance to become a mage but being interrupted by Astoria, Hazezel later finding out that Damon/dark mages were behind the attacks who were controlling Astoria through a parasitic spirit - I had planned and flushed out these ideas well in advance and I actually really love all of them. However, due to the last minute changes I made to the ancestor's inheritance, that whole bit ended up being so unsatisfying, and could have been written a lot better imo.

It has also been quite high consequence, as Drake got some abilities which he's never used (like deflection palms and acute sense) and since I didn't want to give him too many abilities, I couldn't easily give him other abilities I later thought of, which would have actually been more useful and sensible. Basically, this mistake has defined Drake's abilities for most of book 1 & 2.

Also as a result of this, Drake is the only one who uses martial techniques in book 1, even though, for example, Holt and many others are at a much higher cultivation realm than him, so should have been using them too, but they don't, which doesn't make sense.

Obviously, I've never been happy with this.

You could see in book 2, when I had this idea better figured out, people like Sylvia, Corvus, etc, had martial techniques that were smaller in number but more useful, fit with the characters' theme, and just made more sense and was better suited for them, but Drake's abilities are a bit all over the place. I did manage to fix this in the book 3 version I have now, by saying Drake could use the martial arts experience he obtained in the inheritance to modify & improve his martial techniques, and made them a lot better and more suited to him - but it doesn't make sense at all that you'd need to wait 100+ chapters to see this happen!

Another, perhaps more minor issue for example, was I was going to originally have magic cultivation as the main form of cultivation in this universe, so make martial artists would be weaker mages. Some of you might remember if you had read the initial version(s) of book 1, that when Ray sees Drake had formed only one mana core, he still doesn't respect him because of this reason. But later on, I realised this was an unnecessary layer of complexity, and could just make them both equal, and then went back and changed Ray's initial interactions with Drake to better mirror this. Likewise with races, I gave them different lifespans for no reason at all, without really thinking about it, and later on realised this would probably cause more issues than help anything, and tried to say they just start cultivation at a different age, and has ended up being another (or one of the) useless/unnecessary element to my universe.

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

These are just a few examples of my mess ups. There are lots of other smaller details I'd want to change, starting from names for a lot of people and places, and probably Drake's age as he's way too young this far into the story still!

And more

Another consequence of all this which really bothers me is that, the people who are interested in my book a lot and read it within a few days/weeks of it coming out (so most of you guys if you're reading this soon after release), will be reading the version with all these mistakes, and not the corrected/improved version. This also makes me feel bad, as my mistakes are most costly, to people who like my books the most.

Returning to my original point, as I was writing book 3, and I was forced to think about how all the essential parts of my universe would work, I realised that going back, if I had done this exercise, I could have actually made my cultivation system and abilities a lot better from the get go, I could have slowly revealed a lot of this information in my novel which would have enabled world-building, and more.

On the latter point, for 2 books/100+ chapters, I don't think the world building and character building, especially for the MC, has been sufficient at all (at least, I'm not happy with it). Some characters (and this is another major issue for me) like Astoria and Henry got a lot of development in book 1 but have become quite redundant in book 2, which makes the all the chapters spent developing them feel kind of useless for the overall plot of the novel now. I don't know how important they'll be in book 3/4 onwards too so haven't been able to give them a clear conclusion. This happened because I just developed them because I liked the ideas and plots that came out of those areas of the story, and didn't plan for how these characters would fit into the bigger picture of the story, which is just not good enough on my part.

This is also because, as an author, world & character building is definitely one of my weak points, so I've kind of just ignored this. What I like the most and, if I say so myself, am decently good at, is building and writing good plotlines and action, so this is what I've focused on the most, and just kind of fit character & world building into it in the easiest way possible without much thought.

I think book three has been looking a lot better with regards to a lot of these elements, since I've been putting more conscious effort into them. I could go back to change more things in the first two books, but there's only so many changes I can do on a live release, since any major changes would negatively affect people who are currently reading the story in those areas.

That means, no matter how good I make my story book three onwards, my book one and two, especially book one, the early and most important chapters, are never going to be up to standard. And of course, if it takes 100+ chapters for a book to become good in so many essential elements, most people aren't going to bother reading it at all.

You can now probably guess where I am going with this.

I have decided to rewrite my novel from book 1 again, this time without any issues, changing, improving, and incorporating all the details I have missed out earlier.

Sorry for the long, unstructured rant above, but I thought I owe you all an explanation for why I came to this decision, given you've been interested enough to read it so far. I'm sure this must be a bit disappointing so apologies for that, but it is likely that this novel, if written to completion, is going to go on for many more books, over quite a few years. It is possible that I'm being too harsh on myself, but I don't think I'm going to be happy continuing to write this novel for such a long time, in its current form with all its mistakes, and the mistakes compounding over time as well if I don't fix it properly now.

I want to write this novel once, and do it right.

To this end, I do have a lot of plot points and scenes, and plenty of other things in my story so far that I do genuinely like and will try to make use of them again in the rewrite. So it's definitely not going to feel/read like a totally different book or universe. But, it'll be different enough in a lot of key ways that it'll, hopefully, be better.

Due to the long break I took at the start of the year, some of you might have forgotten parts of the story too, so maybe reading this rewrite would be helpful in properly starting to enjoy this story again.

I'm not sure when I'll finish the rewrite, but it'll definitely only be after new year. I'll write another update for you guys when I've completed it to a standard I'm happy with, and have decided on a release date, in case any of you want to read it.

Till then, stay healthy, be happy, and hope you all have a wonderful rest of the day/evening/night, where ever you are, and thank you so much for your interest.

I'll see you all in the next update.

Best,

V

(Side note, I know my IG page has been pretty dead atm. This is mainly just because I had no idea what kind of content to put on there. I have been considering restarting it, this time actually posting about me personally, like a writing page with a personal/behind-the-scenes/day-of-the-life element to it, as I think I'll enjoy producing that type of content. Not quite yet, but I likely will some time in the future)

Next chapter will be updated first on this website. Come back and continue reading tomorrow, everyone!

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.