# Volume 9: [Legacy of the Gods] tells a story of inheritance, with the general purpose of explaining the changes in the Abyss and the Mycroft Continent. It also marks the first [Battle with the Abyss and Demons]. Since the demon and abyss settings in my book are quite different from typical D&D or Western fantasy, I felt it necessary to spend half a volume explaining them.
As for Volume 10: [Radiance of the Star Sea], which covers the Starry World storyline, the theme is [Civilization-Level Chaos Battle]... In this volume, I made another major mistake.
Actually, at the beginning of this volume, the story was quite well-received. Especially when Joshua was summoned to the Star Sea World, monthly ticket votes hit a new high. Combined with the fact that, as everyone knows, I'm actually a sci-fi enthusiast, and this happened to be a star sea storyline, I got excited and started pouring out my steel soul, sci-fi passion, veteran Stellaris player energy, and various transcendent cosmic battle inspirations... And then, I wrote nearly 100,000 to 150,000 words of continuous 'action scenes' like that.
Yeah, over a hundred thousand words of pure combat... When I looked back to summarize, I was shocked myself. No wonder the subscription rate plummeted from nearly 3,000 down to 1,200. No reader could endure such high-intensity battles. There was even an author friend who read my work who dropped the book, saying they simply couldn't take it anymore. When I realized something was wrong, I immediately cut it off, quickly finished off the boss, and shifted the plot. But by then it was too late—the upward momentum of this book's performance was completely broken, and the average subscription even dropped, leaving only around 4,400.
An author's self-indulgence can harm a book this much. Honestly, I enjoyed writing that battle section immensely. I could have written another hundred thousand words. But the result was devastating, completely crushing any possibility of this book's revival. After all, the readers lost at this point were basically true fan readers, unlike in the early stages.
Even though the next volumes—Volume 11: [Gate of Myriad Realms] and Volume 12: [Great Age of Expansion]—the stories of the dragon-girl Lisa and the battles with the Demon Lords, namely [Battles with Other Orders (Black Mist)] and [Battles with Other Seekers of Hope (Abyss Demons)], received decent reviews, the subscription rate only maintained around 1,400 to 1,800. It was truly miserable, and I learned my lesson the hard way.
It wasn't until Volume 13: [World Within a Shell], the story of the time pusher Fatlervi, which is about [Battle with Those Who Abandon the Future], that monthly ticket votes hit another new high and the average subscription recovered... In this volume, I almost made another mistake—some settings and ideas weren't explained clearly, causing readers to misunderstand the protagonist's intentions. But fortunately, I opened a dedicated chapter to explain, and most people understood.
The subsequent storyline also served as a perfect conclusion to the [Rising Tide of the Middle Magic Surge] section of *Burning Steel Soul*. Ending with a story set in the central world where the magic surge converges, after the protagonist defeats the one who abandoned the future, he begins actively seeking nodes to change the fate of the future.
Volume 14: [Eternal Dim Light] is about [Order vs. Order Confrontation]. If both sides are correct from their own perspectives, both pursuing their own hope, their own eternal dim light, then they can only fight it out. Naturally, there's no right or wrong. This volume had no issues, and performance slowly rose. But it was also from this point that the book seemed to lean a bit toward science fiction...
Volume 15: [Lost Star River] is also a relatively sci-fi themed volume, featuring void nomads and a sleeping giant god transformed into a planetary world... This time it was a proper [Battle with Evil Gods], giving Joshua the power and possibility to truly annihilate evil god-level enemies. But it was also from this volume that he began to realize that evil gods seem to be nothing more than tools in essence—these seemingly evil chaos monsters are merely corpses built from countless sorrowful memories.
Therefore, Volume 16: [Eternal Dim Abyss] has the theme [Battle with Death and Sorrow]. The Death Evil God is the embodiment of the decline and doom of all civilizations. Its essence is an inextricably dense composition of sorrow from countless civilizations that have been lost, their names even forgotten. Joshua finally understood that 'killing, denying' the evil gods fundamentally couldn't solve the problem. Only by 'bearing, acknowledging' this infinite sorrowful memory belonging to the past can everything present stride forward.
This volume's monthly ticket votes and performance also hit new highs, with peak subscriptions breaking 20,000 and average subscriptions surpassing 5,500. Then it stayed there without moving until recently, when it rose a bit, approaching 6,000. I estimate that by the end of this book, the average subscription should be just over 6,000.