Radiant Blade of the Wilderness

Chapter 61: Volume 1 Afterword and Notice of 3.5-Day Hiatus

Volume 1 was really quite short. This sentence deserves its own line.

When I was working out the plot, I kept thinking how there’s a whole system built around ”the result of consuming it.” If that only ever applies to side characters and never to the protagonist, the entire setup gets completely inverted. All the world setting would be pointless.

Hence, from the very beginning I confirmed that the protagonist had to consume something. And that in turn, this meant his early advancement would be a single leap to success, a quantum leap rather than a climb. The conventional satisfaction of a progressive power-up would have to wait for the second half. The beginning would instead build its own satisfying moments around that quantum-leap premise. I’ve written similar stuff before, but not often. For me it counts as fairly fresh ground, and shouldn’t trigger aesthetic fatigue.

With that idea in place, Volume 1 was never going to be long. If I’d dragged it out to a hundred-odd Chapters or more, with Ding Songyan still an ordinary man that happened to be a bit clever, decent with people, but otherwise useless, the reading experience would have been something close to a disaster.

Of course, it’s not impossible to write it that way. You’d need some external force to keep the power level suppressed so the protagonist can actually do things and feel involved, rather than being completely pushed around and controlled. That only serves to make readers anxious.

After weighing it up, I settled on something around two to three hundred thousand characters for Volume 1. That’s roughly the length of a mid-length novel, and just enough for a single complete saga.

Once actual writing started, I made further adjustments based on my writing vibes and on reader feedback. For example, once sharp-eyed readers started spotting certain anomalies early on during the ”family of five” daily-life scenes, I cut a significant portion of those scenes, because too many abnormal details would have blunted the impact of the reveal. I kept mainly the scenes with the younger sister, since that’s the centerpiece; Bull got streamlined but is largely still there; the parents’ sections were trimmed considerably, though the key character-building moments remained.

Some characters who were originally going to have more involvement in Volume 1, such as the Wushou, are going to be bumped to Volume 2. The goal was to keep Volume 1 focused on one incident, and not have Ding Songyan developing more and more side plots despite having ordinary human strength. That would drag the story’s pace and make readers wonder when he is going to start training. Why is he still not starting to train?

Not training right away was the whole point. When he does train, he trains big.

That means the stages that show up in most martial cultivation stories—body tempering, qi cultivation, aperture refinement—can be covered relatively quickly later on, leaving room to focus on aperture forging, which may or may not be unique to this book, but is at least something a bit fresh.

After all the adjustments, Volume 1 came down from the eighty-odd Chapters I’d originally estimated to sixty. The story feels reasonably complete, and the main characters’ personalities and images have been established.

In terms of what Volume 1 covers, I deliberately brought in some of the cultivation methods I find interesting, including some that feel decidedly un-wuxia—like the Sutra of Celestial Heart Wisdom, and the Useless Divine Art, which I find genuinely interesting.

This way, readers come away with an early sense that this is absolutely not a conventional mid-tier or low-tier martial arts setting, so they won’t carry that expectation into what follows.

This is fundamentally a mythological world, one with all manner of great powerhouses in it. It’s only because of the heaven and earth severance that those divine arts and techniques gradually declined, producing the current era. It’s tilted toward wuxia, with a relatively modest power ceiling. Under those conditions, what once were divine arts didn’t disappear but were merely diminished. Some survive in the form of sorcery; others are absorbed into various martial disciplines. As a result, things are possible here that wouldn’t be in conventional wuxia, or even in many mid-tier or low-tier xuanhuan settings.

I know that this differs from the wuxia that readers picture in their heads. But if I only wrote the kind of wuxia that already lives in people’s heads, I’d just be regressing to the pre- era. A genre stays alive by constantly renewing itself. Innovation isn’t guaranteed to land, but stagnation is guaranteed death.

If Volume 1 has at least given readers a rough picture of the world I have in mind, I think part of what I set out to do has been accomplished.

As a xuanhuan novel with a wuxia inclination, there will of course be a female lead. I can’t say who it is yet. When character profiles are updated later, they’ll all be listed as supporting female characters for now; once things are finalized, I’ll revise.

Besides Xiao Qing, the demoness, Dog Bro, Master, Zheng Zhuxi, Xu Chang’an, and Qi Xiaoxiang, who are all definite additions, are there any other characters you’d like to see?

It’s been ten years since I wrote anything in this Eastern vein. The feel for the language, word choices, prose style—all of it is still slowly being recalibrated. That can’t happen overnight; it’ll have to be Chapter by Chapter. I ask for your patience.

Volume 1 doesn’t have much fighting in it. My general habit is that if the protagonist isn’t directly involved, fight scenes get kept to a minimum. No need to spend too much ink on it as long as it’s just enough for the point to register. Otherwise, imagine the protagonist in the middle of something critical while two or three Chapters detail a side character fighting to the death. Just thinking about it is terrifying.

And as an ordinary person, Ding Songyan could really only fight Yan Changqing, who had already stripped to almost nothing, under the cover of someone else suppressing the Celestial Heart imprint, using Yan Changqing’s own qi, and only then because a secondary hidden thread was in play. Making him fight more often would strain the reasonability past its breaking point.

This does mean some of the side characters’ arcs end up feeling a little rushed. Now that Ding Songyan has jumped straight to the Grandmaster realm, things should improve considerably from here. After all, he has more fighting strength, more capacity to be involved, and the availability of plenty of threads that can be woven together, with nothing to hold him back.

Volume 1 doesn’t lay out nearly as many long-running hidden threads as Lord of Mysteries or Circle of Inevitability—just two. That’s partly intentional; for this book I wanted to try a different approach: keep the front and middle sections light, satisfying, and full of swift justice, without making things overly complicated. The transmigration, Kunlun, and the mastermind pulling strings from the shadows will all be resolved and explained in time. Filling in foreshadowed gaps is something I’m reasonably good at.

Within this volume, I managed to bring Xiao Qing, Dog Bro, and the demoness to life, and I’m quite pleased with how they turned out. As for ”if life were always as it was at first sight,” beyond the demoness and the Ding family, there are others too, but that’s a saying that needs time to settle; it won’t have shown all it has to show in a single volume.

I’ve mentioned Volume 2’s title before: When Kindred Souls Chance to Meet, I Drink to You. Its epigraph is ”All banquets under heaven must come to an end.”

One is gathering, the other is parting. The theme is the swift joys and sudden sorrows of the jianghu, and the meetings and partings in life. Under the broad canopy of wuxia, that’s actually relatively easy to write, so Volume 2 is built from a series of smaller events rather than one large, explosive main-thread incident. Of course, there will be one on the surface, and the hidden threads will remain, flowing quietly, waiting for later.

As is customary, 3.5 days off to organize Volume 2’s outline and get a firm grip on the tone I’m after. Updates resume at 12:30pm on July 1st. Going premium on July 2nd. There will certainly be bonus Chapters then, since I do have some stockpiled.

Thank you everyone.