Happy early May Day holiday to everyone.
I’ve received a notification from my editor.
This book will go premium tomorrow, May 1st. Because I have to wait for the VIP Chapters to be enabled, the update time will be moved to 12 PM.
First and foremost, thank you to all my esteemed readers for your donations, monthly tickets, and for following along with every Chapter!
I know many of you who followed me from my last book get annoyed with Shijiu’s author notes, especially the ones where I ask for time off (scratching my head).
So, I’d like to take this opportunity, in this premium release announcement, to chat with you all about this book.
Well, how should I put this?
The performance of this book, much like Lin Shu’s "Comprehension," is a rather awkward topic to bring up.
To put it simply, after writing *Learning from Ten Thousand Demons* for about a month, the highest number of active readers I had was on the very first day the book was released.
On that day, April 3rd, I had around 20,000 collections and an estimated 8,000 active readers.
Uhm, on the second day, that number was cut in half, down to about 4,000.
Now, I’m at 70,000 collections, but the number of active readers has been stuck at that same figure for a whole month.
Those of you who are familiar with how this works probably know what that implies.
Normally, after writing for a month with numbers like these, some people’s fragile egos would have completely shattered.
In reality, I’m doing okay... I think.
Because I was mentally prepared before I even started this book.
The truth is, there are many issues.
The most serious one, and the reason I delayed starting a new book for so long, is that I felt I had learned a lot from my previous book.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t fully understood or grasped those lessons. It was all still a muddle.
I wanted to sort everything out before I started writing again, but after delaying for so long, I still hadn’t made any progress.
Some things, perhaps, you have to learn and validate through the process of writing, not just by thinking about them in a vacuum.
So in the end, I chose to start the book anyway.
This problem led to the beginning of the book being cluttered with too many new elements. But because I hadn’t mastered them, they failed to have the intended effect. Instead, it negatively impacted the pacing of the satisfying payoffs—something I’m usually good at—making the story feel slow and bloated.
On top of that, in the words of my editor, Haoyun Ju, I’m a case of "once bitten, twice shy."
The plot collapse during the Mid-stage of my last book has been weighing on my mind ever since. It even frightens me.
So when I started this new book, I was more focused on whether I could keep it stable.
As a result, I forgot that compared to just being stable and not falling apart, the most important thing for a book is to be entertaining and thrilling.
After the premium release, I will make adjustments.
When you catch the right trend, anything can take off.
However, once the trend has passed, the fall can be huge. But you still have to keep moving forward.
But enough of the idle chatter. Let’s get back to the main point.
Please, I’m begging everyone, please support me with a first-day subscription!
I’m really about to lose it (╥_╥)
I’ve been writing for a long time, and this is the first time a book of mine is going premium at only 150,000 characters.
I will do my best to keep the updates coming.
Tomorrow at 12 PM. Thank you, everyone!

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