A man all in gray sat within the cosmos. He should have been pondering deeper mysteries, yet he had no choice but to focus his attention on lesser things. Everything in existence had become so tedious... but in one galaxy, on the abnormal world of Detriton, within a dying lake, there was a single unknown that troubled him.
He rarely bothered with such mundane things as expressions or emotions, but as he considered, the man frowned. The barrier of fate, woven by the limit-achieving forces of existence such that even one of them could not pierce it, made it very hard to see within. It had been a year or two, surely things should have resolved by now.
But if anything, the barrier was spreading. That was another troubling development, if a trivial one.
"Tralala!" A man in multi-colored robes appeared behind him, spinning in a circle. "It is I, Koleiman the Magnificent!"
"Do you have nothing better to do?" the man in gray asked.
"I am currently doing a million things, 97% of them completely useless, but even the 3% that are useful are less important than congratulating you on your master stroke! Sending such weak creatures under the barrier of fate... I could never dream of such a dreary solution."
The man in gray shifted slightly, his lips twisting just a little further downward.
"I can only presume that you intended to exterminate the anomaly." Koleiman the Magnificent swept off his hat in mock grief and shook his head. "A new flower in the universe, plucked for no reason other than that it offended you. I suppose you win this round."
"You weren't involved," the man in gray said. "I'm sure of it."
"Of course not, but I can still congratulate you. So I suppose the result is just to be expected. It would have been very embarrassing if you played against no one and still lost, wouldn't it?"
At last the man in gray identified the fraction of Koleiman the Magnificent that was tormenting him and erased it. His realm was gray once again, allowing him to peer within the cosmos. Though it was difficult to see through the distortion of fate, it did seem as though there was no trace of the monster hybrid within the region called the Deadlake.
So it was back to the old tedium of life. Same as it had ever been.
.
..
.
A fisherman limped along the shore of a lethal ocean, looking for mussels, when he spotted something. It looked like a bit of flotsam or jetsam, something thrown up by the poor fools who tried to sail the Deadlake. Not so unusual, but this time it was three young folks on the shore.
The man was a burly one, though less powerful than you'd expect, for so much muscle. He seemed to have braced his body to defend two women, who were beginning to stir. Something was a bit off about the man, but the fisherman didn't particularly care about such things. The world was a confusing enough place without giving folks a hard time over nothing.
"You alive there, son?"
The young man groaned and pushed himself up, expelling such an enormous amount of water from his lungs that it was a miracle he hadn't drowned. For that matter, the water of the Deadlake usually drained everything that touched it, so he was doubly lucky not to be dead. Nothing could survive out there - the Deadlake had that name for a reason, after all. Yet it seemed like all three had lived, though it had been a close thing, judging from how desperately the man checked his allies.
"Let's get you up and warm," the fisherman said, putting a hand on the young man's shoulder. "We have a good stew right now, and we don't mind sparing some. You hungry, son?"
"Yeah," Kai said. "I could eat."
X
Here we are: the end of book five, the end of the first major saga, and likely the end of the series. It was written unchanged from the original longer plan, with a few minor exceptions:
Longer version would have had more trip preparation as buildup in the next book instead of falling action in this one.
In the original outline, the trio would have been separated during the ocean journey and had to fight their way together again. But if that arc isn't being written, I thought it didn't make sense to separate them ambiguously.
I would have made Wallcrawler's Feet stick around pointlessly for way longer.
Will there be any future arcs? I try to always communicate clearly with readers, so I have to say that the answer is "Possibly but not likely." The second audiobook, with a simultaneous ebook release, could potentially make the series pick up, but statistically this doesn't usually happen. Most likely the best I can hope for is that the combined series does decently and Audible makes enough money back that they don't blacklist me.
I know some people will urge me to continue, but I have been doing this steadily for several years and it has taken a major chunk of time and mental health. I've taken very few hiatuses, always announced, and I think at this point it's clear that consistency won't make a difference. I was trying to do something specific with this and it seems the market isn't interested.
The main thing that makes a return even possible is that I'm still passionate about the ideas I had for the future, even now. I had some truly crazy concepts for a story tackling the massive scope and length of xianxia-styled stories. Some of the bonus content in the future will get into some of this, and at some point I'll do an AMA so readers aren't left with unanswered questions.
This is the last time that the story has a good off-ramp that I can honestly say I believe is a satisfying ending for readers. There's a long tradition in xianxia of a story ending when the characters ascend from one world. These five books have wrapped up the loose ends of the Deadlake continents, given everyone a character arc, and explored the known world. If I delved into the universe beyond I'd be committing myself to a much longer story.
I'll talk about all the bonus content in a later post, since as I've said all of that will be free. Some people leave even if they aren't being charged, and if that's you, feel free to go and thank you for supporting the story. If you stick around, I'll have further posts that I hope everyone who has enjoyed this far will appreciate. ^-^