Well, DH2 has absolutely flopped, which is the expected result for a series that didn't take off at any point. I negotiated for five audiobooks so listeners wouldn't be left with a half-finished series, so those will continue to come out every few months along with the ebooks.
My goal with this post isn't to focus on the negative, however, it's to thank those who have supported the story, by tying off some loose ends. As I've written before, I finished the story of the Deadlake continents because that's a reasonably satisfying point, but obviously there are still open questions, as I laid groundwork and foreshadowing for future stories to come.
If you want answers about lingering mysteries, this post is for you. If you don't want to hear about things that won't be written, well, skip this one and await future announcements. I'm going to write up a lot of my thoughts and then open this to any and all questions from patrons.
The Series-Long Plot
So what's the deal with the abyss at the center of Deadwaste? As was hinted and many speculated, it is a technology that builds up power over time. The monster incursions are a byproduct of this, but the ultimate purpose is to create an unusual type of power that can be harvested by those who know how. This process follows complex cycles, and the first incursion of the book was an exceptional outlier that drew great powers from across the setting to try to absorb it.
Everything about the initial setting is built around trying to limit the raw draining power of the central abyss. It is indeed the reason that Deadwaste is the weakest continent, and the Frontier wall was built more to contain the draining effect than the monsters. But all the continents and the Deadlake itself are also under the draining effect, which is why they're so much weaker than the outside world.
This ties into the broader plot that would have been explored over the course of the series, which involves the fundamental distribution of power in the universe. Its natural state would be relatively mild fluctuations, but the strongest are always hungry for more, so they began "reality engineering" in order to produce regions with more intense sources of energy. There's a law of "conservation of power", however, which means that for one region to become stronger, another has to become weaker. Doing this over millions of years has led to the current universe where the people on some planets are gods compared to the people on others.
Monsters are the ultimate expression of this: their creation involves a "negative power" byproduct, which means the equation can support more normal power. Kai is the first person to harness this negative power, which shouldn't be possible since it's a sort of anti-life.
Of course Kai was never destined and his parents weren't secretly legendary figures - I hope everyone here is on board with that. He was meant to be the inevitable flaw in the system: if you grind people up against an exploitative system, eventually there will be a crack. In an environment with such drained power, and constantly exposed to monstrous energy, some people will begin to adapt to it. What makes Kai unique is that destiny gave him so little that he never rejected those unnatural potentials, and he had the determination not to be destroyed in the process.
Destiny itself isn't a purely natural phenomenon in this setting, drawing off the xianxia concepts of the will of the heavens. Just like the abysses, it's also technology designed to push conservation of energy to allow for more and more extreme outliers, increasing the power of the strongest at the expense of the majority.
The Deadlake continents aren't actually the worst-off, however: the Thin Zones that were referenced by the gods are regions where reality itself is beginning to degrade, populated by people-like creatures that don't actually have souls. For the most part, these are regions of senseless bloodshed, but one future character would have managed to ascend from one of them. He would have been an interesting character, even more oppressed by destiny than Kai and more bitter about reality itself.
Ultimately the series would have reckoned with the unnatural universe and the system would have been broken: all the gods we saw above the abyss, and our main cast having reached their level, would be involved in a huge final conflict that would break the heavens and leave the universe with a more natural distribution of power.
The Grand Unified Theory of Magic
I don't want to share my huge sloppy rubric of magic, but it's ultimately a spectrum of all possible types of power and optimization requires spreading over all of it. For some that involves fusing mana, qi, and chakra into single large arts, whereas others gather a variety of powers. Either is viable so long as they leave no space on the rubric unused.
Mana, qi, and chakra would have been revealed to be not absolute laws of energy, only natural states for energy to fall into. There would be other planets dominated by energy forms that fall into the middle (like mana/qi), creating entirely different systems of power. But as the series already made clear, you can't go around collecting infinite power systems, because they occupy the same overall "space" in your soul.
I had some truly crazy ideas for just how high the scale could go - for example, "godhood" in this system would have been a stage where a person gains dominance over the heavens of a single region. Many stop there, but reaching the peak requires ascending through godhood.
Ultimately, those heights of power require specialization. A person who has mastered many different arts and every form of energy directs all their power to transforming a part of themselves on a fundamental level, using every secondary energy to create a structure of power that would be impossible otherwise. So the cultivator seen above the abyss hasn't simply reached the top level of cultivation, she mastered a dozen other abilities and used them all to reforge her fundamental laws of cultivation into something that would be impossible for anyone else. Likewise characters like the blue giant, who instead focused on Physique, and so on.
Some people started to speculate this at the end, but the Supremacy item in soul readouts reflects something similar to the Dao. This is a heightened form of power that the Deadlake continents were literally too drained to support.
I've never liked how some series just treat Dao like power boosts, no matter the names boiling down to Dao of Blasting Things. My concept was that it involves such a deep comprehension of an aspect of reality that the user gains a fundamental control over it. There are lesser Supremacies, just representing local control, but at the highest level they're singular. The cloaked figure over the abyss possesses the Dao of Fire, meaning that they can take control of literally any flame, regardless of its origin.
I had too many ideas to get into them all. To throw out just one more: ascending isn't a single path, instead involving different choices about specialization. There are traditional Immortals as in xianxia, of course, but also Transcendents who are non-physical beings, or Hypermortals who become carnal gods.
Future Character Growth
One of the fundamental questions of progression fantasy is "Why can these characters become the strongest when others can't?" One of my answers was going to be that starting in the weakest part of the weakest world is actually an advantage in surprising ways: it completely strips away all shortcuts, producing a system of power that is surprisingly pure, if weak. If someone can scale it up without losing that purity, it has unparalleled potential.
(This wouldn't go unnoticed, by the way. Once the main characters begin to shake the setting, the great powers would begin trying to seize weak zones to bring up their own warriors. This would have mixed results, but still lead to a shakeup in the overall order of things.)
Of course the characters would continue to grow over the course of the series, keeping their core abilities but needing to fuse or evolve some power systems. Eventually they each would have attained a Dao and the peak of their own art.
Zae Zin Nim is obviously a cultivator at heart and would have kept the most stable core set of abilities, eventually becoming an Immortal. She would have needed to master creating multiple bodies, sometimes leaving one cultivating for centuries while she continued traveling with the main cast.
Omilaena would eventually have become a Transcendent, though she'd have needed to take some unusual paths. Eventually she would have needed to fuse her ice cultivation into another system to create a more focused build, for example, and later on she would have explored her elven ancestry, transforming her fundamental nature.
Obviously Kai is the protagonist and has the greatest potential with his monstrous doubling of power. He would have needed to bring his cultivation into better alignment with his abilities, but he was actually making one big mistake: unlike the others who evolved their Physique, he was pursuing the "standard" path, which is a dead end on the broader scale.
Mistakes can be corrected, but at great cost. There was going to be a whole arc where he cocoons up in a flesh orb within an abyss and the other characters are desperately defending him while other powers try to exterminate him before he can awaken with his Physique entirely transformed, unlocking a new level of synthesis.
I had a lot of arcs planned, ideas for keeping things fresh over the course of a long series. Zae Zin Nim splitting herself, as mentioned. Omilaena taking a massively disfiguring injury that requires decades to heal, leaving her without her usual seduction and revealing insecurities as her spouses don't leave her. Kai would have gotten stuck in monster form for a whole arc, temporarily limiting him in exchange for new unlocks once he got through it.
Setting Transformations
Another thing I wanted to explore was how a setting itself can evolve, instead of staying static for unrealistic lengths of time. Krysal would have developed over the course of generations, often fractious but ultimately becoming a new land of acid cultivation with crystals serving as support. The consequences of character behavior during that initial revolution arc would have continued to surprise.
Powers would have waxed and waned: for example, Irun is the weakest of the Deadwaste nations at the beginning, but you saw them transform with a new source of metal. We would have seen the same fundamental concepts be expressed in different and increasingly creative ways, having different consequences on society each time.
As the plot extended over generations, some of the characters would pass away, but many of the secondary characters would have extended their lifespans and become leaders of nations. Kai and Co would have been the only one who can make it out of the Deadlake alive, but they would have gone back and helped others get out.
Those survivors would form a new nation called New Monskon, taking the stripped down powers from the Deadlake and carefully growing them with stronger sources of energy. Eventually they would have become a power to be reckoned with, upsetting the established order entirely.
Oh, and I've been waiting to talk more about Detriton. It's actually not the worst world in the universe, it's an enormous assemblage of different worlds that forms a vast Alderson Disk. Basically, this was my way of getting a xianxia-sized setting with completely irrational distances and sizes. Detriton is the largest single world in the multiverse, containing Thin Zones or highly drained regions like the Deadlake, but also intensely powerful regions.
Ask Me Anything
Okay, I've tried to lay out some of my broad plans and answer the questions about the setting and powers that I knew were definitely lingering. There was obviously more, of course. Feel free to ask me anything about the future of the story and my plans for the characters or setting and I'll answer it.
Thanks for following my work. If you've enjoyed this story, I hope you'll stick around to hear about what's next. There will be some more DH content as well as free previews of my next project.