Chapter [NaN] |
Hello everyone, I am the author of this book, Exterminator Squad Member.
First, let me take a deep breath. There is one thing I absolutely have to say, and that is—
The story is finished! Cue the confetti!
(Little Xiang: Crackle, crackle...)
Everyone has asked me a lot of questions, and I cannot reply to them all one by one, so I will address them all together in this chapter.
Regardless, I am incredibly grateful to the friends who have made it to this chapter. No matter how many of you there are, you are all precious treasures to me.
Thinking about it carefully, this truly has been a very long journey. From the moment I typed the very first word to the moment I typed the final period, it has been an unbelievable memory.
Well, my word count might be nothing to the great writing gods, but for an author serializing a novel for the first time... it feels completely surreal.
I am not sure if you noticed, but I am actually a complete novice when it comes to web novels. Because of this, the content I initially wrote was structured like a published physical book (after all, one must have dreams). I have not read many web novels, only the most popular ones like Jade Dynasty, The Lost Tomb, Ghost Blows Out the Light, Battle Through the Heavens, Soul Land, and My House of Horrors. This resulted in me frequently not understanding the common tropes you all mention, which I am truly ashamed of.
In terms of published literature, the works of Jin Yong, Gu Long, Mo Yan, Liu Cixin, Han Han, and the suspense writer Ning Hangyi have all greatly inspired me. Additionally, I really love comics, movies, and games with strong narrative storytelling.
This might also be why my pacing feels a bit strange compared to other web novels. So, I want to apologize to everyone first, and genuinely thank you all for patiently listening to me finish this story.
(Xing Tian: I will apologize to you myself.)
Actually, I have many identities.
First of all, just like the protagonist, I am an employee at a state-owned enterprise. On weekends, I run my own company in the design field. On a certain live-streaming platform, I am a streamer with thirty thousand followers. On a video platform, I am a content creator dedicated to game guides. And on this current platform, I am an author who has just finished a novel. Thinking about it this way, it really is quite wonderful.
These completely unrelated experiences make up my life. Furthermore, the people in each of these fields do not know about my other identities. Therefore, there are many versions of me in this world, which feels very similar to Du Yu.
If you ask me which feeling I like the most? It is the feeling of writing.
So why did I want to write?
One day, I suddenly said to my wife, "I want to write."
She asked, "Why?"
I replied, "Because I feel like I can write a decent piece of work."
She said, "Is that so? Then write it."
I pondered for a moment. "But what genre should I write?"
She asked, "What genres are there?"
I said, "There are a lot. Like cultivation, mythology, sci-fi concepts, history, suspense, romance, time travel, the apocalypse..."
"Write them all together."
"All together..."
At the time, I thought my wife was joking with me. If I mashed so many different things into one book, would it even be readable?
But also because of those words, my thoughts suddenly became clear.
Yeah, who said I couldn't write them all together? I decided to write a book that tried to encompass everything.
Even if I treated it as practice, I could use this experience to find out what kind of genre I was actually good at writing.
Very quickly, I sorted out the outline for Legend Management Bureau. I planned to have the protagonist enter legends over and over again, experiencing a variety of different stories involving romance, family bonds, cultivation, suspense, time travel, and even tests of human nature.
I set the protagonist as Zhan Qisheng and wrote down the two stories of Kuafu Chases the Sun and Jingwei Fills the Sea. It was a full seventy thousand words. The main storyline was set so that after experiencing many Legends, he would eventually betray the bureau.
But a few days later, I deleted everything I had written.
If you want to know the reason, it was because this protagonist was just too boring.
(Zhan Qisheng: Boring? N-No way... Ying Ning smiles every time she sees me.)
For example, if someone in a legend was going to die, you would just fly over and smack the threat away. If someone in a legend was meant to live, you would descend from the sky and save them.
I did not know what the meaning of the book was. All the plotlines felt like a superficial glance, lacking any deeply moving clashes of the Soul.
Using such a powerful Immortal Being to experience the so-called "romance," "family bonds," and "human nature" did not seem quite fitting. Logically speaking, these things would hardly affect him.
If I wanted to make the story seem more full of conflict, then the protagonist had to be a Mortal.
So, I pushed the timeline forward by nine hundred years, starting with Zhan Qisheng's betrayal. I introduced a new Mortal protagonist and overhauled the previous outline, making the earlier draft serve as a prequel instead.
Since the protagonist was a Mortal, if he was going to travel through history, deal with Immortal Deities, and search for the truth within the timeline, then he would have to be a madman, a gambler.
I used the pinyin for gambler, "dutu," and modified it on the keyboard to become "duyu," using that to name the protagonist.
But by doing this, I basically added a lot of unnecessary writing difficulty for myself.
I clearly could have written about an Immortal Deity, yet I insisted on writing about a Mortal. I clearly could have just had him steamroll through everything brainlessly, yet I insisted on coming up with plot devices and brilliant schemes one after another.
But isn't that exactly what makes a "story" interesting?
I simply decided to give myself another difficult problem.
"A Mortal shoots down nine suns."
I laughed when I wrote it out. I felt like I was digging a pit for myself to jump into. I spent several days breaking down all the story beats of Yi Shoots Nine Suns layer by layer. I tried to inject an "error" into a certain segment, and then came up with a "countermeasure." This countermeasure had to be something a Mortal could accomplish; the use of any immortal magic would be considered cheating.
Actually, it wasn't just Yi Shoots Nine Suns. Every legend in this book had an outline of at least two A4 pages. To the readers, it just looked like, "Oh, there's a problem with the legend." In reality, even the "problem" was something I had pondered over for a very long time. I had to think of the "solution" in advance before I could call it a "problem"; otherwise, I would just be getting myself stuck.
Once the outline for this story was finished, I could begin writing the actual text, casually throwing Du Yu in there to enjoy the Suffering.
(Du Yu: Leader, is this why you tortured me? If you wanted to kill me, you shouldn't have said it out loud...)
But as you all might know, the initial performance of this book was very poor, which made me entertain the thought of giving up many times.
I saw that others had such high ratings and so much popularity. Opening the first page and seeing 99+ comments on the very first sentence filled me with endless envy.
Therefore, I picked up a few of those books to read with a learning mindset.
Well... how should I put this?
I did not know where I was losing out.
(Zhongli Chun: That's right, on what grounds?)
Perhaps I truly just did not understand web novels. I didn't have the protagonist steal the spotlight in the very first chapter. I didn't let the protagonist punish Immortal Deities on a whim. I didn't have the protagonist act pretentious, nor did I give him ruthless methods. I didn't even have the protagonist cultivate to become an immortal. I did not write "instant gratification" plots; instead, I frequently buried foreshadowing that spanned across hundreds of chapters. All of this was a massive departure from modern web novels.
However, this learning experience did teach me one thing, and that was: "Stop trying to copy others, just be yourself."
So, I buried my head in my writing and continued to perfect my own story.
This also led to people frequently saying in the early stages, "Your character settings are wrong. According to the Primordial era novels, it should be blah blah blah..."
I actually really wanted to say, "I'm sorry, I have genuinely never read those Primordial era novels. All my character designs were established by me. If there are any references, they come from the Classic of Mountains and Seas and the Genealogy of Gods and Immortals, not from Primordial web novels."
After all, those Primordial web novels were made up, and mine is made up too. I don't understand why mine is considered wrong and theirs is considered right?
Perhaps it was precisely my unorthodoxy and stubbornness that made me suffer enough hardships.
If I remember correctly, during the months between three hundred thousand and eight hundred thousand words, my daily earnings were in the range of 0.1 to 0.3 RMB.
If I performed well in a month, I could furiously earn a little over nine yuan, enough to buy a few steamed buns. If I performed poorly, I would only make a little over three yuan a month. In other words, the person writing the book was making less money than the people reading it.
If I had known earlier, I wouldn't have spent time establishing character designs and backgrounds for the side characters. It would have been so much better to just use someone else's...
Even though I took such a massive blow, guess what?
I refused to accept defeat.
(Fan Wujiu: Yeah, I feel no pain or itch either. The fierce battle is at its peak.)
Under this setback, I overhauled my outline once again and reconsidered the whole thing from a higher perspective. Then I slowly realized that there should be a Saint in this story, and there should be an even higher existence of Time. Furthermore, speaking on a grander scale, there should be infinitely many Saints and Times. Through this process, I ironed out a storyline that I was extremely satisfied with.
Day and night, whenever I had free time, I would perfect the plot in my head. By the time I had written around six hundred thousand words, all the storylines had been conceptualized. At that point, it was time to bury all the foreshadowing.
Just as I said, since I didn't want to conform to the standards of others, I had to aim higher and become a better version of myself.
I no longer cared about the earnings and just kept my head down, writing. At that time, what I lacked wasn't money; I just needed to prove a point.
(Xie Bi'an: No wait, ten cents is still money...)
(Chada: The gentleman above is correct.)
The second blow was a sudden drop in my ratings. You guys could probably tell that I genuinely wanted to give up back then. My thoughts were very simple: I already wasn't making money, and now my reputation was being ruined too. What on earth was I doing?
A woman beautifies herself for those who appreciate her, and a scholar dies for his confidant. Was I just wasting my life?
In truth, I couldn't blame anyone for this. It was because the platform revised its rating system. The minimum score was lowered from eight points to five points, and the rating mechanism was changed from a score ratio to the total number of people rating.
As a result, my novel of nearly a million words only had a few dozen ratings, which undoubtedly made it seem exceptionally terrible. Even if those few dozen people all gave me five stars, the number of ratings was nowhere near enough.
So, my rating started ranking at the very bottom among all the works.
But as they say, misfortune is what fortune leans on. Some people saw a 6-point book and had the thought, "Wow, there's actually a trash book like this?" So they clicked in to read it. But after reading it, they were dumbfounded and left comments left and right asking why this book only had a six-point rating?
Some people said that even if the rest of the book had a terrible ending, the two stories of Yi Shoots Nine Suns and Zhongli Chun alone meant it could absolutely never be a six-point book. Because of this, I am incredibly grateful to the readers who gave me five-star encouragement during that time.
Of course, there were also many people who read the first chapter and immediately left a one-star review, saying, "No wonder the rating is so low, blah blah blah..." Honestly, they just wanted to find an excuse to curse at something, and I can understand that. They believed that this book being a 6 must be because it was poorly written, and they had to maintain a consensus with everyone else. Naturally, I admit that there are definitely aspects of my writing that might leave people dissatisfied, but I find it hard to accept that my six points were solely due to the content of the first chapter.
No matter what, this rating drop brought me a lot of popularity, both good and bad. Among them, a few awesome readers even helped me promote the book, forcefully pulling the rating up from six points to where it is now. As of the moment I am writing this sentence, the book has a rating of 9.2. Brothers, you have basically gone through an epic journey with me. It is likely very rare to see a scene like this in other books.
From 8.8 to 6, then up to 9.2. This was a reputation that managed to bounce back after hitting bottom. The funny part is that I didn't even do anything; I just kept my head down and wrote.
However, during that time, I did have to abandon a lot of stories. I had actually almost completely fleshed out the concepts for those arcs. But if I truly wrote them all out, the completion of the entire book would have been delayed by three to six months.
The large-scale stories included among them were:
"Cowherd and Weaver Girl" (Brother Lang's Storm: A Man in the Underworld)
"Nezha Makes a Fuss in the Sea" (The Tide-Rider Repays a Debt by Willingly Destroying His Flesh)
"Cleaving the Mountain to Save Mother" (A story about family bonds, heartbreak, obsession, heartbreak, helplessness, and more heartbreak)
"The Magic Brush Ma Liang" (Ying Ning impersonates the magic brush to paint a sky full of snowflakes)
"Enenra" (A story about romance, heartbreak, heartbreak, heartbreak, and more heartbreak)
(Master Shen: Bro, how about I forge you a set of Torrential Pear Blossom Knives...)
Thinking about it carefully, if each of those stories were written as an independent volume, the book would be nowhere near finished right now. The reason I abandoned those stories was that they didn't have much connection to the main plot. Even if they were removed, it wouldn't create any reading obstacles for the grand finale, so I had no choice but to take this route.
Setting those stories aside, even now there are still quite a few people bombarding me with one-star reviews because I messed with the Legends. I haven't just encountered people lecturing me on right and wrong, I've also met people trying to debate the authenticity of myths. It's actually a bit unfair. I write fiction, not history books, and certainly not educational science books. But they definitely won't see this sentence I'm writing now, haha.
(Qiang Nv: The last time I saw guys who could only run their mouths was on a damn television screen.)
But regardless, there are still many people who have been continuously reading what I write, and I am truly so incredibly happy about that.
This book already has tens of thousands of paragraph comments. You guys might not believe it, but I have read every single one of them. I've even become familiar with many people's IDs. It's just that there are too many, and I really can't reply to them all, so please forgive me. The readers I want to thank the most here are the ones who have followed the updates from the very, very, very beginning all the way to the end. The time span has truly been enormous. I hope you still remember the plot of the first chapter, hahaha.
Just as I promised everyone before, I did not drop the novel, and I did not write a rushed ending. I have written out this story in its full entirety. There might still be many flaws that need fixing, many toxic plot points that need adjusting, and perhaps many areas that made everyone feel uncomfortable or dissatisfied. But you guys should know me by now; I don't give up that easily. Next, I will take some time to calm my mind and fine-tune the earlier plotlines, making the story smoother and the foreshadowing more reasonable.
You guys say I love digging pits and filling them, but you probably don't know the meaning behind my pen name.
Exterminator Squad Member.
What is the English word for a bug? BUG!
What does a bug mean? A loophole!
What is a loophole? A plot hole!
So what does Exterminator Squad Member mean?
A professional plot hole filler! Hahahahaha!
(Western Queen Mother: I do not understand this foreign gibberish. I will give you one chance to repeat yourself.)
I wrote about the concept of Endorphins in the text because I once searched it up online. During that time, I thought something was wrong with me.
Updating consistently every single day for a long period is actually somewhat painful, but as I reached the end, an inexplicable sense of euphoria actually emerged.
If I didn't update for a day, my whole body felt awful. Sometimes, I would even suddenly update an extra chapter.
I felt like I was sick. After all, this little book is different from others; it requires a lot of brainpower. After I finished writing, I felt my head and actually found a hole there. Oh, it turns out my wild imagination physically manifested itself.
So I went online to search: why is it so painful, yet I can't quit? It turns out that Endorphins were controlling my brain.
In other words, when humans run for long distances, there is a sense of pleasure during the final sprint. When dieting long-term, you feel refreshed and energized. When eating spicy food, although it's painful, it becomes addictive.
In short, under long-term suppression and pain, the brain will secrete massive amounts of Endorphins to numb you, tricking you into thinking this feeling is actually great.
(Ying Ning: So the reason I am so happy is because of Endorphins?)
I have somewhat fallen in love with this feeling now. So, I will give a piece of advice to my future author friends who are preparing to start writing but haven't put pen to paper yet: push yourself, and you will fall in love with this feeling too.
Reaching these final few chapters, that feeling can only be described as marvelous.
Do you guys know what I felt like?
There is a kind of acrobatics where they use thin bamboo poles to spin plates.
Incredible acrobats can hold many bamboo poles at the same time, spinning many plates.
I felt like I was that acrobat.
(Nezha: What kind of divine ability is this?! Can you teach me?!)
Countless plotlines were like the spinning plates in my hands. The more plates spun, the more awe-inspiring it looked to the audience.
But honestly speaking, spinning the plates isn't the hard part. The difficult part of this performance is gathering all the plates during the curtain call without letting a single one break, and then taking a bow and leaving the stage.
Only then is it a complete performance, worthy of the audience's applause and cheers.
You have probably seen many other acrobats who either shatter their plates all over the floor or pull the curtain closed halfway through to quit the show. I am sure those memories are still fresh in your minds.
From the very beginning, I never intended to be that kind of performer. Therefore, gathering those plates killed a massive amount of my brain cells, all just to make this performance perfect.
This sensation of extreme agony made me secrete a massive amount of Endorphins once again, hahahaha!
(Time: You're the real madman!!!)
Additionally, many friends have told me to switch platforms.
But I have no plans to do so for the time being.
After all, this platform allowed me to meet all of you, and it also enabled me to receive my first paycheck right at the end when the story finished.
In other words, it has shown me grace and recognition.
So I will try writing another book, although I genuinely haven't decided on a genre yet.
I want this genre to be unconventional and immediately captivating to read, so I need to think deeply about it over and over again.
Some people said I should write "Legend Management Bureau 2," while others suggested writing a prequel with Zhan Qisheng as the protagonist. I will probably consider them both, but the chances are slim. The plotlines involved are far too complex, and it would create an enormous reading barrier for new readers. Thus, the likelihood of starting a different genre is much higher.
Regardless of what happens, I will continue to stay right here.
(Cowherd: That's right, repay all debts of gratitude. And for grudges...)
(Zhi Nv: Don't finish that sentence!)
Jokes aside, the reason I cared so much about the ratings before was because I didn't want my readers to proudly say, "I am reading Legend Management Bureau," only to have someone beside them mockingly say, "What kind of book is that? The rating is so low and you're still reading it?"
I wanted everyone to be proud, satisfied, and absolutely confident whenever they mentioned Legend Management Bureau.
Finally, I'll share one last piece of good news with everyone. Many of you might not know this, but this book went from being at the absolute bottom of the ratings to reigning in the top 100 of the fantasy charts for three consecutive weeks now.
This is ten percent due to my effort, and ninety percent due to your support.
I think I haven't disappointed the people who love this book, nor have I embarrassed the readers who support me.
Please allow me, at the very end of this all, to express my deepest gratitude to you once again!
I love every single one of you!
I bow to you!
This beautiful journey concludes here! I am truly, truly so happy to have met every single one of you!
My curtains are truly drawing to a close!
I will see you all in the next book! (Or perhaps in the side stories!)
One last thing to say: the story is finished! Cue the confetti!!!!!
(Little Xiang: Crackle, crackle...)