AZI Volume 3 Afterword

12/22/2022

About 300 pages for this volume as well. Might just make it a standard at this point, shall see.

Some random thoughts and ideas below—

• The Tai Xuan Emperor's vessel will be referred to as Tian Cheng, while her title would be used to refer to her whenever she speaks to Long Hua directly. The alternative would have been to refer to her as "the Tian Cheng within the dreamscape," which is too much of a mouthful.

• I was kind of hesitant to put an actual mech unit/Gundam into the gacha system that the Tai Xuan Emperor made, but then the entire concept of this story is I wanted to try something a bit different from a traditional xianxia. In the end, I decided to just go a bit wild with what can be obtained from the gacha's SSR rarity pool.

• The idea behind the Earthborn Elementals' Realm (the Tai Xuan Emperor's home world) is based off the concept of a highly advanced civilization that is many years ahead of the modern world in technology. Concepts that are commonly seen in video games/2D culture exists in this realm, hence the Tai Xuan Emperor's common sense is a bit different from Long Hua's, who has no exposure to such matters.

• A question that I wanted to answer in the next volume if possible is—why is a Sinner called a Sinner? Why didn't I choose to call them something else? I had very stereotypical options to choose from, but I specifically picked this one out of them all. At first, it was like—do I want to make it sound anymore chunni-like, or did I actually want a logical reason for it. In the end, I wanted a reason for it, and after thinking things through, I think I finally got a good answer.

• The fishing rod, that was supposed to be just a joke, but then as I wrote more, the more it turns out to be a very convenient tool to use in place of an actual sword.

• "Arrow to Her Heart Guaranteed, 100 Pieces of Love Advice," the sunglasses, perfume, can of hair spray, instant ramen, folding fan, etc. all these things are kind of like hints to the sort of lifestyle the Tai Xuan Emperor had led back in the Earthborn Elementals' Realm.

• Earthborn Elementals' Realm, the name itself is kind awkward to say even in Chinese. What elementals refer to isn't spirits or anything like that. It's referring to the minerals and metals that the earth gives birth to.

• The intermission chapter titled, "the Immortal in Red and the Immortal Emperor of Yuling," the character Yu Ji is based off the same character I had written about in my creative writing honor class for my previous semester. It was what the professor called an excerpt, basically a portion of what should have been a complete story. But since the story had a page limit of 35 pages, I could only get a basic idea down. It felt wasteful to just leave it be, so I wanted to incorporate it into this story through a character with the same name. Yu Ji's true gender was already hinted at—at the end of the first volume as well. In this excerpt, the original ending that I planned couldn't have been written out due to page limitations, and it was an ending that cannot really be considered a good ending for the two characters involved.

• Previous two intermissions are meant for something else later down the line.

• Long Hua's Relic, I thought about this a good number of times, but since he isn't someone that is a part of Leng Bing Realm, I asked myself—why would he actually have a Relic? At the same time, the entire concept of what a Relic is in my mind, wouldn't make any sense to apply it onto him. The question of why he has a bar code is hard to answer right now.

• Leng Bing Realm, the name itself translates to Cold Weapon Realm. It doesn't sound very good in English, so I just kept it as is in pinyin.

• Long Hua as a character, it's already been thrown out that he's a selfish person—someone who can sacrifice thousands for personal gains, which I feel like is a very realistic belief to have. That's also to say that he isn't really the sort to be a hero, and I don't think that's something that I want to change about him, yet.

• Final thought, I feel like the story has most of the Leng Bing Realm's settings/rules done with just a few more things to be added. Overall, I'm quite satisfied with this volume. The beginning of it—I was thinking, there's not much happening, other than a few back-and-forth between characters, which I'm not against since I wanted the beginning to be a bit more of a slow burn-in process. At the same time, I also had to throw in the members of the Ashen River Hall, who serve as an antagonistic faction in this volume.