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Hi ArcaneMag Oh wow... thank you. Truly. ❤️ I don't even know how to properly respond to a review like this. Knowing that you have read 500+ chapters in a week, and are still willing to follow me for another 500+ if I write them, is both incredibly flattering and slightly terrifying. 😂 I absolutely love that you compared yourself to the Devourers, just less evil. I think I can safely say you are the good kind of Devourer. Although, after consuming 500+ chapters in a week, I think the evidence is pretty strong that you have earned the title. 😂 And hearing that the characters and their stories have made you laugh, cry, reach for tissues, and become emotionally attached to them means more to me than I can really explain. The demons, Ren, Yinxin and her children, the Harrowing... these are all pieces of a much larger world that have lived in my head for a very long time, so knowing that they have found a home in someone else's heart is incredibly special. The fact that you have now started my other books as well honestly has me sitting here with the biggest smile. Reviews like this are one of the reasons I keep writing when I probably should be sleeping. There have been many nights where I have been sitting at my computer at some ridiculous hour, telling myself, "Just one more chapter," while my characters apparently have other plans. Knowing there are readers on the other side of that screen waiting to see what happens makes those late nights completely worth it. Thank you for taking the time to write such an amazing review, for giving my characters a chance to become important to you, and for coming along for this rather ridiculously long journey with me. And yes... if there really are another 500+ chapters ahead, I sincerely hope you are ready. Because apparently neither Jayde nor I have any intention of behaving ourselves. 😂❤️
Good question — and the answer's on the page, though I clearly need to make it louder. That isn't a worm tunnel. It's a subsidence. Nine and a half thousand years of something eating everything under a four-hundred-pace circle leaves the rock hollow, and eventually the roof gives at its weakest point. Takara says as much on the rim: the whole roof under this field is hollow; this is where it gave first, not where it is worst. The slabs around the mouth haven't finished settling because it's still coming down. The worms didn't dig it and had no reason to. What they want is underneath them, not above. As for why go down at all — the nest is three hundred feet down and fastened to something that can't be reached from the surface. Yinxin has to near it. You've put your finger on something I'm going to enjoy, though: if the way in is a collapse rather than a road, there's no guarantee the next one has one.
Thank you, AchroniaSamara, for the heads-up - I will make note of this going forward and when I eventually get a chance to edit past chapters.
AchroniaSamara, thanks a mil for pointing that out - I just realised I copied the unedited versions over - fixed it - Ch 486 to Ch 490, I copied the unedited version.
My beautiful AchroniaSamara, Again, millions of thanks for being my free editor. cheeky smile And of course, you are 100% right—which, at this point, is becoming alarmingly normal for you. 😭 I will go and edit that immediately. Honestly, every time I see a comment from you, there is a small part of me that wonders whether I am about to discover a typo, a continuity error, or a sentence that sounded perfectly reasonable in my head at 2am but clearly escaped all adult supervision before making it onto the page. So thank you, genuinely. Readers like you make the story better. As for payment, I am afraid my budget only stretches to hugs, kisses, and eternal gratitude. You'll have to let me know if that exchange rate is acceptable. 😘🤗
Hi AchroniaSamara, Oh damn. You know, I cannot honestly answer that off the top of my head. Now I am going to have to go digging through notebooks, timelines, worldbuilding documents, and who knows how many chapters to figure out whether I already answered that, contradicted myself somewhere, or left a clue hidden in plain sight. 😭 This is one of those moments where a reader asks a perfectly reasonable question and the author suddenly realises they have approximately seventeen thousand words of notes spread across twelve different locations. Can I get back to you on this one later, pretty please? Before I accidentally give you the wrong answer and create a plot hole the size of a dragon.
Hi AchroniaSamara, You are asking dangerous questions again. 😭 I don't really want to reveal too much about the Mid Realm and Upper Realm just yet, because there are a few worldbuilding secrets hiding over there that I would like to keep hidden for a little longer. The Lower Realm is a bit easier to explain. Every 10,000 years it essentially gets beaten back to the Stone Age and has to rebuild from the ashes. Knowledge is lost, techniques disappear, sects collapse, and entire branches of learning can vanish between cycles. So it is not necessarily that these things never existed. The bigger question is whether the knowledge survived. And let's be honest here, I cannot see the Temple returning after each cycle and generously handing out all of its technology and formation knowledge to everyone. That doesn't seem very Temple-like. The Temple strikes me as the sort of organisation that would discover a revolutionary advancement and immediately file it under "classified" before anyone else got a look at it. 😅
Hi AchroniaSamara, I am not telling. 😭 What I can promise is that you will find out eventually. Green, White, and Isha all have very complicated backgrounds, and there are still quite a few layers to their histories that have not been revealed yet. Some of the answers you're looking for are tangled up in those stories. As for exactly how old they are, when certain cultivation practices began, and how all of that fits together... those are the sorts of questions that make me stare nervously at my spoiler wall. So for now, I shall hide behind the author's favourite defence: "RAFO." But yes, their histories matter, and one day—sometime in the future, at a completely unpredictable point that may or may not surprise everyone—we will get there. 😁
Hi AchroniaSamara, I actually tend to keep that distinction myself. A Hollow One refers to a Maleficari that is currently wearing or inhabiting a body, whereas Maleficari refers to the soul itself. I deliberately keep the two terms separate because I wanted readers to be able to tell the difference between the entity and the vessel it is using. As the story goes on, that distinction becomes increasingly important, so having separate terminology helps avoid a lot of confusion later. Of course, now that I've said that, I've probably guaranteed that at least one future chapter will make me realise I used the wrong term somewhere and send me on an editing expedition. 😭
Hi AchroniaSamara, You are 100% right. There are definitely more healers than that. In fact, thank you for bringing it up, because I immediately made a note to myself that I need to clarify that in a future chapter—and probably go back and edit that specific paragraph as well. 😭 All demonesses have the ability to heal to some degree. Like any talent, though, there is a huge range in ability, and only a handful become truly exceptional healers. The bigger issue is demoness empathy. Their empathy makes them incredibly vulnerable to soul death. The fewer leaves a demon male has remaining, the more pain a demoness experiences simply by being near him. Healing amplifies that connection, making it even worse. Because of that, single demonesses generally do not heal male warriors. The emotional and spiritual cost is simply too high. Most healing of warriors is done within true-mate pairs, where the bond provides protection and stability. Vaelith's situation is unusual because she is the most powerful healer in the Demon Realm. What she can do, and what most demonesses can do, are very different things. So yes, the Demon Realm has more healers. They just have some rather unfortunate occupational hazards. 😭