This isn't a chapter, obviously, but I wanted to inform you all regarding what was going on.

  I completed Vol. 3 earlier this month, and subsequently fell ill with the flu. It was really remarkable, like the moment the thing was done I crashed and ate shit, same day I uploaded the final chapter.

  Anyways, it's up on Patreon and is going to be edited for amzn some time in the near future.

  I will be participating in writathon this November partly for my own sanity and partly to see if pushing the output with something new will help me increase my output overall.

  The writathon entry will be an ultra-far-future xianxia/wuxia novel set inside a megastructure, with the idea being that the ability to cultivate is a result of concerted effort on the part of all mankind over billions of years. The setting originally had no such thing as qi or the heavenly dao, but gradually, humans changed themselves and their environment on the galactic scale to make things like psychic powers and drawing strength from higher dimensions possible. The current state of the setting, the Soltern (short for Sol Aeterna), is a single megastructure that has grown to encompass the entire milky way, with a "Dimensional Lighthouse" in the middle, powered by a supermassive black hole formed from all the stellar mass of the galactic center. This Lighthouse was and is being used to rewrite the foundations of reality faster than the speed of light by spreading "Substrate," basically defeating entropy by subtly changing fundamental laws to make the impossible possible. The Soltern is also actively sending "seeds" to other galaxies for several million years to create other, similar megastructures. That's the grand-scale cosmology of things: Man found no gods in space, so he built the heavens, so to speak.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  As for the story itself, the gimmicks are:

  - Psychic powers

  - Male MC

  - Puppets, as in proper puppets, not just robots or mind controlled people, and MC will use them as his main thing rather than a support tool that gets tossed aside (can you tell this bothers me in xianxia?)

  - "No Golden Finger" - this is somewhat only partially true, but the point is that MC doesn't have heavenly talent or a heaven-defying time dilation bead that lets him cultivate 10x as fast. I want to write a character who is "normal" but still ends up being interesting and gains the reputation of a "monstrous genius" due to his diligence. I generally don't like the common trend of xianxia focusing on how you can only get ahead by finding ways to cheat.

  I will make another post like this one when I actually submit the fic and get a page for it made come end of Oct./start of Nov.

  Cover art: