Chapter 193 - Afterword: The Eventide Of Faith (1/2)

So let me be the first to admit that this volume got the best of me. I tried to bite something that was too large for me at the time. I lacked the skill and more importantly, the passion to write after I was done with my stunt of updating daily during my four-month period while I was in the Minimum Guarantee System. ;

To be quite frank, I realized midway during MGS that I was never going to be able to write anything good at such a ridiculous pace. In fact, I honestly doubt whether anyone can do it. ;

A drained husk, it took several months for my mind to recover from that neverending marathon. And when I finally did get back to writing, I found myself still feeling out of touch. ;

But I am now happy to inform you that I finally feel better in some weird way. Maybe it's just relief that I finally finished this gigantic volume, or that I didn't give up on it, despite my fatigue.

Thank you for putting up with me through all of that. I'm serious. It was a shitshow, but I feel that I came out with a passable (though I will never be happy about it) volume.

But even if I am not fine with Volume 3 not reaching the standards I put for myself, I am still very glad I gave it a shot. I stand by my decision to write it the way I did. Better to do the hard thing than give up on myself and do the easy thing. ;

I did not want this volume to be a simple volume. I did not want a villain that one could easily point to and blame. Nor conflict that was the usual fight against a standard foe like some giant boss character or say, for example, a threatening army of Infested.

A surface-level answer to who the villain might've been would be The Dreaming Council since they were the greatest offenders, but the answer was far more complex than that.

The correct answer is that blame fell upon every person in power at all levels of authority, ranging from the Dreaming Council at the top, all the way down to individual Chosen across the generations since the Dark Age.

The royal families, their noble families, and the top-level executives in the governments created in their name are also included in this giant pyramid of corrupt mismanagement and incompetence — let me make this clear, it is not just Chosen that are at fault, but also the select mortals that played a part in maintaining this whole mess. They're just as accountable in this messed-up circus, too. ;

With no one to hold the top liable for their extreme actions and the added fact that the Goddess gave them the green light to do whatever was necessary to maintain the peace in her indefinite absence, it all went to shit as with any situation where people are given unlimited power and no regulations to stop them from going off the rails. ;

The Dreaming Council, believing that the ends justify the means, did what they saw fit in order to create an eternal peace across Mulia, albeit at the cost of effectively lobotomizing the entire population of Mulia into sheeple with horribly morally bankrupt methods, something that should have struck a horribly similar chord to the poor souls imprisoned by the Outsiders...

So yes, I did not want a physical foe that would be the cause of all the troubles in the story or arc, to put it bluntly. ;

There are an infinite number of novels that will gladly hand you an opponent like this, which is why I opted to not create something like that. ;

But to be real with you, the primary conflict of the volume was something I'd been setting up since Volume 1 — the real conflict for Volume 3 which was Reed himself. ;

There are many supporting conflicts in this volume, but the one that I decided to take center stage was that of Man vs. Self, ; something that I felt appropriate at the current arc. ;

Reed, now a young man almost 20 years old, rightfully needed to mature into an adult. For young people, this means finding himself, his own personal identity, and his purpose in life. ;

That's what you do as a young person, as a teenager — you experiment and find out what you like and what you dislike. You find yourself very impressionable and often times follow the trends and flow of popularity, lost and confused about what you're about and where you're going. ;

And Reed was no different as a teenager. He was a highly impressionable kid who always had a desire for more in life, given his terrible upbringing. ;

So naturally, after he had been whisked to Mulia and given unbelievable powers, he did what any normal person who had been disadvantaged his whole life would have done. ;

He got completely and utterly lost. ;

Whether it was the powers he gained, the extravagance of his supposed destiny, or the people around him, they all contributed to him losing sight of himself, which in turn lead to the many mistakes he made along the way. ;

Not surprising, since making mistakes is to be expected of teenagers, but it all got overblown in Reed's case since he was in possession of a lot of power.

You can pretty much think of Volume 1 as Reed's fall into delusion, Volume 2 being the mistakes Reed made from being in that disorientated state of mind, and...

Volume 3 as Reed struggling to make amends for the mistakes in his youth as he becomes a proper, responsible adult. ;

For a normal youth, this process of making amends and becoming more world-wise would have taken them the better half of their twenties to accomplish, but Reed did not have that luxury due to his cursed destiny.

As with any person born into a position of power, he was forced to grow up faster than his normal peers in order to wrangle the responsibilities that had been thrown unto him. Real-life royalty had to do undergo the same exact thing. The duty of the office they had been born into demanded they become mature as fast as possible.

This ties into the next topic I wanted to talk about... Lu'um. ;

She was to be quite frank, a difficult character to write about in this volume. Not because of her gender, of course, but because of her role. For the longest time, she had been Reed's biggest pillar of support in his world, aside from Lacrima.

This was a girl who knew what he had been through before his arrival in Mulia, of the terrible destiny that awaited him, and of the mistakes he had made in Volume 2 that had come to haunt him. ;