There is an old Chinese saying:
"Each day, I examine myself three times."
I don’t take the "three times" part literally, of course, but I do like the idea behind it.
That’s basically what this review is for.
I’m not writing this to complain about readership, blame the platform, or fish for reassurance. I wanted a place where I could periodically stop, look back at my own work as critically as I can, figure out what worked, what didn’t, and record what I understand about my writing at this point in time.
Sometimes that means admitting that something I wrote simply didn’t work as well as I thought it would.
And lately, I’ve spent quite a bit of time wondering why this book has attracted fewer actual readers than I expected.
At first, I thought the answer might simply be the writing itself.
And to be fair, the early Chapters do have problems.
Some of the dialogue is stiffer than I’d like. Some scenes feel too deliberate. There are lines I would write differently now, and a few moments that make me cringe when I reread them.
The prose does become noticeably smoother later on. Once I became more familiar with the characters and stopped overthinking every interaction, the dialogue, pacing, and general flow started coming much more naturally.
But after rereading the story several times and comparing it with some of my other writing, I don’t think the prose is the main problem.
I think the real problem is much more fundamental.
The early story lacks enough pressure, and more importantly, it lacks a strong enough narrative center.
Things happen.
A lot of things happen, actually.
There are fights. Lin Yan gains new traits. He becomes stronger. New characters appear. The world changes. One event leads into another.
If I isolate some of those scenes, I still think they’re perfectly fine. Some of them I genuinely like.
But when I read the opening as a whole, I get this strange feeling that is much harder to describe.
The story keeps moving.
But it doesn’t always feel like it’s moving toward something.
It feels slightly weightless.
Unanchored.
I can finish one scene and think, That was pretty good.
Then read the next one and think the same thing.
But there isn’t always a strong enough question hanging over the story that makes me think:
I need to know what happens next.
And I think that’s probably one of the biggest reasons the opening doesn’t pull as hard as I originally expected it to.
A story can be fast without feeling urgent.
It can have action without tension.
It can have progression without creating anticipation.
It can even have a series of individually decent Chapters while still leaving the reader unsure what exactly they’re supposed to be waiting for.
That distinction is something I understand much better now.
When I first conceived this book, the core appeal in my head was actually very simple.
Kill monsters. Take their traits. Become stronger. Kill stronger monsters. Take even stronger traits.
That was supposed to be the central progression fantasy.
Every monster represented a possibility.
Every new species meant something new Lin Yan might be able to steal.
The stronger and stranger the enemies became, the more interesting his own growth would become.
And I still think that core idea works.
The problem is that I didn’t build the surrounding story strongly enough around it.
A progression mechanic by itself isn’t a narrative engine.
The reader can understand that Lin Yan will keep becoming stronger, but that doesn’t automatically answer:
Why does he need to become stronger right now?
What happens if he doesn’t?
What is he racing toward?
What is chasing him from behind?
That is where the early story is much weaker.
Lin Yan becomes capable very quickly.
He doesn’t have a strong long-term objective yet.
He doesn’t have a personal dilemma constantly threatening to crush him.
And once the immediate crisis is resolved, there isn’t enough internal pressure forcing him forward.
At the same time, the outside world isn’t oppressive enough either.
So there isn’t enough external pressure pushing him from the other direction.
The result is that he can keep fighting, keep gaining traits, and keep progressing—
but sometimes it feels like he’s doing those things simply because that’s what the story is doing next.
Not because something is forcing him toward an unavoidable destination.
Part of that problem comes from another decision I made very early:
I set the story in the modern world.
And modern weapons are extremely powerful.
That’s not something I can simply pretend doesn’t exist.
If the early monsters are still ordinary flesh-and-blood creatures, then rifles should work.
Machine guns should work.
Explosives should work.
Armored vehicles should matter.
Organized modern militaries should be terrifying opponents for anything that can still be killed through conventional physical damage.
That’s just the logical consequence of using a modern setting.
And this created a problem for the kind of story I wanted to tell.
If Lin Yan can kill a creature with his body or a cold weapon, but then the story suddenly tells me that an assault rifle can’t kill the same thing for no reason, I personally can’t accept that.
I would feel like I was forcing the world to become stupid just to make the protagonist look important.
I could have invented a convenient rule.
Maybe ordinary firearms mysteriously stop working.
Maybe monsters are somehow immune to bullets.
Maybe modern weapons are weakened by the Convergence.
But unless I had a convincing reason for it, that would bother me even while I was writing it.
I care a lot about internal logic.
If a rifle should kill something, then I want the rifle to kill it.
If humanity realistically possesses a weapon capable of solving a problem, I don’t want that weapon to suddenly become useless because the plot needs more tension.
The problem is that protecting that logic also reduced the pressure of the setting.
Human civilization is still functioning.
The government still exists.
The military still exists.
Guns still work.
Institutions still operate.
And Lin Yan himself becomes stronger very quickly.
So the story loses pressure from both sides.
The protagonist is increasingly capable, while the world around him is still capable of fighting back as well.
That makes the early Convergence feel less like an apocalypse and more like a dangerous new phenomenon that humanity is still managing.
And that creates a very different reading experience.
If I wanted to preserve the same basic concept while maximizing survival pressure from Chapter 1, I probably should have designed the world differently.
I could have begun with something catastrophic.
A massive zombie outbreak.
Civilization collapsing immediately.
Most of the population dying in the opening disaster.
Supply chains failing.
The military being overwhelmed or fragmented.
Cities becoming isolated survival zones.
Then even relatively weak monsters would feel dangerous, because humanity itself would already be crippled.
That would create a very clear external pressure:
Survive.
And Lin Yan’s ability would immediately answer a very clear internal need:
Become strong enough to keep surviving.
That version would probably be easier to make gripping.
It would also be narrower.
Potentially more repetitive.
And it isn’t really the story I originally wanted to tell.
So I didn’t choose that route.
But looking back, I can see the price I paid for that decision.
I think the best comparison I can make is to an online game.
There are games where the mechanics are fine.
The combat is fine.
You can level up, get equipment, enter new areas, complete quests, and watch your character become stronger.
Nothing is obviously broken.
But the world never really makes you feel that anything important is at stake.
There’s no pressure.
No urgency.
No larger problem constantly sitting in the back of your mind.
So you can play for a while and have fun—
but when you log off, you don’t necessarily feel desperate to log back in.
I think the early part of this book sometimes has that feeling.
It’s not exactly lighthearted.
It’s not exactly dark.
There is danger, but the danger isn’t constantly oppressive.
The main storyline moves fairly smoothly.
Lin Yan encounters problems and generally solves them.
So the book ends up occupying a strange middle ground.
Things happen.
Some of those things are entertaining.
But the story doesn’t always create enough narrative gravity to make the reader feel emotionally trapped inside it.
And I think that’s much closer to the real problem than simply saying, "the opening isn’t good enough."
This also connects to the kind of protagonist I originally wanted to write.
One of the reasons I started this book was that I was tired of protagonists who constantly have to endure humiliation.
They get insulted.
They hide their strength.
They pretend to be weak.
They tolerate people they could easily deal with.
They spend Chapter after Chapter swallowing everything just so the story can eventually deliver one enormous face-slapping scene.
I didn’t want that.
I wanted to write someone who doesn’t deliberately make himself miserable for the sake of a future payoff.
Someone who doesn’t enjoy pretending to be weak.
Someone who, if you come looking for trouble, will simply deal with the trouble.
If you falsely accuse him, he fights back.
If you attack him, he retaliates.
If he has a grudge, he doesn’t spend fifty Chapters waiting for the perfect theatrical moment to settle it.
That was part of Lin Yan’s appeal in my head.
And I still like that about him.
But I’ve realized something important:
removing frustration from the protagonist is not the same thing as creating tension for the story.
I removed a lot of the artificial pressure that comes from humiliation, suppression, and "pretending to be weak."
But I didn’t replace it with enough pressure from somewhere else.
That is the mistake.
The answer isn’t necessarily to make Lin Yan suffer more.
It isn’t to suddenly turn him into someone who gets bullied for thirty Chapters before fighting back.
It’s to give him something bigger than those petty conflicts to struggle against.
A world that doesn’t care how confident he is.
A danger he cannot punch his way through yet.
A goal that remains distant even after he wins today’s fight.
A problem that follows him from Chapter to Chapter.
That’s the difference.
I think the story starts moving closer to that around the first major event, which begins after Chapter 30.
That’s the point where the scale of the threat finally starts changing.
Genuinely powerful beings begin appearing.
For the first time, humanity starts encountering things that cannot simply be dismissed as monsters that modern weapons can eventually deal with.
The gap between the human world and what is coming through the Convergence becomes much harder to ignore.
And, at least from my own perspective, that’s where the atmosphere starts feeling closer to what I wanted from the beginning.
The pressure becomes heavier.
The environment becomes more hostile.
The unknown starts mattering more.
Lin Yan can still be strong without the world around him feeling harmless.
I don’t think the execution suddenly becomes perfect there.
But I can feel the difference when I reread it.
For the first time, the story starts developing something that was missing earlier:
weight.
The strange part is that another novel of mine, I Gain Power by Burning Corpses, managed to establish that feeling much more naturally.
When I compare the two openings now, the difference is obvious to me.
That story has pressure coming from both directions.
There is external pressure.
The world itself is hostile.
The environment is dangerous.
Monsters are everywhere.
Death is normal.
Survival is never something the protagonist can simply take for granted.
The danger exists whether he wants to participate in the story or not.
And then there is internal pressure.
The protagonist is weak.
He needs power.
He has his own problems.
He cannot simply sit somewhere safe and decide that none of this concerns him.
So the world pushes him from one direction.
His own circumstances push him from the other.
And because the protagonist is constantly being pushed forward, the reader naturally gets pulled forward with him.
There is always something unresolved.
Always something pressing.
Always a reason that tomorrow matters.
And ironically, I didn’t sit down and carefully engineer that structure.
That story came from a dream.
I sometimes get ideas in a slightly strange way.
After I’ve already had enough sleep, I’ll wake up, eat something, stay awake for a while, and then go back to sleep once I start getting drowsy again.
That second sleep occasionally puts me into a strange half-awake state.
The dreams become unusually vivid.
Time feels distorted.
Sometimes I’ll wake up convinced that two or three hours must have passed because the dream contained so much, only to realize that I was asleep for thirty minutes or maybe an hour.
Most of those dreams disappear quickly.
Some are completely useless.
But occasionally I wake up with something still sitting very clearly in my head.
Not necessarily a complete plot.
Sometimes it’s just a world.
An atmosphere.
A place.
A feeling.
A situation.
Something that feels less like an idea I consciously invented and more like somewhere I briefly visited.
I Gain Power by Burning Corpses came from one of those dreams.
And looking back, I think that mattered more than I realized.
I didn’t begin by thinking:
I need a system.
I need a progression mechanic.
I need a cool monster.
I need a fight here.
I need an arc there.
The world came first.
For a little while, I had already been inside it.
I knew what that place was supposed to feel like before I knew all of the details.
So when I started writing, the danger came naturally.
The atmosphere came naturally.
The protagonist’s position inside the world came naturally.
Even the pressure came naturally.
In a strange way, the story I planned less deliberately ended up feeling more coherent.
And comparing these two books helped me recognize another habit of mine.
I have a tendency to start writing the moment I get an idea that excites me.
A system.
An ability.
A monster.
A scene.
A character.
A world.
Something flashes into my head and I immediately think:
I want to write this.
So I start.
And inspiration can carry a story surprisingly far.
I can keep inventing scenes.
I can design fights.
I can create abilities.
I can introduce characters.
I can make one Chapter lead into another.
That is basically what supported a large part of the opening of this book.
A lot of it came from bursts of inspiration.
I thought of something interesting, so I wrote it.
Then I thought of the next interesting thing.
Then the next.
And individually, many of those ideas still work for me.
But eventually inspiration alone stops being enough.
Because at some point I have to answer:
What is all of this actually orbiting around?
Not:
What happens next?
Not:
What cool ability does Lin Yan get next?
Not:
What monster appears in the next arc?
But:
What is the central force pulling this entire story forward?
What problem survives after today’s fight ends?
What does Lin Yan ultimately need?
What happens if he fails?
What should the reader still be thinking about when they close the Chapter?
That is what I mean now when I say a story needs a center.
Or maybe a better word is a spine.
Something everything else attaches to.
Without it, even good individual ideas can start floating apart.
And that is probably the strangest feeling I get when rereading the beginning of this book.
I don’t necessarily think:
This is terrible.
That’s not really the feeling.
Some scenes are fine.
Some fights work.
Some jokes still make me laugh.
There are character interactions I like.
There are ideas I’m still interested in exploring.
If I encountered some of those Chapters individually, I might even think:
Yeah, this is pretty decent.
But when I put everything together, I sometimes get this vague feeling of:
What exactly am I reading toward?
That’s the problem.
It feels decent in the moment, but slightly uncertain as a whole.
The pieces have value.
The direction isn’t always strong enough.
And if I can feel that as the person who wrote it, then I can understand why a reader might read several Chapters, think they’re fine, and still not develop that strong urge to immediately continue.
Not because every scene failed.
But because the story didn’t always give them something strong enough to hold onto.
I obviously can’t prove that this is the sole reason the readership has been lower than I hoped.
There are other variables.
Genre.
Platform audience.
Cover.
Title.
Synopsis.
Timing.
Reader preferences.
Recommendation traffic.
Plenty of things exist outside the text itself.
But this is a self-critique, so blaming the platform would defeat the point.
If I strip everything else away and ask what I personally could have handled better, this is the largest structural weakness I can currently see.
The original progression fantasy was clear:
Kill. Plunder. Grow stronger.
Lin Yan’s personality was clear:
Don’t swallow humiliation for no reason. Don’t pretend to be weak. Fight back when someone comes after you.
The individual ideas were there.
But the world surrounding those ideas didn’t provide enough sustained internal and external pressure to turn them into a compelling long-term narrative engine.
That’s the lesson I’m taking from it right now.
A cool mechanic can make someone interested.
A good fight can entertain them.
Fast pacing can stop them from getting bored.
A likable protagonist can make them enjoy spending time with the story.
But none of those things automatically make someone need the next Chapter.
For that, the story needs pressure.
It needs anticipation.
It needs unresolved tension.
It needs a destination—or at least the feeling that something important is waiting further ahead.
The story needs gravity.
And I think that’s what the early part of this book was missing most.
This isn’t a postmortem.
I’m still writing it.
The first major event has already shown me a version of the story that feels much closer to what I originally wanted, and I’m still figuring out how to carry that feeling forward.
So I’m writing this down partly as criticism, and partly as a reminder to myself.
The next time I get excited by a system, an ability, a monster, or some cool scene and immediately want to start another book, I need to stop for a moment and ask one more question:
What will make the reader need to keep going after the cool idea is no longer new?
I think that’s the question I should have asked much earlier.
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