Haa…

I've got some decisions to make regarding my story. Specifically: Runes/Rifles/Reincarnation

I love writing it; however, it hasn't reached the standard I would have liked. I let my ADD influence the direction of the story, adding whatever content came to mind on a whim. I feel like this has done irreparable damage, and now I'm just playing cleanup, trying to salvage what feels like a burning pile of ashes—something totally unfixable.

I want this story to be published one day—to be read by thousands of people—because I truly love it and want others to love it as well. However, the quality just isn't there for me to justify spending hundreds of dollars I don't physically have to self-publish, and it's been rejected in its current state by multiple publishers.

For those reasons, I'm faced with some impossible choices.

Do I push on and hope I can finish the story and self-publish it one day when I have the funds?

Who really knows when, or if, that's even possible.

Do I scrap it and move on to the next story?

No. I refuse to do that.

Do I stop and rewrite it the right way?

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

Honestly, I'd like to do this. I want to write a conclusion and then take a long time to rewrite the story in a satisfying way. But I fear I'll lose you, the readers. I worry that doing so would feel like pulling the rug out from under all of you.

So, I'd like to show you my thought process and what I want to see from this series, and I hope you'll share your own thoughts with me as well.

For starters, I want to take this story back to the beginning and completely restructure it from the ground up.

I would change Jin Shu's character, doing away with the split personalities. I like the concept, but it's annoying to manage.

Nano would either be rewritten as a system AI or removed entirely (please share your thoughts on this, as I'm undecided).

If I did implement a system, it wouldn't be LitRPG—just a way for me to hand-wave some things that are hard to explain. (Like how he's creating guns with primitive tools, aside from simply saying they're magic tools 😅.)

The harem genre elements would be removed—at least for the beginning of the story. I feel like trying to add female characters solely for the sake of the genre tag degraded what I originally wanted to do. I like the characters, but it's just too much to manage.

The main focus of the early chapters would likely be on the royal family and the political intrigue that entails. Afterward, I would slowly expand the world and lead into the main conflict with the Demon Worshipers.

I'm also considering giving Yin'er a mother (and, in turn, Jin Shu a wife) from the beginning 🤔

There are some other ideas as well, but I don't want to fill this post with a deluge of my random thoughts.

So, with all that said: if the majority of my readers are okay with this, I'll be bringing this story to a conclusion for now while I take it back to the drawing board—hopefully returning with a new, improved version sometime in the next year.

I will still release all the chapters I've written so far.

And for Patreon, I'll be keeping memberships active for anyone who'd like to continue supporting me and my next story, and I truly appreciate every bit of that support. I'll also be sharing the rewritten version on Patreon as I complete chapters—if a rewrite ends up being the consensus—so patrons will be able to follow along with the process as it happens.