I don't even know what words to use to express this — when there were fourteen or fifteen hundred monthly votes on the final day, when we were still two hundred votes behind at seven in the evening and then overtook the competition in a single hour, when the distance opened up wide after the eleven o'clock update and bonus chapter, all I can feel is gratitude. Nothing but gratitude.
For the first time, we broke into the top five on the overall monthly ticket chart. For the first time, we hit second place in the Xuanhuan category. Your support let me fulfill the dream I had at the start of the month.
And I kept my promise too — a full month of twenty bonus chapters, seventy-eight chapters total, the most updates in any single month. The word count suddenly reached two million.
Two million words, and yet it feels like I've only been writing for a little while. It seems like just yesterday that the novel first went up on the platform. Back then, I was thinking that getting into the premium section with three or four thousand average subscriptions would be pretty good. But now, the twenty-four-hour per-chapter subscriptions sit around seven thousand, and the average has reached over ninety-seven hundred. Maybe by mid-next month we'll cross ten thousand, and starting from the middle of the month, with just three updates a day, we could make it onto the bestseller list.
And all of this is thanks to your support too. I never would have imagined that a novel about symphony, about math olympiads, physics, and chemistry could achieve something like this.
Still, reaching two million words also reminds me that the story is entering its later stages. I need to devote more energy to the writing — a lot of things have to be made clear and accessible, otherwise it stops being a novel and loses its entertainment value and readability. So, even though this month left me exhausted, I probably won't be able to add too many bonus chapters in December. I'll take it slow and build up the details for the seventh and eighth arcs.
To be honest, with so many updates this month, I didn't have time to cross-check many of the finer details against the outline and earlier chapters. Some of the exposition ended up with a few issues, which is why there have been some errors. Fortunately, everyone pointed them out, and I was able to correct them in time. Let me fix one more now: earlier I wrote that the capital of the Breyana Kingdom was Famacheria, but then I forgot and wrote Salivar later on. From now on, I'll just go with Salivar and treat it as the official version.
Once again, thank you all, no matter how tired I am. On the first and second, I'll put out three chapters each day as thanks! Please save your baseline monthly votes for me! (To be continued)