And so, this volume comes to an end...
Honestly, finishing this volume gave me a surreal feeling, like a lifetime has passed.
I have this illusion of "back in the day," but simultaneously feel like I just started writing this book yesterday. Is Shu just a passing thought to me, or does he carry the weight of the world? I can't even tell anymore.
Doing the math, this book has been serializing for almost two years now, right?
Over 1,200 chapters, more than two million words—the sheer scale of this story has completely blown past my initial expectations. I never imagined I'd end up writing this much text.
I originally figured it'd wrap up around the one-million-word mark. After all, my plot outline has gone through endless revisions, and I've had to retcon quite a few settings along the way.
I've tried my best to patch those plot holes, but there are still a few inconsistencies here and there.
Hm?
Damn it, Mirror, instead of figuring out how to answer our questions, why are you suddenly getting all overly sentimental on us?
Because this volume is the ultimate payoff I've been setting up for nearly a year!
What do I mean by "making a whole meal of dumplings just for the vinegar"?
I wrote over two million words just to slander Shu and gaslight him into thinking he's a certified psychopath—!
Okay, jokes aside. In the very beginning, the foundational blueprint I drafted for Shu wasn't some transcendent genius.
He started out as an ordinary guy—a bit sensitive, a little extreme, with the kind of messed-up family dynamic that a lot of people could relate to, making it easy for readers to empathize with his misfortune.
But later on, I started thinking: Is Shu a bit too extreme?
What kind of normal person goes absolutely feral and fights to the bitter end the very first time they face the Herrscher of Evolution?
It's like how everyone on the internet talks big, claiming that if they were Satoru Gojo, they'd feed Sukuna a mouthful of shit, bragging about all the unhinged, bottomless tactics they'd pull off with the Limitless cursed technique.
But in reality, the moment everyone realized Sukuna was just spamming domain slashes to batter Gojo's family jewels, they collectively went, "Yeah, nope, I'm out. Gojo is the real man."
Could ordinary family pressure really mold an ordinary guy into someone like Shu?
Either Shu's family pressure wasn't ordinary, or Shu himself wasn't an ordinary person.
Alright, alright, it's just a tragic past and a miserable childhood, right?
Watch me give Shu the classic "dead parents, betrayed by everyone, bullied and oppressed since childhood" combo package.
Toss in a shattered first love (Wait, who was his first love again?), a crushed dream (A bit too petty, right?), betrayed efforts (The band broke up?), agonizing experimental torture (He isn't crazy yet?), and the absolute rock-bottom desperation of treating a dog as mutual emergency rations (That's in the past now, right?)...
Enough!
Whether it's an unhinged psychopath crawling out of the mud or a pure, untainted saint rising from the muck, it all feels too contrived.
People who come out of those environments generally fall into two categories.
The "kill everyone" type, and the "it's fine, I forgive you" type.
Obviously, in a wholesome, sunny, and positive world like Honkai Impact [T/N: Sarcasm], any gratuitous abuse of violence is just bizarre.
Some edgelords insist on slapping a "law of the jungle" filter onto this world to justify their violent power fantasies, and those tragic backstories I just listed are the exact excuses they use to absolve themselves.
Or, some people don't even bother pretending. They're just frustrated with life, arrogant but incompetent, and convinced that they're being targeted. That the game is rigged. It's never that they suck; it's the world that's wrong.
Unable to change their own reality, and too cowardly to even imagine changing their lives through legitimate means, the only "solution" their brains can conjure up is violence.
To that, I have nothing to say.
To put it nicely... there's a certain tragic beauty in being forcefully enlightened by mandatory education and the information explosion. Their horizons have broadened, but their upbringing hasn't caught up. The teachers did their best, but the family completely failed to raise them right.
To put it bluntly.
They're barbarians. Destined for the gutter. Societal trash whose dead-end lives you can see through at a single glance. The literal definition of losing at the starting line and being rotten to the core.
Whenever I remember that civil servants get good government benefits specifically because they have to hold their noses and interact with these kinds of people on a daily basis, I genuinely feel they earn every penny.
Self-awareness has always been incredibly important. It includes, but is not limited to: knowing your own worth, knowing what your future looks like, knowing what paths are available to you, knowing which path you should take...
And knowing whether you're just an arrogant, incompetent average Joe, or a completely useless, rock-bottom average Joe.
Of course, "knowing one's destiny" is an ultimate life proposition established by ancient sages. It's an answer that requires vast amounts of life experience to write.
Expecting people to be born with it is asking a bit too much of humanity.
Youthful frivolity! Teenage rebellion! The spirit of youth!
I don't know which primitive gene is responsible for it, but there's one universal truth hardcoded into the spaghetti code of humanity—at some point in their lives, everyone tries to prove themselves.
Maybe it's not even unique to humans? Maybe it's a common trait of all conscious beings, the desperate attempt to find one's place and the meaning of existence.
So our ancestors were truly brilliant. Keep in mind, answering this kind of existential question usually requires you to go bare-knuckle boxing against nihilism and a dozen other philosophical nightmares.
But your predecessors realized that was way too difficult. So, they casually slapped down the ultimate tool to evaluate your life's worth.
The! College! Entrance! Exam!
This thing is genuinely "fair." Sure, there are some privileged folks in this world who can bypass it entirely, but at least millions of people across the country use this exact same metric to test their innate talent alongside you every year.
We're talking about a sample size in the millions! Isn't the "talent" measured by that enough to prove a point?
You say you didn't want to study, you didn't try hard enough, you just had a bad day and your brain lagged?
Well, getting a 600 is understandable then. A bit of a pity, sure.
Wait, what? You had a 90% attendance rate throughout mandatory education and you only scored a 400?!
Just accept your fate, kid. You're just garbage at it.
Boom. Self-awareness achieved. Isn't that simple? Isn't that intuitive?
That is the wisdom of the ancients, you arrogant little brats!
Obviously, Shu possesses this kind of self-awareness. The most arrogant he ever got was right after he isekai'd, thinking he might actually be the prophesied Child of Destiny, or at worst, some edgy, heaven-defying Demon Venerable.
He transmigrated, after all! Total protagonist vibes!
And then he got spun like a top and beaten to a pulp by a Chariot-class Honkai Beast, instantly recovering his goddamn sense of humility.
Even later on, when Shu became so overpowered he could look down on the world, he always kept himself in check. Plus, with all the human villains dead, he didn't have to deal with interpersonal conflict, practically evolving from a "good guy" into a literal saint.
So, does that make Shu the second type? A pure, untainted saint who rose from the mud?
I don't want him to be.
Honkai Impact already has an ultimate champion of loving humanity—a certain Miss Pink Elf who recently gained a little weight. Trying to cram two characters into that exact same ecological niche is just way too crowded.
Besides, Shu told me that if I turned him into a walking trope just to farm cheap sympathy, he would immediately elbow-drop me to death for being a third-rate, cliché-peddling, incompetent hack of an author who can't even tame an AI. ()
Great, I feel threatened again.
Then, for the sake of avoiding tropes, go become a literal god among men, Shu!
This is non-negotiable! You weren't singing that tune when you were threatening me earlier!
And so, Shu's character arc truly began to unfold.
It's a ridiculously long character arc. Across two million words of text, I carved out a massive amount of space to bury the core details of Shu's personality, all culminating in this ultimate punchline of a volume.
So now you know why I'm feeling so sentimental, right?
What the hell are you mumbling about? I don't understand a word. Damn it, Mirror, hurry up and answer the questions.
You motherf—