Afterword
I dedicate this book to my grandmother. Two Obon festivals have passed, and I finally feel as though I’ve begun to set my heart back in order.
I also offer it to my editor, who, instead of losing their temper at my slow progress and scheduling mishaps, doggedly assisted me in the bookmaking process; to Lansane, who brings my meager writing to life with beauty and celerity despite my last-minute additions and bothersome requests for scenery; and of course, to my wonderful readers who so graciously support me through thoughts and retweets.
This marks the fifth afterword begun in foreign style, and my first-ever single work split into two books—the completion of which has left me awestruck.
Speaking of, when I was nearing the end of this volume, I received the auspicious news that we would be releasing our first-ever limited-edition product for this series. For those who have only read the standard paperbacks or ebooks and may be confused: limited to the publisher storepage as it may be, this series has released its first instance of official merchandise.
Upon first receiving word about it, I bluntly said, “An acrylic...block? Huh? Not like...a stand or something?” and had to double and triple check with my editor. If that wasn’t impolite enough, I went so far as to blurt out, “But what is it for?” Good times.
I suppose it might be the world’s cutest paperweight, or maybe you can use it as a spider token in a certain TCG since it depicts Margit. Anyway, utility aside, when I remember that the sales numbers may justify more merch in the future, I can’t help but get excited. Man, do I want little metal figurines of Margit or Mika—or maybe a set of dice where the highest value is themed around each character...
My motives can barely be considered ulterior, but I truly do want to put out something usable in tabletop games themed after this series; I would be so over the moon that I might fly straight to heaven. Please, I beg you, do show your support if you would be so kind. I swear that rolling real, physical dice will bring indescribable euphoria with it!
Jokes aside, I suppose I ought to touch on the main text itself. While I’m sure those of you who have finished reading are aware, this canto has seen even more text added than the first; even the afterword has bloated to an impressive page count.
Initially, I had written the web novel without any consideration for how lengthy any given arc might become—I thought it a touch too arrogant to begin writing with the assumption that my story would see paper—and since I didn’t have any restrictions, I’d adopted a laissez-faire policy of “Mwa ha ha, I’ll write what I want how I want it!”
You can see how that turned out. Feel free to laugh.
Even without my kidding around, though, I do feel as though I’ve made a mistake. Not only does this canto easily clear twenty thousand characters in length, but it’s roughly a hundred pages thicker than the first half of volume 4. Now that I have the physical copies in hand, I can understand why my editor had complained about how they’d look when lined up together...
But, hey! I think I’ll get to see even more comments along the lines of, “Huh? I don’t remember this...” or, “This is more new content than not!” than the last canto or even the first volume. I’m looking forward to that.
At any rate, I’ve made plenty of revisions and additions that longtime fans can enjoy. I also felt that the core idea of “one heroine per arc” caused the story to feel rather lifeless; wanting to have everyone come together for a real campaign caused things to get a little out of hand.
The more I wrote, the more I wanted to write, until I started to question if I could actually fit everything into two books. When I said as much on Twitter, my followers gave me a hearty laugh with comments like, “Just make it a trilogy,” “Canto II (Cont.),” or, “Don’t worry, I’ll wait for Canto II-2.” The internal conflict between not wanting to cut off the plot inorganically and being unable to justify derailing the publishing schedule for one pathetic author aside, I somehow managed to—read: they were kind enough to let me—fit everything in one book.
To tell the truth, I did consider pulling the same trick as volume 3 and off-loading the ending to the next volume. However, mere survival didn’t feel like a fitting conclusion to me, and I ultimately jammed everything into volume 4.
But as a result, my hopes of fitting in a Margit side story like I mentioned in the last afterword were dashed, along with the deeper dive into the world’s religious groups I’d been so excited for... Not only was I hesitant to add more prose—yes, I do know that there is a limit—but I also simply ran out of time.
In addition, as you may already be aware, this Henderson chapter has changed dramatically from its inception on the web. Frankly, I’ve read enough sci-fi and military fiction to cause machine oil to dribble out of my mouth since when I first wrote it, and I just wanted to add in some of those elements. Go ahead and laugh that you can plainly see what’s caught my attention at any given moment by reading what I write.
To speak about the story without spoilers is a challenge, but I would like to move on from what I couldn’t write to what I did.
The underlying theme of volume 4 is this: immortality. Not limited to this work, of course, but I wished to explore the woes and emotions of beings unbound by time—or at least, for whom death may be inevitable, but whose lives practically span the whole of human civilization. I’m not entirely sure if the message was “underlying,” per se, but it wasn’t entirely overt, so I’ll leave it as is. I believe that anyone who will effectively never die is sure to be psychologically alien to us Homo sapiens sapiens.
I entered my fourth decade of life in August of 2021, and one thing I realized is that even we humans endure the spiritual abrasion of time. Perhaps you might understand: how many times have you laughed until your sides hurt as of late? Surely not as often as when you were a child, I would think.
Though I wouldn’t have called myself a clown, I personally laughed a great deal at comedies on TV and online parodies in my youth; at times, I would have such a fit of hysterics that it hurt to breathe. But in the last ten years, I can’t remember a single time I’ve done the same.
I suspect that experience banishes the great majority of things into banality. Humor that stems from the unexpected becomes harder to come by, and punch lines that can be predicted draw out smaller laughs. To attain that nostalgic aching in my sides becomes a dream more difficult as time wears on.
Yet these brains of ours bless us with the ability to forget, preserving the bare minimum of novelty. No matter how many years I live, new shows or books continue to capture my interest, even if they contain a good deal of familiar material. Emotions are much the same; life is not so difficult to live.
However, these immortals have emotions befitting their elongated lives and memories built to match. They cannot say the same: life unending and recollection unfading produce a wealth of experience and a store of emotions that never dissipate. Their vast treasuries of knowledge reduce the world to a lifeless expanse of the known; in the end, their day-to-day activities become redundant, and when they grow weary of the mundane, the act of living itself becomes no more than habit.
Thinking about their condition reveals a terrible fate. For us, simply not dying takes up a part of our mind at any given moment. So long as one does not wholly abandon the past and future, subscribe to pessimistic ideals, or find themselves trapped in a despair-inducing dead end of life, it is rare for a human being to tire of living.
After all, our bodies regularly scold us to keep us going: don’t eat and you’ll get hungry, don’t bathe and you’ll feel disgusting, and don’t use the restroom and it’ll begin to hurt. While we may fall into the trap of routine, these deterrents prevent us from straying too far off the course of life—in this way, I think we are rather fortunate.
Alas, organisms too perfect for their own good are not so lucky. The methuselah that appear in this series can forgo food, drink, and sleep without issue; vampires simply need a sip of blood and a room to hide away in. They lack the spurs digging in to force them to live.
When the flesh is too complete to derive joy from mere survival, the weight falls to the psyche. Thus the everlasting characters depicted tend to drown in their hobbies to the point where their sensibilities seem deranged from more normal perspectives. Any less and they shall tire of existence, doomed to choose between death and a fate no better than the unmoving stone Buddhas at the sides of roads.
To unload that burden onto interpersonal relations is, in a sense, easy. Society will demand participation whether you wish for it or not, producing limitless permutations of interaction. Similar people will follow similar patterns, but none are exactly the same. Seeing as company can act as a permanent drip feed of novelty, perhaps it is just right for an eternal’s hobby, as poor as their taste may be.
However, overattachment will render the immortal unable to bear the fleeting hourglasses of life around them, culminating in the “They all left me behind,” seen somewhere in this volume. If one chooses more permanent friends, their undying nature tends to produce unchanging personalities that are easy to grow bored with; cling to the interesting ones, and they will leave in the blink of an eye. What a sorry way to live.
I tried to dial into the thought processes behind this fictional race and their imaginary culture in order to improve the quality of my writing, but I feel as though I’ve created a form of life beyond salvation. I truly do pity them. If I’m ever offered a drug that will stop my aging, my efforts have convinced me that I’d never take it. Even if I regret it in my final moments, I can’t see myself needing it to live a good life.
With that said, if I manage to string together a fifth volume with your support, I will once again be focusing on these sorry people.
Yes, that’s right: the next story will focus on the scoundrel. The web novel glossed over it, but the imperial ennoblement fiasco that precedes Erich’s coming of age will be expanded upon by a lot. That, and the strangely popular—it might even be the most popular—Henderson chapter...?
I’ve babbled on for a good while now, but I pray we might meet again in volume 5. I recently was given access to the Net Terminal Gene—aka the first shot of the vaccine—so it’s only a matter of time before I link my mind directly with the internet and fuse my ego with the great collective consciousness. I’m sure that will boost the speed of my progress.
[Tips] The author uploads side stories and world-building details to @Schuld3157 on Twitter as “extra replays” and “rulebook fragments.”
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