Chapter 211 Postscript of Sand Sea 2

A few months ago, I was sitting on the road, leaning against the green belt behind me. It took me an hour to realize that I couldn’t stand up again. My cell-phone wasn’t far away, which turned this whole situation into a strange conundrum. I never thought about what kind of changes would take place in my life because of this. It was just another accident, after all.

I sat there until dusk, and every time a car passed, I pulled my legs back.

It was a wonderful feeling, sitting in a place where few people have sat, and looking at the world from a strange point of view. No matter how you described it, people in the world wouldn’t be able to understand what you were seeing.

No matter who you were, the world would ignore you if you sat there in such a state.

It was sad, but for some reason, I liked this feeling a lot.

A friend called my flowing sentiments physical cowardice and inner madness. This had changed my life, after all. My mind always seemed to stray far away. It seemed as if I could go on forever, but my body had rotted away, and become useless before I could even start.

I liked this feeling a lot, but I didn’t think it might be with me all the time.

After this incident, there was a period of time where I felt like I had all the opportunities. I had learned to choose wisely, and was no longer worried by a large number of temptations. I made easy choices, and once I was sure, I went all out until the wrong things were right.

This was definitely an improvement. I had always hesitated before, but I finally stood on top of the mountain, and watched the world change. Then, in an instant, God booted me from my freedom of choice to something unworthy. Not only did I fall into flash blindness, but I fell even harder than normal people.

A long time ago, I used to take pleasure in experiencing strange and funny events. I would even tell stories to everyone for the sake of conversation, taking something normal and telling it with many twists and turns. Everyone liked these kinds of jokes when we were students, but when we grew up, my friends laughed, but all dodged.

“Xu Lei is a person who always meets some strange things and unreliable people any time he does something.” It was probably around this time that the news spread.

It was ok to tell jokes, as long as you could avoid cooperation.

So I became an eternal topic of other people’s gossip.

I was happy to do this, and very happy to see them laughing, but I still wanted to tell some stories. I seemed to be fluctuating between embarrassment and joy every day, meeting strange people, saying strange things, and longing for things that would go wrong: getting lost, getting a flat tire, rain and snow, driving in the mountains in the fog, watching a truck fall off a cliff… life was only fun when it was full of variables.

This writer was really bored to death.

Unfortunately, I found that I had made a mistake. What I experienced and longed for wasn’t a variable. In this pot of soup called life, those kinds of things were only the last bit of pepper, and they weren’t even the spicy kind.

The real variables were the ones people weren’t willing to tell others, because they didn’t want to become the source of others’ gossip.

I added my experience at that time to the end of “Sand Sea 2” when I serialized it online. I could see Li Cu lying alone at the bottom of the tomb, thinking of the things he could no longer do in a place no one knew about, constantly wanting to leave and move forward, but unable to do anything.

Such a bruised person was saved by unknown people, and once again trapped by fate. What he despaired over the most was that he knew no one would come to save him, whether it was Wu Xie or the ones who carried him out of that hidden place.

In fact, I write novels for a single purpose.

My initial purpose for writing “Grave Robbers’ Chronicles” was to write a story that everyone liked. Later, it was to be a writer that everyone liked. “Great Desert Wolf” was written to prove that I could still be liked purely because of the content instead of my pen name. So what about “Sand Sea”?

It was written in order to provide more materials and possibilities for the world of “Grave Robbers’ Chronicles”.

Of course, the story should also be interesting.

When writing “Sand Sea 1”, not all the ideas were very clear. At that time, under various pressures— including the initial serial— I used the “Thorn Tomb” manuscript as a supplement.

Rejecting the usual narrative system I used when writing “Grave Robbers’ Chronicles”, coupled with the desire to develop a new style and write new things created a lot of contradictions, and caused a lot of grievances to the partners at that time. After I finished it, I didn’t even know how I wrote it, and when I read it myself, I didn’t feel the control I normally felt when I was writing before—I don’t mean controlling the characters, I mean the words.

After reading Sand Sea, a friend described the whole series as, “Painful, really painful. Publishing is like a horse. You used to drag the horse to run with you, and then you were neck and neck with it, but after that, you’ve been knocked down and dragged by it. In writing “Sand Sea 1″, you were dragged so far, your elbows have almost been worn out.”

I didn’t notice this at that time, because I lost my sense for the language. When I was reading “Sand Sea 1”, I couldn’t get into the plot, and it didn’t jump out at me. I only felt a sense of panic when I faced the white paper, and I didn’t know what to do.

This feeling continued into the later process, including most of the online serials. I found that I was reluctant to tell a story at first, and was just piecing together one thing at a time. While I was working on “Sand Sea 2”, I could only feel that something was wrong, but I couldn’t say what it was. I didn’t realize where the problem was until “Sand Sea 2” was changed for the third time.

Then I did it again.

This is the version you see now. There has never been a novel that I’ve been satisfied with—this one was no exception—but at least it won’t scare me in the middle of the night.

When I used to read the “Kindaichi” murder mystery novels, I always really enjoyed Kindaichi’s battles with humans, and always imagined a monster with a human brain and an orangutan body appear (called Monster Baron). It always immediately jumped out at me, and then, I graduated from “Kindaichi”.

I felt like the system had been destroyed. I still didn’t understand why Seishi Yokomizo suddenly wrote a novel that destroyed the world outlook. Later, when I wrote “Sand Sea” from a youth’s perspective, I began to understand Yokomizo’s idea for the first time.

Real novels were really hard to write; a little fantasy loosened the shackles a lot. Moreover, there was a side issue of the reader’s age group.

This could help break through the age gap between new and old readers.

At that time, “The Eagle’s Cape Massacre” was very popular after it was published in Japan, especially among teenagers.

Sand Sea 1 sold very well—even better than Tomb Robbers’ Chronicles— so I anxiously worked hard to revise “Sand Sea 2”. After reading it, the editor gave a worried sigh; she loved Sand Sea 1’s style even more.

So I think my mental problem is a little more serious.

<Chapter 210> <Table of Contents><2014 Chinese New Year Special: Extra 2.1>

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First off, this postcript was weird as fuck, so I’m hoping it wasn’t just my shitty translation lol. I’m not sure if he got in a car wreck or something??? Or just got depressed? I don’t know.

Second off, PRAISE SWEET BABY JESUS!!!!!! WE’RE DONE! WE’RE FINALLY FUCKING DONE! SAND SEA IS OVER! Let me just curl up over here in the corner crying tears of victory/joy. I’m so relieved, I’m not even mad at last chapter’s abrupt ending lol. And to all you beautiful darlings that have stuck with me for these arduous 3 months, I want you to know that I love you, and you all are awesome! (ﾉ´ з `)ノ