As everyone knows, "River Crab" refers to people working in the animation industry. The company is adapting a web novel into a 3D animation. (To be honest, it's "Against the Gods.")

A certain number of episodes need to be submitted to the video platform by the end of the year.

The company, which had been dragging its feet before, is now in a hurry and is organizing overtime, usually until around 9 PM every night. They'll also be making Saturdays work overtime from now on. Currently, they don't work on Saturdays.

The objective conditions are roughly as follows.

He Xie gets off work around 9 PM, and there's actually enough time left to write a chapter. But after working overtime, He Xie isn't in a good mood, and coupled with a generally low motivation to write, the combination makes it impossible to concentrate. So, for the past two days, He Xie hasn't written anything after work and has instead played games. If He Xie doesn't play games, he's afraid his emotions will collapse. It's not actually that dramatic, but the pressure of work plus the novel is quite torturous. The burden on his mind keeps him anxious.

I will update regularly on weekends and randomly on weekdays, provided I take the weekend off.

Finally, let me briefly mention the book itself.

Currently, the average number of 24-hour orders has dropped from over 200 at the end of August to just over 160, a sharp decrease of one-quarter. This is likely related to the start of the school year. Based on the experience of the last winter break, once things drop, they're unlikely to recover.

So that's about all the achievements this book has made so far.

From now on, updates will be mostly done out of love. So please stop urging me to update. Although, basically no one is urging me to update anymore. Sigh, I'm still quite conflicted; I hope I can update more often in the future. Writer's block is really tough.

Due to overtime work at the company, Hexie's previous plan to finish the story in November is no longer feasible, as Hexie will still be working in November. The completion date has been adjusted to before the Chinese New Year this year. Afterwards, Hexie will spend about three months preparing a new book. If all goes well, it will still be in the current genre, and Hexie will title it "Male-oriented ensemble novel," so there's no possibility of it being censored. Other wording is highly likely to be censored on the spot.

However, the setting is almost certainly not a martial arts setting. It will most likely be a fantasy or science fiction setting, with the focus on an ensemble cast.

Let's stop drawing the pie here for now.

Of course, if subscriptions for later chapters are particularly dismal, I'll consider speeding up the completion. I'll aim for tens of thousands of words to the end. At least it won't suddenly stop, right?

Posting a chapter and getting no comments feels like it was never written. So, a special thank you to all the readers who have consistently commented, and to those who haven't commented but have silently voted. The censorship has been observed; thank you all.