The Fire Mage was levitating like a wraith a few feet above the ground, shrouded in a blaze of roaring scarlet flames. From his position, Jake watched helplessly as his friend pointed her fiery hands hatefully at Asfrid on the brink of death.
Gritting his teeth, he tried to teleport to intercept the attack, but his consciousness flickered for a split second, followed by a searing pang of pain in his throat. When he opened his eyes again, his mental sense found only a sea of flames instead of Asfrid. Even her ashes were nowhere to be found.
He could have cared about where Enya had gone, but a flowery scent of vanilla mingled with the smell of his own blood assaulted his nostrils. Looking down, his chin bumped against a mass of silky brown hair. Two delicate pale hands with red-painted nails were clawing tightly at his shoulders to hold him in place, while the lips of the woman they belonged to were sucking his blood as if they hadn't drunk in days.
Edit 03/01/2023
Sorry for all those who were hoping for daily releases last month. I had a chaotic second half of the month with my irl work and I chose to focus on Blood Legacy for several reasons. One of them is that it requires less effort to write. The Oracle Paths requires much more preparation.
I've been criticized for my lack of communication here or on Discord and I totally agree that this is clearly something I need to work on. When I miss a release, I get stressed and guilty and cutting myself off from feedback is the only way I've found to deal with that stress when it happens. Simply because I don't have a quick fix at the time.
For those of you who know how I operate and are familiar with procrastination, I never plan ahead to disappear for two weeks. In my head, it always starts with "Just take a day off and I'll be back the next day." That's the main reason I can never put a "no chapter next week" message to you, because deep down inside that's not what I want.
I've received several suggestions on how to be more stable with releases, the first being to reduce my number of releases per week to 4 or 5 to ensure stability or to communicate more frankly and stop overestimating my abilities but it's hard to accept.
The thing is that between writing and my work I'm just burnt out. I know some might be tempted to say that I shouldn't be writing two webnovels at the same time in this case, but Blood Legacy is not the problem. Some days I'm inspired to write The Oracle Paths and it's a pleasure to write, and some days it's the opposite. Strictly speaking, with a knife to my throat I could find the time to write even a third or fourth novel if I wanted to. It's just my sanity that would suffer.
Needless to say, I insist on this, but I am not forcing anyone to pay for the privilege. This financial support and your kind comments are of course what motivates me to keep going and not give up, but I started writing in the first place because I loved it. I just wanted to write a novel that I would be fully satisfied with. In practice, one realizes very quickly that it's not that easy and brings a lot of anxiety, but I have never regretted starting to write and intend to finish everything I've started.
Looking back three years, I never thought I could write almost 900 chapters. It's easy to forget, but TOP is already longer than the entire Harry Potter saga. Webnovels authors deserve a little more recognition, because it's really not an easy job considering the low salaries of most of them.