It's been a while since I kept you guys up to date on what's happening! I'm still working on the revision and I made significant progress. I'm now past all the chapters I have up on Royal Road. The archives were a bitch to get past. I tweaked a few things, changed a little bit of dialogue. I also inserted some foreshadowing to make Vincent's freakout in the market seem less random. Hopefully the reader will see the buildup. I tweaked the dialogue between Vincent and Thal'rin to feel more natural and organic. I also made Vincent more conflicted about his deception rather than being overtly hostile. He feels like he doesn't have a choice but to lie. Some exposition on the expedition was cut and replaced with dialogue. I got rid of the "Thorp the Sleeper" bit since it didn't mesh at all with the tone. I also got rid of Akhil's flying shuriken. It felt too much like an anime weapon. So yeah, basically it's been a bit of cleanup, plus some lore building.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Now, onto a different subject. Content scrapers and story thieves are on the rise. People are stealing stories, tweaking them with AI, and posting them to Amazon for profit. This isn't limited to the big shots with 4-5 digit follower counts, I'm seeing it happen to authors with less followers than me. As far as I know, nobody has done this to A Chronicle of Lies, but since this world is my child of sorts, it's something I'm very worried about. I think it's only a matter of time before it happens. I've thought about hiding a good chunk of the chapters I have posted to prevent this, but I'm torn about that since it would be unfair to anybody who's trying to catch up. I'm not sure what I'm going to do, but I would like to hear your thoughts on it. I would, of course, warn you guys ahead of time if I decided to do such a thing.

Anyway, that's what I've been up to. Hope you all are doing well! Btw... feel free to join my discord community! Check the author's notes below!