Hello. Yes, yes, it is as you feared. It's over. The book is being discontinued. I bit off more than I could chew and worse, the book broke my mental fatigue over it's knee. It was basically the straw that broke the camel's back but in many ways, it was a good thing. The long hiatus I did from writing really helped me focus on some things in some ways.
But for those of you who read and liked Likes so much, this isn't really any good news. Likes was a great book and I had at least some great stuff planned with it. Let's go over that a little.
I was planning doing more stuff with cultivation. Yeah, we were getting glimpses, but part of me had the idea of Matt getting thrown into that whole world for a bit. It was going to be a great Arc.
I was going to do more with the big guy walking around, have him be the end of the 'tutorial' and then have him catch the eye of the 'god' (non-meta kind) who destroyed the world by gazing at it. It was going to be a great thing, with him having over taken the moon. Were gonna be hordes of demons and Matt was going to have to be on the run and survive as he was hunted down, slowly finding more and more sapient and sentient monsters of all sorts. I was planning on they're being an underground market/city, underneath the city, with the stranger and more creepy denizens would go and talk about the "Insane living human up there. Best to stay down here till he goes away." and they're whole 'culture' as many of them just woke up as they are recently or came from a whole other plane or reality.
There was going to be so much meta commentary. I literally had this whole deep meaningful conversation between 'The Host' (me) and Matt planned out. It was going to be great and an idea I've wanted to throw around for a while. Basically, what makes a person real and what makes a person fake? We could be brains in a jar, *we* could be people in a book. Imagine a world with a man in the 21st century... to have gotten there, to that man in your head, you need to have gone through the rest of history, yet you never thought about that. Games, movies, books, there's always a past and a future after what you see. People sometimes say we're in a simulation (either seriously or jokingly), but what if we're just the background lore that got loaded up? What if the whole world was made... just so someone could play a character in 2332 of being a space pirate? What makes Matt more real than us? All those type of things and much, much more.
Matt was going to find out that his whole *world* was created soley so Matt could exist and entertain gods and deal with that mind fuck. that he is the reason that his entire universe exists.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
The dream versions of Rick and Jessica, when they left the door, were going to (very, very long from now), be revealed to have merged with the real Rick and Jessica's subconscious.
Let's not forget the milestones! I was going to have soul weapons, race stuff, classes, all sorts of great things. Etc etc.
Jessica currently was stuck in a dream and when (if) we ever got to her, I was going to have her have lived a whole 40 years with a fake Matt and all the ensuing chaos that would bring.
Rick is currently stuck fighting for his life and miracously managed to beat a Black Skeleton as a regular baseline human.
Spot isn't doing great and feels really, really sad that he's stuck in a cage and can't move much.
And that's it. Not really 'it', it, but a lot of my stories are made up as they go along and this one way more than most. I have no idea what I would've done for a lot of situations. Btw, the last poll was a tie between "Give him a Motorcycle" and "Random positive effect."
Oh, mechanics! If there was a tie, I'd usually just roll a random Die or flip a coin or something. I rarely, if ever, put my hand on the scale. The most notable feature of me doing that was that once, no joke, Matt was missing *one* like to level up and kinda needed it (this was when he was dying in the sewer), I decided to hand wave that a tiny bit rather than doing anything else.
And yeah, if he hadn't reached level ten by the time a 'month' in story had passed, I was going to have him Die. Death was always going to a very real possibility in the book from the main character. At the end of things though, this was an expierment partially because... I expected Matt to die. There was no way to get that high, all the way to level 100. But really, I think we could've done it, if I could've kept it up. But I couldn't and so it fell down, down, down.
It was fun and thanks for all the fish.
Game Over
Final stats:
Level: 10
Views: 41,000
Words: 61,000
Chapters: 14
Comments: 909
*****
As the host watches a frozen world, she looks down. Matt, Rick, Jessica, even spot. She has failed. A frozen universe, unmoving. With a wave of her hand, reality it reset. An apocalypse undoes itself, the world returning to it's pristine nature. Matt is never summoned, Rick and Jessica are never abducted, Spot lives happily ever after as the good boy he is. She smirks a little, amused.
"Well, better luck next time. I guess you won Matt."