So, an update on this whole bloody mess:

At this point, I have managed to hack up enough chapters to satisfy the website's automated sensors. I only removed one explicit scene (the one which shouldn't have existed to start with because it had no real plot relevance, so no big loss). Most of the losses came from incidental naughty words, status boxes with descriptions of sex skills, and the like. The one big loss is that I had to cut the entirety of Aidan's Profession Talents from both the story itself and the Glossary.

For the record, I made these cuts 'voluntarily' but with no real guidance beyond a binary "yes/no" on whether any given chapter tripped the bot. My alterations are almost certainly over-zealous, but the alternative was a lengthy manual review with an automatic deletion of the entire story if the review came up at even 0.01% over the limit.

Moving forward, the rest of this book (Champion) will continue to be posted here on Royal Road. There should be no need for censorship in any of the remaining chapters. After the end of Champion, I already planned to take some time off from Paths of the Chosen to refresh my creative batteries and get some other projects rolling. That will still happen. The big change from my previous plans is that Book 3 of Paths will not be posted to Royal Road. I will post an update here letting you all know where to find it once it goes live, but this whole situation has been the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

I do understand the reasons for the restrictions (it's something imposed by RR's advertisers). I understand that the site doesn't have the manpower to perform manual reviews as a matter of protocol on long-ass stories (469k words for this one pre-culling). I understand that they want to maintain the site's "clean" reputation.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

None of that makes it any more fair for authors. We have to adhere to vague, weasel-worded guidelines. Requests for clarity are ignored or outright rebuffed. Tools for dealing with the situation exist but are specifically and intentionally not made available to authors. Requesting to have an actual person look into the situation results in automatic deletion without review or appeal if the single individual decides that the story is even the tiniest bit over the limit of accepted content.

Worse, the content filter is absurdly easy to defeat. If I wanted to really thumb my nose at this website and the asshole who prompted this incident, I could have either cut my chapters into halves or thirds (making sure not to bifurcate the tainted text in doing so) or replaced the tainted text with images. The only thing the website cares about is the percentage of chapters with text their bot doesn't like. Increase the number of chapters or replace the text with images and the bot is happy.

Any metric that simple to circumvent does not measure what it claims to measure. I could have left my story absolutely unchanged save for making people press the "next" button more often and gotten out of this looking squeaky clean. It would have gone from 27% "tainted" chapters to 13.5% and voila, no problem!

So, yeah, not happy with the website or their support for their authors. I'm not even going into the whole deal with the asshole reviewer. I'm not going to make this rant even longer by going into THAT situation, but suffice to say if he had been even a tiny bit less self-righteous, he would have gotten away with it. It remains true that evil feeds upon itself.

Anyway, that's the situation as it stands. TL;DR: Champion will continue to be posted here on Royal Road, but Book 3 will not.