At the start of 2023, I was feeling pretty directionless. I was wasting a lot of time on Reddit, not even particularly enjoying consuming media and entertainment. Around this time, I stumbled onto the 52 Book challenge, and decided that it would be a nice change of pace from the TV, movies, and video games I had primarily been partaking in.
I had been a voracious reader in my youth, so it was refreshing to read very actively again as I started plowing through books. While it’s arguably true that reading fiction is really just another form of escapist entertainment, like watching series and playing games, I’ve always felt that reading was a bit more active and valuable. It stimulates the mind and it stretches the imagination a bit more than the flashier visual options do.
Mostly, I was reading science fiction, because that’s my primary love. I have always wanted to write a science fiction story, and in March of that year, I gave it another shot, but as with all my attempts, I barely got a tenth of the way into it before I hit a wall. I’ve always struggled with writing long-form content, and I’ve stopped at around 6k words more than once. That was my record.
Still reading for the 52 Book Challenge, it was around this time that I stumbled onto Dungeon Crawler Carl through what other people were reading and posting for the challenge. I was entirely unfamiliar with LitRPG at the time, but the cover and description hooked me. I read it and loved it, hardly an uncommon sentiment, but it really opened my eyes to the kinds of stories I could potentially be writing. While I loved reading sci-fi, and loved sci-fi worldbuilding, writing sci-fi was not exactly my forte. I was often getting lost in the weeds and worrying too much about keeping it “hard” and technically possible.
On the other hand, I wasn’t a big fan of reading fantasy. I had read quite a few series, but I often found myself not liking the heroes of fantasy stories. One form of fantasy I did like was that of portal fantasy, or specifically, reincarnation isekai fantasy. This was something I had only really experienced through anime and manga, and around this time I was also devouring eastern isekai series. Finding a western series like Dungeon Crawler Carl, which shared certain characteristics, made me think that maybe I could write something like this.
I took elements I loved from isekai anime and manga, elements from games and what I had seen in Dungeon Crawler Carl, and in May I started writing what would become the first part of the Worldseed saga, Incarnate. In two weeks, I had written 85k words, which completely blew me away. It far exceeded any attempts to write fiction before, and it had mostly come easily and almost uncontrollably.
It’s not entirely true that I’ve never written more than 6k words in a story before. In my teenage years, I was part of a play-by-post roleplaying forum based on a popular game franchise, and spent years both playing and DMing that RPG. That had nothing to do with writing fiction, though, or so I thought.
Writing Worldseed for me was a lot like roleplaying, though. I wasn’t always sure where it was going, I was figuring out the world as I went, I was exploring ideas, and the progress was driven by a very quantifiable element, the experience and levels. Obviously, this ended up working out.
So much of the first book was stuff I was figuring out as I went, which constrained the world and the story I was writing as it continued. In that way, I came up with what would ultimately be Pilus’s own purpose in the world, which you just read about in the ending of this book. It’s a bit meta, but in a way, Pilus is just me writing the book from within as I roleplayed my way through it. I’m not sure if this is a very good way to write a book or not, but I was no good at outlining and plotting, and this has certainly worked out, insofar as I’ve now written the entire series.
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My goal with the end of this story, at least in part, was to answer as many questions as I could for the reader, because I personally find that satisfying. I’ve always found it a bit distressing that the “why” behind an isekai protagonist’s reincarnation was never explained, or was hand-waved away right at the start. So much of Worldseed was Pilus trying to create order out of the madness of fantasy, which is also the purpose of the book itself, in a way. I have no idea if that makes a good story, but I’m glad some of you enjoyed it enough to read it through.
I’ve also grown a lot as a writer, though, thanks to getting this practice in. At some point, part of what I was writing about in Imperiate and Infinite were me thinking about the legacy Pilus would leave behind, as if this entire series were just the history of a world for a future story. That’s why some big things happened towards the end that did not particularly need to happen to finish Pilus’s tale, while still resolving all the lingering threads of the story so far. I may yet return to this world to tell that story, which would be significantly more plot-driven than this story has been, with a focus on worldbuilding and character.
In the same way that Legend of Korra returns viewers to the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender and shows how the world had evolved since, I have some rough plans for a sequel series which would take place sometime in the future of the Horuthian Kingdom. In it, we would see how Pilus and his children's legacy changed the world, how repeated Ringfall events cause the Kingdom to adapt and progress, how the introduction of people to and from a new continent went and what impacts it has, and how the systems and Guilds Pilus made continue to operate for the natives. It would be more of a fantasy story, in that the main character would be a native to this world, not another Worldseed reincarnator. I'm not sure how long it would be (if it even gets written) and would treat this five-part story as its direct history, but since it's a non-causal world, we can also assume there's been some drift in the time since Pilus was active in the world, giving me some flexibility from the hard numbers of MP and skill levels. I'm not jumping into writing this right away—I have other LitRPG story ideas I'm working on—but if you loved Worldseed and find you don't like what I write next, hopefully you can look forward to this sequel story.
Since writing Worldseed’s first book and getting to know Royal Road, I became familiar with LitRPG and progression fantasy as genres in the west, and spent a lot of time between Initiate and Indomite reading those and familiarizing myself with it. A lot of readers of Incarnate and Initiate were coming to my story from a background with LitRPG instead of my own background of Japanese isekai stories, and that seemed to cause some confusion. While I did not necessarily set out to resolve those conflicts when I returned to writing Indomite, Imperiate, and Infinite, it still changed my thinking about the kind of stories I was writing.
I can’t unlearn what I’ve since learned, which means chances are my future LitRPG stories are going to be rather unlike Worldseed, since there are certain things I would now probably consider “mistakes” if I were starting from scratch. Even a sequel series that takes place in the future, if I write it, would be somewhat different, maybe share more in common with non-LitRPG progression fantasy. Despite these possible follies, it was the passionate readers and fans who kept me going as I wrote the conclusion of Worldseed, and both those readers and this story will always be special to me, even if I never write anything quite like it again.
That said, anything I write from now on could be considered part of this multiverse, given the ending. Perhaps the next story is even taking place in the universe of Pilus’s own making. It probably won’t be, but you’re welcome to think of it that way.
I hope you join me for whatever it is that comes next, but for now, thank you for taking this part of the journey with me. I appreciate you!