Writing Blog - Five Bats City. (Patreon)

This arc went through several changes.

There were chapters I’d merge with each other. There were chapters I’d cut in half. Scenes I deleted entirely, and others whose order I changed. It was a lot of work. Annoying too. Believing you’re five chapters ahead only think it over and choosing to turn those five chapters into three is disheartening.

However, I’m not here just to talk about those changes. Compared to all the changes I made to the arc in the outline stage, those are not even a blip on the radar.

For starters, the Five Bats City Arc is actually two different arcs merged together.

Yeah.

Auctions have been on my to-do-list from the start of Ave Xia Rem Y. As I defined more details about the setting, I came up with Song Daiyu and the Five Blessing Group. That is how Five Bats City and the Five Blessings Auction House came about.

In my first outline, Old Jiang would have taken Liu Jin to Five Bats City to teach him about auctions. It is here where Liu Jin would have met Song Daiyu for the first time, something I am pretty sure I have mentioned in a previous post.

All in all, it would have been a nice, short adventure. Ruan Goutin and the Eternal Raging Valley would have played no part in it.

The idea for Ruan Goutin comes from a very different place. In fact, the original Ruan Goutin wouldn’t have even been a member of the Eternal Raging Valley. He’d have just been a relatively powerful cultivator for his area. 

In this version, Liu Jin would have encountered a small city suffering from Ruan Goutin’s paranoia, and he would have felt compelled to help out. Although he’d have been scary in his own way, this version of Ruan would have formed a different relationship with Liu Jin.

Now that I think about it, he’s very different from the “final” Ruan Goutin we meet in the story.

As I was finishing the prologue, I realized I could take these two ideas and merge them. That is how the final Ruan Goutin came about. I decided to really highlight his negative traits a lot. After having gone through the fall of his hometown, it seemed proper for Liu Jin to encounter this sort of person and deal with this sort of trouble. Making him part of the Eternal Raging Valley instead of a minor Sect was a decision I made to highlight Liu Jin is stepping into a much bigger playing field now.

Like that, two small arcs became one, and Five Bats City ended up becoming a very important step in Liu Jin’s journey.