About "Seven Days, One Life"

From now on, after each major volume, I will add a chapter to discuss and explain that part. This is my first time reaching out to readers—well, whether it’s truly an exchange is debatable; in all likelihood, I’m just talking to myself. Every day I see the number of views rising, but not a single reader has stepped forward to point at me and say: “Ting Yue, you’re an idiot, what on earth are you writing?”

I can't help but suspect these view counts are just the website editors feeling sorry for my lack of clicks and boosting the numbers a little so I don't give up. (If an editor were to pop up now and say, “You’ve caught us!”—I’d abandon the whole project, too heartbreaking.)

All right, it’s inevitable that the first exchange is a bit rambling. (Split personality: You’ll soon discover this guy has a peculiar habit called “Ting Yue’s Tangents.”)

Let’s talk about the author first. Yes, I’m that elegant, dashing... cough, cough, better be realistic; it wouldn’t do to get hit with a brick when I walk outside. I’m a graduate student, a science and engineering guy. (Girls? Doesn’t exist. Cross-dressing? Also doesn’t exist.) So my writing inevitably carries the straightforward thought patterns of a STEM student, and I often include things I mistakenly assume are common knowledge. (Once, after a literature major friend read one of my early drafts, she spent ten minutes criticizing me: mainly because she had no idea what Coulomb force was.) I think her middle school physics teacher would weep in the restroom.

The initial concept for this story came near graduation in college; it’s been four or five years since then. The idea started when some classmates and I wanted to write something together to commemorate our “barely made it” college days. We ended up mapping our real personalities onto the five protagonists in the story. Thanks to my unreliable friends and their wild, divergent thinking, we managed to blow up the universe ten times over in our drafts. Of course, the story couldn’t go on like that, so after revisions, we created a group who seem unreliable—and really are.

The inspiration for this book came when we were wandering down the street one day and saw a seven- or eight-year-old girl pressed against the glass of a cake shop. The person who inspired the character Gong Hou pointed at her and said, “Look, there’s your favorite little girl.” What began as a joke turned into nearly a hundred thousand words of plot, and I nurtured that little seed of an idea in my heart until it grew.

We’ll probably never see that girl at the cake shop again, but the character we created, Angel, lives on in our hearts. While writing, I happened to hear a song called “She Once Lived.” The feeling in the song was so similar to the emotion I wanted to imbue Angel with. Thus, I wrote the theme for this volume:

To live.

It’s a simple thing, but also a difficult one. Just a few days ago, my roommate told me that one of his classmates died working overtime, only a month after getting married. I’ve seen people take their own lives; I’ve seen the pain of losing loved ones; I’ve contemplated ending my own life during moments of confusion.

But I became afraid—afraid of death not out of cowardice, but out of the courage to choose to live. It’s bitter medicine, but it helps. The increasing pressure of modern society has turned our hair white at an early age, yet we still strive to live. Sometimes, when bored, I hum Jay Chou’s “Rice Fields” and realize why children dream of growing up, only to sing songs of childhood when they get there.

Ting Yue has gone off on a tangent—let’s return to the main theme. The core of this story is about a group of protagonists without halos struggling to live. They have no cheat codes, no miraculous encounters, no wealth; they are ordinary people lost in the crowd, working for others, living as others want them to.

Angel is the beauty we discovered in life, yet she cannot stay. What the protagonists do is what we cannot—they fight for Angel, but truly, they fight to live as they wish to live. As for the final discussion between Xie Liu and Taro Tohno about science, it no longer matters—much of it is just random bits I pieced together.

Regarding the writing process, before starting this novel, my friends and I made extensive preparations. But probably no one wants to read all that, so we left it out, leading to some confusing parts in the story. I can’t help it—my skills are limited, I really can’t write well, and I’ve given up trying to fix it. (Still, do check the related works section for a few essential settings; those are the most simplified introductions. If you skip those, I honestly can’t help you understand.)

The outline and subsequent plot for this book now span over twenty volumes. Overall, it won’t be a feel-good story. If you’re not a reader who can settle down and focus, you need not waste your precious time here. I admit, this book really isn’t all that great. (Having been told by friends that my world-building is garbage and they absolutely won’t read it, I feel—I have nothing left to fear.)

I placed this here in the main text, but please don’t miss the last chapter of this volume, “Poetry and the Distant Horizon,” or you might think I’m not updating.