Author’s Note on Publication

Tomorrow, on Children’s Day, it will go on sale at noon.

The first chapter after release is also the first meeting between Luna Tsukimiya and Xia Qingyu. I have already decided on the chapter title: Mutual Affection. Everyone should understand the meaning.

As for this novel, The Witch, I honestly do not expect too much from its performance. Some of its plot threads, especially those involving the villainous witch, may touch on rather contentious subjects.

The more people read it, the greater the controversy may become, and the more likely it is that some extreme readers will want to take the author out, or take the book out instead... To that, I can only say:

Spare my life!

The main content of this book is actually romance and emotional entanglement. So those controversial elements exist purely to establish the background, drive the plot forward, plant foreshadowing, and create conflict. They do not represent the author’s personal views or inclinations.

Besides, I do not plan to write much in the way of career arcs or business plots, because I am probably not very good at that sort of thing.

Some readers may still want to ask: then why write any of it at all? Couldn’t you just leave it out completely?

Because, by the rules of this story, what is called a witch is born only after enduring the most extreme suffering.

What counts as extreme suffering? Take Xichuan Mie as an example. If her husband and children had died in a car accident, or of illness, or choked to death on tofu soup, she definitely would not become a witch; that pain would not be pure enough.

But if they were murdered, then any normal person would want revenge, right? And then, unable to obtain it, you find your enemy protected. What, you are not satisfied? Go ahead and sue me.

Sue once, sue twice, lose every case, end up penniless and with nowhere left to turn.

Only then would her suffering be considered barely sufficient. In the end, her fall into witchhood and her transformation into a villain are what I regard as a more reasonable setup.

So all the tragic stories involving witches are simply there to create dramatic conflict. I myself am very much an optimist, so please do not take me out.

The same applies to the heroines. The extreme suffering they endured in their past lives was not merely because of the death of their beloved, but because they failed to prevent that tragedy.

“I could not do it” is not painful enough. “I might have been able to stop it, but I did not” is barely sufficient. Add in “you might have been able to stop it too, but you also failed,” and then there is a story worth telling.

If girls are made of sugar, spice, and everything nice, then witches are forged from knives, blood, and the deepest of fixations.

Sorrow is the flour, despair the cream, guilt the eggs, remorse the sugar, hatred the fruit, and malice the chocolate, until all of it comes together to form the dark cake known as the witch.

But witches are still girls in the end, and dark cake is still cake, so at heart this remains a youthful romance about beautiful girls drawing close to one another. I trust everyone will agree with that.

Considering that most people probably do not enjoy suffering, I have tried to place all the “knives” in the heroines’ past lives, and all the “sugar” into the bowl of the present.

Many stories from their previous life, since they may be a little too cruel, can only be woven gradually into the main text, so that no reader grows upset and wants to take me out again. I have already grown quite afraid of being taken out.

I wrote a couple of lines before, originally intending them for the synopsis, but they felt a little too abstract out there, so I am leaving them here as the ending:

In their past lives, their broken bodies were bristling with bloody knives.

In this life, they pulled the knives from their own flesh and pointed them at everything in the universe, and at each other.