I've gone silent for the past months on FNN after my last chapter for ROT4H.

And honestly, I'll just get this out of the way now.

Remember what I've been saying last chapter that I would be writing another rewrite of the story on my own time for personal preference alone and I wouldn't do anything regarding it otherwise? Needlessly to say, that's where all of my writing focus has been slated for the past few months because I've been enjoying it again. I've been enjoying my time in writing Rising of the Four Heroes again because of the changes I've made to the rewrite.

So I'll be uploading the new rewritten version and scrapping this one.

Yeah. Another rewrite.

Fuck me, I know.

I don't mean to say this lightly, mostly because I've already gone ahead and pulled this shit on you guys already. I can imagine that the readers would be vaguely annoyed at my decision here, but please believe me when I say that I can't continue this version of the story, knowing that I was able to produce something of better quality. Even some of my peers were able to give a second look to the rewrite for me, saying how much improvement there was, not only in narrative flow, but just the overall events in general.

And that's where I understood why I felt like this story was being dragged on.

If you read up to this point, you should know what happened and needless to say, I wasn't satisfied as to how everything ended up. It took too long for things to play out, all while having plotlines be tugged together basically artificially when in reality, there was no need for any of that. There hadn't been a need to try and keep things as similar as they were in that vision, a flawed vision that completely misses the point of the story.

The Rising of the Four Heroes isn't supposed to be a convoluted narrative.

The Rising of the Four Heroes is a story of friendship and the struggles that can come with it. From the way that I see things here, it's obvious that this current version of the story is still trying to tell that thematic narrative, but it's simply bogged down by so much unneeded things that it's difficult to even digest it anymore. ROTSH has a setting where this "what-if" scenario can work, but I was completely oblivious to that fact. There wasn't any need to add in more than what was required for a story that people - no, I wanted to have.

A story about friendship should be about friendship.

I stripped the story back down to its roots, piecing back together what narratives did work and disposed of what didn't work - or rather, what shouldn't work. All my original characters, deleted. They're done. Gone. They don't exist within the space of this rewrite anymore, mainly because there was always an antagonist that could have fulfill their job, but I was simply to frightened to use her.

I shouldn't have been scared of the inevitable.

As such, it's clear that I'm not an excellent writer. Not by a long shot and while I do think I've improved over time, I needed to stop pretending to be someone that I wasn't. That's why I felt like my story was struggling. I needed to focus on what made my story unique, the aspect of friendship between the four heroes from the very start, and expand on that, rather than throwing shit at the wall and having them act. Because that's a reaction, not a development.

Look, I'm not asking for more chances from you, the readers. It's fair that you don't want to keep up with this game of cat-and-mouse. I know I probably don't deserve anymore chances, given my track record, but I wanted to give myself just one more. To get this new, praying-to-the-heavens final rewrite out here onto FFN because I knew I could do better.

And apparently, I was able to, according to my discord friends and peers.

(btw thanks for that, guys)

I'm able to be satisfied with what I got, because it's what it should have been from the very beginning.

A story about friendship. Plain and simple as that.

...

So, what's the plan now?

Tomorrow morning, and for context, it's nighttime here, I'm going to start uploading my rewrite onto FFN as a new story. I'll upload up to the point where the heroes splits off from each other after getting their party members and do a bi-daily upload until I'm caught up to the amount of chapters I have on hand right now. For additional context, the rewrite currently stands at 200k words, in compressing the 300k+ words of narrative I originally had here as well as having the wave of destruction at Riyute already occur.

This way, I won't be cramming down that many chapters down your throats, if you do ever choose to continue reading with the rewrite.

And so, I conclude this little arc, I do want to say something.

Someone told me that I shouldn't be ashamed of rewriting. In fact, a lot of stories undergo more than multiple rewrites before making it to shelves in the professional world. The final product always looks more different than what it was in its first version. There's not a single case where a writer was able to publish the first thing that came out of their words, not even a second or third version. I'm not trying to become a professional writer by any means, but it certainly placed my thoughts into perspective.

So, I won't apologize.

That would mean that I'm ashamed of what I've done, but that couldn't be further than the truth.

Instead, I'd like to thanks the readers for following for this long. If you choose to step off from here, you're more than welcome to. I won't try and stop you, but if you want to see what future I have in store for you...

... well, let us ride this wild ride together.

Thank you, everyone.