TLDWR: The story is on hiatus (Obviously), I have a new Xianxia story now up on Royal Road, and I posted the three Patreon chapters of TVDIGU after this note if you still want to read them. I plan to get back to TVDIGU eventually, but don't know when. Hoping it's in 2025, but no promises yet.

  As you have no doubt guessed from the months of radio silence, TVDIGU is officially on hiatus. I've been putting off officially announcing this. At first it was because I wasn't certain I wouldn't jump back in in a few weeks. Then it was probably because I don't like disappointing people, and there were a lot more people to disappoint here than on the smaller places I post. I still can't believe thousands of you follow this story.

  But, on to the good news.

  But, I've neither died nor given up on writing. For the last few months, I've been writing another Xianxia story (I still have no idea how this became my genre). After Black Myth: Wukong came out, I had the idea of a alcoholic monkey cultivator stuck in my head for a week. So I wrote 1 chapter to get it out of my system, while working on TVDIGU 45. Then I wrote 2 more chapters. Then four more. And then writing TVDIGU kinda fell by the wayside. And, well, here we are, with Between Beast and Buddha at chapter 26 and the end of book 1 in sight.

  You can find it here, if that sounds interesting to you:

  As for the future of TVDIGU:

  I don't want to go into too much detail as to why I went on hiatus. Part of it is that pushing so hard to keep regular chapters while I was working a lot of hours really burned me out in a way that didn't get better even after months of a more reasonable schedule. Part of it is that I'm a perfectionist at heart and this was my first writing project that was this long, with thousands of regular readers. There's a lot that I would like to revisit and improve. Book one (Pre chapter 34ish) opened a lot of plot points and resolved few of them. I'd like to revisit the Elder Li conflict and give that an earlier resolution than what I had planned. The Meti chapter needs to be rewritten entirely, it's just not very good. There's also a fair degree of... call it tonal schizophrenia. A tension between some of the comedic and darker elements that I want to handle better. On top of that, book two has a tremendous number of parts in motion, and my outline needs a great deal of firming up before I'll be confident I can finish it in a reasonable number of chapters without dropping any balls.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  All that goes to say I want to get back to TVDIGU eventually. But it's pretty special to me, and I feel a lot of self imposed pressure to do right by the story I want to tell. I just don't know when it will happen yet. I've been poking at it a bit, but Between Beast and Buddha is my current focus, and I don't know if I'm going to move directly into a second book of that, return to TVDIGU, or fully flesh out one of the other concepts I've been working on.

  Anyway, since people have asked for them on other forums, and because me getting back into this will probably involve substantial edits, I posted the three TVDIGU chapters that were on Patreon after this note. They... Don't not end on a cliffhanger. But they are more content, and the place they leave off is no more cliffhangery than where you were at before.

  Finally, I just wanna say thanks to all of you. Obviously there are no guarantees that stories people post for free on the internet will ever get completed. But I've been burned by as many abandoned works as any of you, and didn't want to be someone who did the same. Whether you're a lurker or commenter, or one of those psychopaths who doesn't even use the follow button and just checks a bookmark every few months. You didn't have to take a chance on this story, and I hope it was worth the time you spent reading it.

  Wishing all of you the best,

  Turniper