A few months ago, due to a moment of poor judgment, I found myself sitting on the road, leaning against the greenery behind me. It took me an hour to realize that I couldn’t get back up; my phone was not far away, bent at an odd angle. I never imagined what kind of changes this would bring to my life; it was just another unexpected moment. I sat there until dusk.

Every time a car passed by, I would pull my legs in.

It was a strange feeling, sitting in a place where few have sat before, viewing the world from an unusual angle, observing people who, no matter how you describe them, would never understand what you see in that moment.

No matter who you are, sitting here in such a state, the world won’t pay you any mind.

It’s sad, yet for some reason, I found great pleasure in this feeling. A friend referred to my aimless musings as the weakness of the flesh and the madness of the heart. Ultimately, this changed my life; my thoughts always seemed to travel far, as if grasping onto something eternal, while my body began to rot before it even set off, rendering me utterly useless.

I loved this feeling, not realizing it would follow me for a long time to come.

After that incident, there was a period when I felt I had all the opportunities in the world, and I had cleverly learned how to choose. I no longer felt anxious about the multitude of temptations; making choices became effortless. Once I decided, I would go all out, relentlessly pushing until even the wrong things became right.

This was definitely a step forward; I used to linger indecisively, but I finally found myself atop a mountain, observing the changes of the world. Then, in an instant, God kicked me down from my self-satisfied choices to a place where I felt unworthy of having anything. I not only fell into a blinding light but fell harder than the average person.

Long ago, I used to find joy in recounting bizarre and humorous experiences, even using them as conversation starters, sharing stories with anyone who would listen. A normal event would be told with twists and turns, and during my school days, everyone enjoyed hearing jokes. As I grew up, my friends would laugh but gradually began to distance themselves.

“Xu Lei always encounters strange things; he’s unreliable.” This sentiment probably started circulating around that time.

Telling jokes was fine, but collaboration was out of the question.

Thus, I became an eternal topic of conversation for others.

I was happy with this; seeing you all laugh brought me joy. I still hoped to share stories, seemingly caught between awkward and amusing situations every day, meeting strange people, saying odd things, and yearning for misadventures: getting lost, flat tires, rain and snow, driving in foggy mountains, watching trucks fall off cliffs… Life is only fun when it’s full of unpredictability.

Writers can be incredibly boring.

Unfortunately, I realized I was mistaken about something: what I have experienced and longed to experience isn’t called unpredictability. In the soup of life, they are merely a sprinkle of pepper at the end, not even enough to be considered a real seasoning.

True unpredictability is something people are reluctant to share, unwilling to become fodder for others’ conversations.

I incorporated my experiences from that time into the end of “Sand Sea 2” during its online serialization. You can see a member of the Li clan lying at the bottom of a tomb, in a place known to no one, thinking about things he can no longer do, and constantly wanting to leave and move forward, yet feeling powerless. This battered person is saved by an unspeakable being, yet he is once again trapped by fate. What he finds most despairing is that he knows no one will come to save him, neither Wu Xie nor the person who carried him out of the secret chamber.

In fact, my purpose in writing novels has always been quite singular. The early part of “Tomb Raider Notes” was to create a story that everyone would enjoy; the later part was to become a writer that everyone likes. “Desert Wolf” was meant to prove that I could be liked for my content without using a pen name. And “Sand Sea”? I wrote it to provide more material and possibilities for the world of “Tomb Raider Notes.” Of course, the story also had to be engaging.

When I was writing “Sand Sea 1,” all my memories were not very clear. At that time, under various pressures, including the initial serialization, I used the manuscript of “The Tomb of the Stabbing” to fill in. At that time, my rejection of the narrative structure of “Tomb Raider Notes,” my desire to explore a new style and write new tasks, along with various grievances with my collaborators, created many contradictions. By the time I finished writing, I didn’t even know how I had done it. When I read it myself, I couldn’t feel the sense of control I had during my previous writing—not in terms of controlling characters, but in controlling the words.

A friend who finished reading “Sand Sea” described the entire series by saying, “Painful, truly painful. Publishing is like a horse; at first, you were running alongside it, then you kept pace with it, and eventually, you were knocked down and dragged by the horse. By the time you reached ‘Sand Sea 1,’ you had been dragged all the way along, and your elbows were almost worn down to nothing.”

I didn’t notice this at the time because I had lost my sense of language. When reading “Sand Sea 1,” I couldn’t immerse myself in the plot and found it hard to step out of it. I was just panicking, facing a blank page and not knowing what to do. This feeling persisted throughout the subsequent process, including most of the online serialization. I noticed that I began to be unwilling to tell a story and was merely piecing together a timeline. Before I kneeled down to “Sand Sea 2,” I could only sense that something was wrong, but I couldn’t articulate it. It wasn’t until I revised “Sand Sea 2” for the third time that I realized where the problem lay.

Later, I went through it again. This is the version you see now. I have never been completely satisfied with a novel, and this one is no exception, but at least it won’t leave me feeling cold in the middle of the night.

In the past, when reading the “Kindaichi” series of mystery novels, I seriously appreciated Kindaichi’s battle against humanity until I reached a book featuring a monster with a human brain and an ape’s body (named Baron Monster). I suddenly jumped out of the narrative, and then I graduated from “Kindaichi.” I felt that the system had been broken. I never understood why Seishi Yokomizo suddenly wrote a novel that destroyed the worldview. Later, when I created “Sand Sea” and positioned it as a youth story, I began to understand Yokomizo’s thoughts for the first time.

Writing realistic novels is really difficult. When there’s a bit of fantasy involved, the constraints loosen significantly. Additionally, there’s a side effect related to the age range of the readers. This can bridge the generational gap between new and old readers.

When “The Eagle’s Nest Incident” was released in Japan, it became very popular and created a strong cultural phenomenon among teenagers.

“Sand Sea 1” sold very well, even better than “The Grave Robbers’ Chronicles.” I felt anxious and worked hard to revise “Sand Sea 2.” After the editor read it, she let out a worried sigh, expressing her preference for the style of “Sand Sea 1.”

As a result, I felt that my mental health issues had worsened again.