Two things: the battle and the timeline.

[1] Combat

As for how magical battles should be fought—including both skirmishes involving a handful of units and large-scale warfare—I gave the matter some deliberate thought. My conclusion is as follows:

Although this is, in a sense, a pseudo-D&D novel, I may borrow elements from D&D for the sake of spectacle and ease of understanding, but I will not follow its rules in full.

There are several reasons for this:

1. For the sake of readability, I should choose spells that are well known, commonly found in fantasy stories, and simple enough to understand.

Rather than spells that may be powerful but come from obscure expansions, or magic that depends on complicated game mechanics and is too cumbersome to explain within a fictional setting. For example, magic built around turn-based concepts such as actions and rounds.

2. Within the rules, many strategies with excellent cost-effectiveness are actually extremely insular, interaction-averse, and counterintuitive.

This is true of many games: the more self-contained a strategy is, the less it relies on outside conditions, and the harder it is to counter, the stronger it tends to be. But that runs contrary to what a story requires.

As the saying goes, real-world business warfare is crude and overwhelming, like smashing a brick with sheer force; business warfare in stories is a chain of interlocking schemes, full of twists and turns!

Suppose the protagonist could simply remain at home, never interact with the outside world at all, and grow ever stronger by repeatedly casting certain spells, while steadily increasing the number of units under his control. In the game, this behavior is called “card farming.”

Then what would be the point of developing an empire?

He might as well hide away and farm cards for twenty thousand years.

In summary, for the sake of making the story easy to read, I will do my best to write battles that are reasonable within the setting, consistent with the logic of the real world, and relatively easy to understand. As the story gradually unfolds and the empire becomes more advanced, I may try introducing more abstract forms of warfare.

………………

[2] The Passage of Time

Let me talk about the passage of time in this book.

The book is called Twenty Thousand Years of the Magic Empire. Obviously, it would be impossible to write about every single year.

Just as in cultivation novels, the first month may be described in great detail, while later on, a single secluded cultivation session might last a thousand years.

The story is currently set in the empire’s first year—the first year of renewal, the beginning of all things, the first spring and autumn of a difficult undertaking that will open the way into the wilderness. Accordingly, the narrative will be more detailed for now, with each time skip covering only two months.

Later, the story will begin leaping forward by ten years, twenty years, one hundred years, or even five hundred years at a time. As the empire develops, the timeline will advance ever more rapidly.

To a five-year-old child, one year is an entire fifth of a long life; to a middle-aged person, one year passes in the blink of an eye. Summer insects cannot speak of ice. Once we grow powerful enough, the scale of the years becomes relatively insignificant.

…………

The theme of this book is one I am deeply fond of—perhaps the one I have liked most during the more than two years I have spent writing.

I hope I can do this story justice.