Hello everyone!
Thank you for reading my first ever novel and giving it a chance, I hope you find it entertaining.
I've been reading web novels for a while now and I truly have been sent down the rabbit hole and so I thought I'd try my own go at writing one simply because I am bored.
This book is something I have been thinking about for a while now and I am going to write it according to how I want it to be.
After reading a few web novels I felt like a lot of them had great concepts and potential but they either do not execute it well or they just waste it.
That is not to mean no web novel is good, don't get me wrong there are some amazing works on this site and compared to their awesome writing styles I get a feeling mine is going to pretty lacking.
I am writing Vampire Cultivation Odyssey as an epic, and it is heavily inspired by works such as The Innkeeper, Infinite Mana in the Apocalypse, Supreme Magus, Shadow Slave, Cultivation Online, Lord of the Mysteries and Divine Emperor of Death. What I want this book to be is on the same level as those works, and even surpass them in terms of chapters as I am aiming for something similar to chinese web novels where they can go on for 10,000 chapters.
(Speaking of chinese web novels, I have also been inspired by Martial God Asura and Nine Star Hegemon Body Arts. They are pretty good and you should check them out.)
I have also been inspired by stuff like Mushoku Tensei and The Beginning After The End.
I don't want this to be another cliche cultivation novel, I don't want things like the main character being in a race against time to stop the end of the universe.
I want the main character to not be the 'main character' of the universe, he's just another person trying to get by. That is where my Mushoku Tenseu inspiration comes in, I want him to be somewhat similar to Rudeus Greyrat, someone who has connections to people who could be considered 'MC' material but he ultimately is not that guy.
When I read cultivation novels I always get annoyed when the MC arrives just in time to save someone, or he just so happens to make it on time for the 'once in a year alchemy exam', or the 'once in a century secret realm opening'.
Also, a lot of these novels have the main character constantly surrounded by chaos and utter bedlam, they are either always being chased by immensely powerful beings or having to fight a thousand people at once because he just so happened to coincidentally bump into some young master and he took offense which begins a sequence of crazy shenanigans.
That stuff really does bug me. So rest assured, there won't be constant young masters, he won't randomly bump into the city lord's third son and set off a chain reaction that ends in an emperor of a random empire mobilising the entire nation's army to hunt down the MC. In short, the MC will not be a divergent (however he is close to being one... it will all be explained at some point in the novel).
I have everything planned out in terms of systems regarding cultivation, magic, alchemy, etc etc etc. I also have all the lore and general plotline as well.
The scale is going to enermous, there are going to hundreds of different races (beasts, humans, elves, dwarves, demons, devils, titans, undead, eldritches, vampires, werewolves, aliens, AI, angels, spirit races, the classic goblins and orcs, etc etc etc, if you can think of it then they will most likely show up in the novel at some point), different power systems (ie magic and cultivation), billions of different worlds within millions of different universes in the cosmos in which the main character lives in, different layers to the cosmos, e.g. lower universes, upper universes, grand universes and supreme universes.
I want there to be action, adventure, romance, slice of life, horror, tragedy and the such.
Oh, and there is also going to be harem. I know a lot of people really do not like it because a lot of writers do the genre poorly and it most of the time devolves into picking up girls like pokemon cards. I want to avoid that at all costs. However, I believe a harem will be a necessity just due to the fact that the MC will be going around having adventures and attracting the ladies.
The harem I've planned for has a minimum of 4 women and I want to stick to that, but I don't want to tie myself to that number definitively, so a range would be 4-9 girls. However, it will never go double digits because that really is starting to get ridiculous imo, and don't worry, every girl will be fully fleshed out and their own character with a brain (for example, the first woman of the MC is not going to be happy about him getting new women... at all).
In terms of writing smut chapters? I have no idea. Do people who read harem stories consider this an absolute must? I might write it but then again I might not, I mean... what if my family finds out about this in the future and reads it? What if I (somehow) get a girlfriend in the future? Ehh... If the people demand it, I will write it. If the people don't really care about it, then I will probably just hint at it vaguely and skip it.
I suppose all the R-18 stuff will mainly come from the violence and the world the MC is seeing, so there will be stuff such as slavery, torture, sexual assault. All the stuff you would expect from a cultivation world, a world where the strong really do eat the weak.
Want to cite the Geneva Convention to the arrogant young master? He won't care, he'll just order his guards to kill you without even leaving you with an intact corpse!
Mentioning human rights? Truly courting death!
Another thing I want to be different compared to a lot of western novels is the inclusion of the passage of time. Cultivators get to have enermous lifespans and I want to utilise that. I don't want the entire story to exist within a 10 year time frame, I want to take advantage of the MC's ability to live for millions of years. This allows for a lot of calmer moments where the MC can go through his slice of life moments, he can be with his beauties, raise his children, go explore and learn new things, perhaps even create his own clan and raise it and be like a patriarch.
I mean, wouldn't it be cool for the MC to be the hidden and mysterious expert of the family that no one sees but shows up to save his descendant after he offends a powerful expert?
You can even do some fun things like that happen in The Innkeeper, where the MC acts like a mysterious sage to some young cultivators who are going through their own little 'main character' arcs and our MC is just on the sidelines watching it all play out, like a reader to a novel. Those are the sort of things I am interested in.
I don't want there to be any sort of ticking time bomb that rushes the story along, of course there will be moments where the MC is under great pressure and must win a fight. However, these moments will be isolated to the MC's circumstances. I want the scale of the world, the universe to be large and something the readers can get lost in, but I don't want the MC fighting gods or anything... at least not anytime soon and certainly not directly (I think? Again, fighting gods will be really late stage stuff).
Again this is another thing I love about Mushoku Tensei and have been so inspired by it, because Rudeus Greyrat at the end of that story is not fighting Laplace or Man-God, who are the true final villains of that universe, no, instead Rudeus is basically fighting a few of Man-God's henchmen and I really do like that.
Another thing I just came up with just now is having the story continue after the main plot finishes in the same style of Frieren... but again I am getting waaaaaaaaaaaay ahead of myself here because if this ever happened in the novel it would be after chapter 10,000 at the minimum.
Hell, maybe not even that early. After all, there are going to be tens of million lower universes, hundreds of thousands of upper universes, thousands of grand universes and then a few dozen supreme universes (thats where the gods live btw). With the canvas I have set myself up with here I can pretty much do anything I want, its just up to my imagination and keeping things sensible by having it all fit within the rules and power scaling (don't worry about the cultivation system btw, its going to be long and timely system that can't be magically jumped after consuming a special pill or plant, you can't go from mortal to god in just a few cultivation ranks).
And yes there are going to be gods of different pantheons involved (however thats pretty late stage stuff), so I am doing a lot of research into things like Norse and Greek mythology to make sure everything is airtight and I don't have any history fanatics coming for my neck.
I truly am going all out, tbh I think this novel may be the only one I ever write because I have so many different ideas for story arcs that will just go straight in this book.
I know a lot of people are going to be concerned about pacing but rest assured I will do everything I can to avoid filler and padding chapters, I don't want anyone to feel bored and I want them to keep coming back like an addict, I want readers to scream at me in the comments for more novel updates.
Ultimately, all of this depends on my ability to keep myself in check. I don't want to accidently 'blow my load' just a couple thousands of chapters into the novel and have the rest be a wet fart, thats why I'm going to be doing a story arc format where its the MC and his women going from place to place and having their own little stories that for the most part won't heavily affect the rest of the universe. Of course there will be a general and overarching main plot that will occur simultaneously.
Okay, I think I rambled on too much but I'm happy and I think I got my general intent across to you all. If you have any questions please feel free to ask and I will try to answer what I can.
Finally, don't worry about paying me... I mean it would be nice to get paid whilst writing this! But its not essential, I have a job and the reason I'm writing this book is not for money but because I am bored and because this is something I've always thought of whilst day dreaming but has never been truly realised by anyone before.