Hello, so this is a little author's note before we start the story. I have been meaning to write a crossover with LOTM for so long, but the number of details Cuttlefish put into this story makes it hard to write without fully reading it.
There is also the fact that there is an extreme case of "causality" with Lord of The Mysteries, which is why you cannot just make a character and induce some changes and think it is enough to make a good fanfic.
Making a mediocre fanfic with mediocre knowledge is not a bad thing, I suppose, when you are doing just a fanservice, but Lord of The Mysteries is one of the things that I read religiously. So, I want to do this masterpiece some justice.
And I have now finally read both LOTM (10/10) and COI (8/10)
The Pathway selection for Kiyotaka was a hard one, I won't lie. There were so many good options such as the Red Priest Pathway with Demoness Pathway neighboring it from the Calamity of Destruction Group, as well as The Black Emperor Pathway and Justiciar Pathway from The Anarchy group or The Hanged Man pathway from God Almighty Group.
There were also The Fool, The Error and The Door pathways looking straight at me from the LOTM Group.
But in the end, I decided to torture myself over it and went with the hardest route, because why not, we all hate ourselves, lol.
This is the first volume out of about 2? 3? Since each original volume of LOTM is packed with so much content, it is hard to cramp everything into 80-100 chapters. And if I make a single fanfic of around 200 chapters, it will scare away new readers.
So, what I "might" do is that volume 1 will be turned into this book, and then the coverage of the other volumes will be done in other books that will be published independently.
Either a link will be provided, or you can join the discord server to keep track with the future uploads.
Or I can just publish all chapters into a single book, idk. This is merely a thought, or perhaps a question from all of you regarding which approach you would prefer. This would be the only thing I will be taking input from the readers in.
Chapter 1 will be published on December 1, 2025.
I am releasing this author note beforehand so you can at least have a confirmed date for the release. I have enough backlog to not worry about anything. The upload schedule will be 1 chapter a week.
Although, I have to apologise in advance as Chapter 1 to 10 are rather small (averaging at around 3-3.5K words. After 10, the word count increases by 1K, and capping at 7.5K to 8K words per chapter. If I feel like the content is too less in the earlier chapters while proofreading it, then I will make sure to release two chapters a week.
But once we reach the 5K words territory, it will go back to single upload a week.
The reason why I am taking so long is that I don't want to drop it due to reader feedback. A lot of times, I have changed my decisions, ships, and plotline to satisfy a certain group of people. It was because I was too greedy for views.
That would eventually lead me to drop the story as the direction would make very dissatisfied with everything. In some cases, they constant criticism made me drop it (cough... Danmachi... cough)
With that said, in the era of steam and machinery, the one who had no knowledge about the world of horrors or mysticism, tried to battle his way to the top. The one who started at the bottom and then attempted to become The One Above Everything.
This is the story of the Sovereign of Blight, The Hideous Emperor.