Hello everyone! Sorry for missing the February update. My dad had another stroke and I’m much busier at home than before. Things here have been so overwhelming that—

1000 Lotuses Part 3 Has a New Release Date

Part 3 is now set to launch on May 29th.

The following excerpts may differ slightly from final release.

After recovering from her mad scramble to Mingdao Temple, Zhang Suming takes an interest in the heavenly tribulation sealed on the mountain, while her sister will need some time and careful attention from the exorcist Ouyang Chakou before she can fight off the flesh-eating hex. And it turns out that the healer Zhang Chenghua is a bit of a handful when it’s her turn to be the patient…

“No one told you it was safe to leave your bed.”

“Daozhang, I’m a physician, and I know my body.”

“Go back to bed,” Ouyang Chakou calmly ordered.

“Daozhang, I—”

“Bed. Now.”

“Daozhang…” Zhang Chenghua dropped her voice to a near whisper. She knew her sister could still hear, but she didn’t care. And for good measure, she let a wicked smirk peek from the corner of her mouth, with a matching sparkle in her eyes. “When a pretty girl insists that I go to bed, it usually means she’ll follow me there in short order.”

Because the disciples couldn’t hear this, they had no idea what to make of what they saw next.

Ouyang Chakou quickly raised her sleeve over her mouth, while Zhang Suming slipped into the residence hall with her fists clenched at her sides. The delicate, perfectly diffused redness of Ouyang Chakou’s nose and cheeks inspired more wicked thoughts in Zhang Chenghua, and she was about to conjure up a proposition even bolder than the last when Zhang Suming burst into the room, scooped her up by the armpits, and flung her onto the bed with enough force that Ouyang Chakou was briefly concerned.

“You’ve only recovered a third of your vital essence!” Zhang Suming roared so loudly that the disciples who couldn’t see inside the room were convinced that she had shifted to her tiger aspect. “Can you take your situation the least bit seriously?”

Ouyang Chakou burrows deep into her shell, determined not to show any signs of weakness to this scoundrel…

She straightened up and thoughtlessly placed her hands on her hips just so they’d have somewhere to be. Ouyang Chakou turned her head slightly to the side. Zhang Chenghua also glanced that way, and she found nothing amiss. “Daozhang, did you see something?”

“I was mistaken,” she mumbled.

“Ah, but you kept looking over there, so I thought…”

Zhang Chenghua’s voice trailed off, choked out by the revelation that Ouyang Chakou doesn’t want to look at me.

But what happens when Ouyang Chakou has no choice but to seek help from the jianghu physician? Find out in the Part 3 preview…

And After Part 3…

This little webnovel of mine has an anticipated length of about fifteen parts, which will be collected in five volumes. The release of Part 3 will bring us to the end of Volume I. My goal is to release Part 4 about four months after Part 3, and I hope to continue releasing installments every four months after that.

While parts are only available on LotusCarp’s itch.io, each volume will be released as an ebook on itch.io AND other storefronts. Volumes will also be available as PRINT books! They will include bonus materials like character rosters and interior art.

Itch.io makes it possible for readers who’ve already purchased all individual parts of a volume to automatically access the volume ebook for free when it drops. (The Volume I ebook will be priced lower than the rest because Part 1 is free). If you like downloading and reading 1000 Lotuses one novella at a time, you won’t have to pay extra for the compilation volumes as long as you’re downloading them from itch. If you prefer the experience of sitting down with a longer book, you might want to wait for the volumes to drop. Any corrections made post-publication will be reflected in all applicable files.

Compilation volumes will not be produced until I can afford a professional proofreader and cover illustrator. The ko-fi goal is currently at 13%.

Yes, I saw ko-fi’s soft-on-AI policy, no, I don’t know where else to go at the moment.

A Word About Ratings/Reviews

1000 Lotuses still isn’t indexed on itch.io and may never be. The website’s search engine does not pull it up, even for logged-in adult users. If you like 1000 Lotuses and want more people to hear about it, I’m counting on your help! Tell your friends! Post on your socials! Readers have added the first installment to Goodreads and Storygraph, and you can leave ratings and comments on itch.io too. Everything counts!

EDIT: Since sending this newsletter earlier today, I found out that Part 1 has also materialized on Pagebound.

Now, if only Goodreads would stop rejecting my attempts to claim my author page. I swear I am following all the instructions >:(

That’s all for this month. Back to work!