AFTERWORD

Good day, good evening, good morning. I am the author, Hinagi Asami. Thank you very much for picking up a copy of The Otherworlder, Exploring the Dungeon. I cannot say if you are reading this after or before purchase, or if perhaps you have followed the story from its days on the Web. It would also be impossible for me to know whether you are reading it now or have already read it and in what time period that might be occurring. Maybe you fished this out of the devastated ruins left in the wake of nuclear warfare or some such disaster.

In any event, I am grateful to have this story as a published book. Even if I keeled over tomorrow, this book would still remain. I mean, it would still be on the Web also, but that’s that and this is this. They’re pretty different animals.

In the process of making this book, I did some major correcting and revising on the original work. It’s incredible how many flaws I found in something I’d had quite a bit of confidence in when I’d originally published it. I would like to thank my editor and proofreaders for their help with this. I’m also grateful to the illustrator, Kureta, for creating the wonderful illustrations within, to all the members of the video game and planning and book editing departments, and to every one of our collaborators.

And yet, the only reason I managed to publish this book at all was thanks to the supporters who left me their encouraging comments while I serialized this story online. You have my deepest, deepest gratitude. I would be even more grateful to new readers who buy and support my work.

If I had to say what kind of book this is, I’d say it’s a light novel whose main theme is irony. There is one other hidden theme, but well, it would be tacky for me to point it out in something I wrote myself, so I will seal my lips for all of eternity on that point.

I’ve worked some near-future sci-fi elements into a tale similar to those in the reincarnation fantasy genre. However, there will be no reincarnation. There are no cheat codes. I’ve done everything I could to exclude any video game aspects such as skills or status details. This book appears to be one of those recently common fantasy stories but is actually something a little different. I went into this intending to write a story about following the noble path, but based on the reviews and feedback I get from others, it appears it may be a novel about going down the road to evil.

This story won first prize in the Dragon Book Up-and-Coming Authors Fantasy Novel Contest. It’s an honor I don’t deserve. Honestly, I thought I’d been scammed. That’s how surreal it felt.

I started off with this nebulous dream of becoming an author one day and wrote stories I meant to be like novels. Looking back on it now, I don’t think I did a good job of it at all. But apparently, I don’t like to give up easily, and the longer I kept at it, the more the stories turned into something approaching a novel. The longer I kept writing vaguely novel-like books, the more novelish those stories became. Comments and reviews I received spurred me on, until finally, thanks to this first-place award, I was able to turn this story into a real novel.

No matter what you do, the longer you do it, the more you will grow. I have no doubt about this. It’s all about spirit and guts.

I’d like to express my deepest and utmost thanks to everyone who has collaborated with me on this novel—and to those who will continue to do so in the future. If I’m lucky enough to have a second, I look forward to working with you again.

 

 

 

This book is a revised and edited version of “The Otherworlder, Exploring the Dungeon,” the first prize–winning story in the 2018 Dragon Book Up-and-Coming Authors Fantasy Novel Contest.