Final Announcement: REWRITE CAUGHT-UP
Hey! Rustpen here. The first arc of the rewrite, Fate Unraveled, ended yesterday, at chapter 29, meaning it’s now caught up with the original. (You can check it out by clicking here, but I recommend reading through the announcement below first.)
Now, for those of you who’ve already checked out the rewrite but didn’t enjoy it, and for those who have been waiting until it’s caught up, I’ve decided to clarify some things, to give you guys a better idea of what to expect, based on the feedback I’ve gotten so far from UT readers who’ve read the FU.
First of all, the prologue. It really doesn’t seem to have much of a connection to Unfortunate Transmigrator, so if you were to judge by it alone, you’d think that it’s a completely different story. Everything after it, though, is very much so in line with UT. Chapter 1 of the rewrite pretty much perfectly parallels chapter 1 of UT, and so does the plot as a whole. For a more thorough overview of the plot—and assuming you don’t mind being some light spoilers—check out the spoiler tag below.
To start with, you get a mission gone wrong, with the inner disciple leading their mission trying to assassinate the protagonist’s teammate. That leads to the protagonist mysteriously regaining his memories of his previous life, realizing that his teammate is special, and deciding that he wants to follow him around to get to the bottom of things. Following that, a bunch of disciples get sent to a forest to hunt monsters.
There, during the hunt, the protagonist’s team is ambushed. They end up escaping, with the protagonist’s teammate mysteriously leading them to a cave, where they find a special weapon that only answers to the protagonist’s teammate. Then we have a final show-down with the overarching villain of the arc who wants the protagonist’s teammate dead.
Ultimately, despite the differences, Fate Unraveled is very much so a rewrite of Unfortunate Transmigrator. I rewrote Unfortunate Transmigrator because I felt like the vision I had for the story when I was writing the later chapters was very different from the one I had in the beginning, when I was starting out (back then, I wanted a simple story I could write to unwind, without really caring about quality). You see, two years ago, I decided that I didn’t want UT to just be a derivative, uninspired story that was carried mostly by its characters anymore. I wanted it to be a complete work; I wanted it to have it all: plot, setting, and character. That’s how Fate Unraveled came about.
Now, if you liked UT’s main cast (Hao Zhen, Tian Jin and Lan Yue), I’m afraid that Hao Zhen (now Jieyuan) and Tian Jin (now Daojue) have changed considerably. Some readers liked those changes; others… haven’t (to summarize, Jieyuan is far more competent and ambitious, whereas Tian Jin is more of a traditional xianxia protagonist: ruthless, cold, aloof—or at least that’s how he appears to be so far hint, hint). And that’s perfectly fair. On the other hand, Lan Yue’s counterpart in Fate Unraveled, Meiyao, is much closer to her original version than the other two, so if you liked Lan Yue in particular, you should also like Meiyao in Fate Unraveled.
The rewrite is also still as character-driven as Unfortunate Transmigrator, even if you wouldn’t think so based on the first arc. That’s because I wanted to be more realistic about things, so the protagonist doesn’t immediately connect to his teammates like he does in Unfortunate Transmigrator. But further down the line? My character work is what I’m most proud of in this story, even more so than the plotting and the world-building. Arc 3 (which I’m currently publishing on Patreon) should show that off the most, because at that point the scope of the story opens up to include a lot of other characters and explores their connections to each other.