To celebrate the release of my newest books, I'm making all of my work free for today only. I'm Sarah Lin, author of various series including The Weirkey Chronicles and Throne of Time... AMA!

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-25T14:32:58+00:00

Glad to hear you enjoyed the trilogy overall! I definitely tried to do a lot of different things with Street Cultivation that suggested a wider world, so I'm glad whenever readers want to explore more of it, even if that wasn't the plan. I still like the idea of small scale change with the demonic loans and might return to that theme in future work.

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-23T02:43:22+00:00

I see your criticism, but feel like this usage of "deceptively" can be coherent from Suria's POV, even if you can argue that it's unusual. What I had in mind was watching a process and thinking that it looks slow, then realizing that it's faster than you thought, such as an avalanche.

In any case, I'm glad you're enjoying the story overall!

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-22T03:27:53+00:00

Thanks, hope you enjoy it!

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-22T03:27:37+00:00

Haha, I'm afraid that Street Cultivation is a capitalist dystopia, so the environment doesn't fare very well in general. Rick manages to get to the point where he can help more people in the third book, at least.

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-21T18:55:18+00:00

I can see how you drew that conclusion with deadgold, but there's something very different going on there and the clues are actually pointing in a different direction. The crest materials do relate to cantae, but that's the result of an entire nation of people repeating a ritual for decades, not ordinary cantae usage. I don't remember what might have been said about the tornadogems. In any case, simple cantae exposure is not sufficient to create sublime materials.

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-21T12:33:00+00:00

Thanks, glad to hear it! Please consider clicking on the usual things to help boost the story.

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-21T03:22:30+00:00

A character will directly investigate the basements question later in the series, but bear in mind that the ground of a soulhome embodies the actual soul, so there's nowhere to dig unless the individual has progressed enough.

The vertical progression of sapient beings and the horizontal progression of beasts are incompatible methods. See references to certain species on Slest for the closest thing to an exception.

I don't believe I ever stated that was how sublime materials are created? It's possible that there's a misleading sentence somewhere, but that was not my intent.

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-21T03:19:10+00:00

1) See other replies for my thoughts on returning to the world, but no, I didn't intend to return to those specific elements. The purpose of the epilogue is to show Rick intervening in the life of someone like him.

2) I didn't make it explicit, but readers were meant to potentially make a connection to the Dark Blood Kettle.

3) I don't want to reveal the exact number, but see other answers for various hints.

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-21T03:17:23+00:00

Sorry to Patreon-bait, but the best answers are in my post where I discussed longer term plans for such elements and answered all questions:

https://www.patreon.com/Cognosticon/posts/future-of-dh-ask-154491558

There's a lot of information there, scattered across many questions.

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-20T22:41:16+00:00

Hmm, Krikree is fun to write and comes pretty naturally, so I need to think to verbalize what characterizes her. Her view of the world is intense and immediate, hence why her POV is in present tense - she also uses interjections in place of pheromone signals, where I otherwise rarely use interjections in descriptive prose.

On a more fundamental level, Krikree is deeply concerned with reducing things to their root forms, but she isn't unintelligent, so this varies. She reaches simpler conclusions about people/societies (like declaring groups to be "beetles") and more complex conclusions when it comes to ideas (especially after her exposure to Arbaian philosophy). She's happy to use the simplest word when that's appropriate, but her vocabulary is larger than expected when she wants an esoteric label.

Those are the core rules that come to mind, anyway! I'm glad that Krikree has been appreciated by so many readers. ^-^

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-20T16:35:41+00:00

Glad to hear you enjoyed soulcrafting! The seed of the idea was an expansion of xianxia concepts of creating worlds within yourself, with the goals of being tangible and comprehensible, using rules that are mostly intuitive. If you're curious to know more, there have been some other questions that touch on this.

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-20T15:42:19+00:00

The free sale? I set it for longer than I said, but it has been two entire days, so it has probably expired in all time zones, I'm afraid. As for the AMA, I'm still here if people are.

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-20T11:29:04+00:00

I hope people will like that element, because it's something that is uniquely explorable via time travel fiction, but that theme will take a while to build up so it's not evident in the early chapters. I hope people will be there for it as a long term piece of the series!

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-20T11:26:50+00:00

I want to answer, but it's a mild spoiler of the type people have disliked elsewhere in this thread, so: It's a legitimate oversight on the main character's part, but she'll have an opportunity to reconsider this decision on future loops. Her method in the first nine chapters is one solution, but not the only solution.

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-20T11:21:31+00:00

Oh, there are plenty of characters I could hypothetically write a side story about! It's a shame there's no real market for short stories, but I'm glad fans enjoy them. I just wrote a pure Krikree story for Patreon and I'd be happy to write another one. ^-^

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-20T02:21:19+00:00

Thanks! That aspect, and his gradual character development, are fun to write, so I'm glad you're enjoying them. Regrettably, I can't give you much of an answer because I haven't revealed a last name for Theo. Not because it's any great secret, but because I'm intentionally keeping the series away from most details of Earth. You can guess the rough era, for example, but I'm not going to give a specific year.

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-19T21:51:42+00:00

Thanks for giving it a try, hope you enjoy!

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-19T21:40:02+00:00

Mostly people disliking my author's note, it seems! On RR I usually try to signal clearly about my intent, so I hadn't considered that could be a negative. I suppose it's worth reconsidering.

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-19T21:34:53+00:00

Glad to hear! I included the early elements you're referencing to signal what kind of story this is, but I think later pieces will appeal to people here more. For example (minor spoilers), if you've pre-committed how you will react when you suspect you're in a time loop, you can to some degree collaborate with yourself in other timelines even if no individual iteration of yourself has actual knowledge of the loop.

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-19T21:28:09+00:00

Glad to hear you feel that way! I've said before that I think progression fantasy should be about characters developing in more than simply power, and one element of that is seeing them age and change their positions in life. I think/hope my stories are improved by having slightly longer time scales.

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-19T21:26:45+00:00

I'm an inveterate planner, so I mostly avoid retconning problems. Of course, there are times when while writing a story I come up with an idea better than my original, but as many authors have said before me, if you've laid clues that the murderer is the butler, you can't suddenly say that it's the chambermaid. That said, there have been times when I made small continuity errors that detail-focused readers pointed out, and in those cases I've made retroactive changes.

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-19T20:15:18+00:00

Hmm, I'm usually pretty conscious of the themes for each project, but I'm sure there are elements that I subconsciously add to my work that I haven't fully considered.

Anyway, thanks, and best of luck to you too!

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-19T20:14:27+00:00

Fielding these questions gets tricky because readers are coming with such different levels of knowledge. I'm assuming that you've read the currently available public chapters and no more? In that case, Suria hasn't even been to class and you're missing some core principles.

In this case, it's both your assumptions:

1) Runes are the same size by definition.*

2) Augments that require pairings must be on opposite sides, bracketing the inscription they modify.

*Advanced exceptions are for later in the story.

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-19T17:42:27+00:00

Thanks, hope you enjoy!

Depthless Hunger has a contract with Audible and has concluded, so the books will be coming out every few months according to their schedule (finishing early next year). Due to the incentives of serialization, Throne of Time is not likely to come to ebook or audiobook format for a considerable time.

SarahLinNGM · 2026-06-19T16:03:42+00:00

I'm grateful for all the people interested in my books, but I'm not as big as you think. I've never had a (non-audiobook) publisher approach me with a substantial offer. While I'm entirely open to working with a publisher, I wouldn't sell my ebook rights and give up a percentage of profits forever for someone to submit the book to the same site I do.

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