Chapter 2 is here

I wanted to thank the readers, again, for joining me in this story. I honestly didn't think many people would be interested in this kind of story. GA is not AO3, there's fan-fictions and historical fantasy, but they are localized to select topics and genres. I have yet to see any East Asian Fantasy story, nor fan fictions from popular non-western stories on GA. I hope I am opening people's minds and eyes to the vast cultural landscape of gay fiction from a different corner of the world, maybe inspire readers and authors to do some more exploration of their own.

As for chapter 2, I wanted to showcase the characters' personalities as I interpret them from my readings of their respective stories. For Xie and Hua from Heaven Official's Blessing, they are very different: Xie is more introspective at times with lifetimes of suffering and pain in his experiences, while Hua is far brasher and tricky with how he handles others as he lost his mother in his human life, along with his father and stepmother mistreating him as a child. I think as parents they represent the 2 sides of the "reason"-based parenting style and the "tough love"-based style based on their different experiences.

Sun Wukong in my interpretation as a child is highly intelligent, adaptable, and cynical. He was born out of the seemingly endless human suffering that he absorbed as a celestial stone. To most western viewers of the classic TV series "Monkey" based on Journey to the West, he's a comical and cunning character, but to readers of the original novel, he's a nuanced character. He was a child, who grew up around suffering, but he was intelligent enough to understand that this should not be how the world should be. His intelligence though is what should show through his character, he can make good plans and goals.

A few minor details: I made a few in-jokes for the readers of Heaven Official's Blessing, Xie is well renowned for his bad cooking, causing several gods in the story to fall deathly ill (despite being immortals) and when he attempts to make alterations with sewing needles, he creates crimes against fashion  For readers of Journey to the West, Sun Wukong's peach adventure and the mention of Xiwangmu are nods to his famous scene in the story, where he goes up to her garden and snatched hundreds of her prized immortal peaches, which would grant immortality to anyone who ate them (he was already immortal by the time of eating these, so it just made him even more powerful and unkillable). Another lesser-known fact about Sun Wukong that I referenced, he's not adept at swimming. In order for him to enter water and perform several of his famous feats in the novel, he had to use magic to transform himself or the water around him, basically manipulating matter/reality, in order for him to defeat Ocean gods or river demons. As child, Sun Wukong without magic would be far more susceptible to his issues around water.

Hope my readers enjoyed this chapter, let's see what the reaction is, and maybe I'll write the third chapter soon. I did not expect this story to generate many readers and was thinking it would just be a one-off project. If readership rises to equal to or greater than my most well received story True as It Can Be's 45 followers, I'll consider making it a weekly publishing schedule and extending the story into a large-scale novel. I don't think it will be that well received, but I will offer it to fans as a possibility.