Her eyes flicked towards the corpse of the dead guard. She did not say anything but the offer was there. Then, as if that offhand suggestion was insignificant, she turned her back to me and started rummaging around in her pack.

I didn’t care what she was looking for. After all my efforts not to linger on it, she had irrevocably drawn my attention to the corpse. I could not look away any more. It was there. I needed it. The Honey-blood had offered it to me. She had offered me another human being as food, without thinking twice about it, simply because I had asked.

And I had asked.

Whoops, I've been neglecting this place a bit in terms of progress reports on volume two. Time to rectify that. Yes, there have been delays and rewrites while I wrangle with the vast complexity of the second volume. But I can assure you, volume two is still happening. Here's a quick rundown of the progress so far:

Volume two ballooned from my initial estimate of 80k words to something much closer to a massive 160k words. That's a lot. Twice as long as volume one was. It's too much to prepare in advance. It would simply take too long. So I've split the second volume into two halves. The first draft of the first half is complete. The snippet above is from that first draft. I am now working on the second draft.

I initially promised an epilogue/side story shortly after the completion of volume one. I had to postpone that as it needed tighter integration with volume two. Now that I have a good grasp on all the details of volume two, the first draft of this side story (10k words / 6 chapters) has been written as well. There as well I am now working on the second draft. Here's a snippet from the side chapter for good measure:

She probably considered me her friend. And that… friendship? Such a wild concept. I’d never had friends before.

There have been a lot of small edit suggestions and spelling/grammar corrections. I've worked through most of those and combined them with my own corrections. I'll apply the last of these corrections to my master doc somewhere in the coming months and then update the chapters here to match. Sorry if I didn't reply to your edit suggestions personally, and sorry that I left them for so long. I do appreciate all of them. It is merely that processing them in bulk like this is a little easier for me.

I've learned a lot more about cover design. A much neater cover has been designed for volume two, and the cover for volume one has been redone to match. The updated volume one cover is what's currently on the story. The volume two cover can be seen below.

And finally, and most importantly, the new timeline: I hope to begin posting the side story somewhere in January or February 2023. It will be going up at a very sedate pace, 1 chapter every 3 or 4 weeks probably. This will give me until May or June to finish up the first half of volume two. Once I finally start posting volume two it will be at the same fast release schedule as volume one.