Preface To my dad

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  It’s a moment that comes in every long march—whether literal or metaphorical. When you look down at your own legs, pumping your own legs, and you can’t really explain why they keep moving. Muscle, sure. Habit, maybe. But sometimes, it’s memory. Sometimes it’s a promise you made to someone who can’t march beside you.

  Endless March Online was born in that moment. I wrote it as a thought experiment, a fever dream where endurance became a kind of morality, and motion itself is the only proof you’re still alive. The premise sounds simple: a VRMMO where stopping means death. But under the sand, the drones, the game loops, it’s really about people. The way they cling to each other when systems stop making sense, the way empathy survives even when the world wants to turn it into spectacle.

  If you peel back the game code, you’ll find my influences hiding like buried power lines.

  Stephen King’s The Long Walk is the obvious ancestor: a story where forward motion becomes a kind of religion. Black Mirror added its own circuitry and surveillance: the idea that cruelty can be monetized and mistaken for entertainment. And somewhere between the two, I wanted to build a totalitarian simulation that reflects the way we live online now: how we perform pain for clicks, how systems claim to measure our worth, how algorithms decide who deserves a sip of water and who gets culled for lagging behind.

  But that’s just the framework. The real heartbeat of this story isn’t code or commentary—it’s a conversation I had with my father when I was seventeen.

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  My dad was a practical man. He worked hard, spoke few words, and believed in doing things right or not at all. One afternoon, he asked me the question every parent asks sooner or later: What do you want to do after high school?

  I remember hesitating. Not because I didn’t know, but because I thought the answer would disappoint him. College was the obvious route. Stability. A degree. But I told him the truth anyway: I want to write.

  There was a pause so long, I could hear the refrigerator hum. I braced for the talk about how writing doesn’t pay bills, how dreams need backup plans, how reality bites. But instead, he just asked, “Are you sure that’s what you want to do?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  Another pause. Then he exhaled and said, almost casually, “Well… don’t half-ass it.”

  That was it. No speech, no conditions, no lectures. Just a short sentence that hit like a spark plug in my chest. Don’t half-ass it.

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  It was his blessing, and his challenge at the same time. A father’s way of saying: If you’re going to do it, do it with everything you’ve got. Put some leverage behind it. Get some horsepower under it. Own it.

  Those words stuck. They became a mantra, an internal metronome I’ve tried to keep pace with ever since.

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  When he passed away two years ago, the world went quiet for a while. Grief has a strange way of distorting time: Days drag, months blur, and before you know it, two years have gone by and you’re still measuring your life in the spaces someone else used to fill.

  Today, the day I’m writing this preface, marks that anniversary—his death day. I don’t know exactly when Endless March Online will launch; Royal Road has its review queue and waiting periods, and this thing might take forty-eight hours or more. But to me, this is the date that matters. This is the day the words hit the page. This is the day I keep pace with him again.

  Because this story—the endless road, the walkers who refuse to stop, the idea that mercy itself can be rebellion—all of that began with a man telling his son not to half-ass his dream.

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  In a way, my dad’s advice became the philosophy of this world. The marchers keep moving not because they expect reward, but because stopping would betray everything they’ve already survived. They find meaning in motion, purpose in persistence. Every mile hurts; every step costs something. But they keep going anyway because to keep going is to honor what came before.

  When I wrote Riven, the protagonist, I imagined someone who measures redemption in steps: a man who believes that if he just keeps moving, maybe the world will forgive him. When I wrote Ox, Nyx, and Kite, I was really writing fragments of what my dad taught me about endurance, ethics, and compassion. And when I created Rook—the predator streamer who turns suffering into content—that was me confronting the part of the world that does half-ass things for attention, that mistakes spectacle for sincerity.

  This book isn’t just science fiction or litRPG; it’s an argument against apathy. It’s my attempt to prove that decency, persistence, and humanity can be just as thrilling as violence or victory. It’s a story about people who keep walking even when the system tells them to quit, who invent kindness as a survival skill, who turn endurance into defiance.

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  Writing it was my own version of the march. Some nights I wanted to quit. Some days the words felt like gravel in my teeth. But I kept hearing him—Don’t half-ass it.

  So I didn’t.

  I wrote through the exhaustion, through the doubt, through the grief that comes in quiet waves when you least expect it. Every paragraph was another mile, another breath, another small act of faith that stories can still mean something.

  And now, as I prepare to share it with whoever finds it—whether you’re here for the world-building, the action, the characters, or just curiosity—I hope you feel a little of that heartbeat too. The one that says: keep going.

  This isn’t just a game world. It’s a metaphor for surviving grief, for carrying forward what can’t be replaced. It’s about walking toward something that may never end but refusing to stop anyway.

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  Dad, wherever you are, this one’s for you.

  You told me not to half-ass it. I didn’t. I’m still walking.

  Thank you for believing in me before I even believed in myself.

  And to anyone reading this—if you’ve ever had someone give you that kind of faith, honor it. Keep going. Take the next step. Solve the mile in front of you.

  — Fierce-Energies Author of Endless March Online