Well, it's been about two weeks without updates and I feel no motivation to continue writing. It's not entirely due

Summaries(chapters 37+):

Spoiler :

Chapter 37-40

-The demon pushed off the edge climbs up one of the chains while on fire, creating a large ruckus until being kicked back down by the guy on stage. This is part of the show for the people, to reinforce the thought that these people who truly demons and criminals.

-A boat is dragged up by the chains from the pit. The people were sacrificed to the pit and the pit rewarded them with an essential part of their livelihood. After this, temperatures start to go back down and some people go onstage to grab the boat and bring it off somewhere else.

-When the boat is unloaded from the chains, the onstage guy gets a light cut on his hand but the entire city shakes a bit when this happens.

Side note: At this point, I might've gone back to edit 35 and 36 to make it so some of the criminals onstage are missing eyes or have it so some just have their eyes removed rather than pushed off. The point of this is to demonstrate that blindness correlates to someone who does crime in the city.

-Further traveling, find more demons hiding in plain sight and a lot more blind and disabled people on every corner. Some of the demons tag along with them as they head towards some sort of back alley.

-Merchant in the alley selling weapons with an assistant. He passes the weapons to the demons but seems to realize what they are, frowning with each weapon sale while the assistant is happy about all the profit.

-Payment for the weapons is a mix of coins, goods, and the tortoise... Yeah, so much for camaraderie. Demons run off heavily armed to cause trouble in the city while the merchant immediately leaves the city. They take the tortoise with them, dragging it off to a distant land.

-As they travel into the distance, the merchant suddenly grabs the assistant and tells him to not look back. The entire city explodes in a volcanic eruption, struck down in an instant while a wave of heat and dust went outward.

-The merchant lifts up a heavy blanket, knowing this would happen to cover himself and the assistant.

-Assistant doesn't listen and looks back around the blanket to see the city fall and his body gets struck directly by extreme heat and dust, tearing his upper half to shreds.

-Merchant gets skimmed on the side of the face from looking to the side out of shock. Loses an eye and gets a few burns and scars on that side of the face.

Onward:

-a few days later the merchant notices the tortoise is also a demon from its rapid growth and lack of desire to eat or drink anything offered to it. So, it's kicked off and into the wild, but in a distinctively more temperate and green area.

-The tortoise grows bigger and travels. Maybe a time skip or maybe I come up with some filler content that stretches out into a new arc introducing stuff.

-Eventually, the tortoise gets so big that people can get on its back. And people do so. Namely, a group of bandits.

-As the tortoise grew, so did the bandits. The tortoise would seek out human settlements to attack and the bandits pillaged everything in sight. A win win relationship.

-More years pass and the tortoise gets excessively big. Bandits become less bandity and raise families, becoming more like nomads with a very portable home.

-One day the tortoise will find a river. One small enough that it could pass it with a single step but it doesn't, choosing to walk alongside it instead.

-The river leads to the ocean, a dead end on the journey and an end to the story as there isn't much of a point continuing the story as it would just stretch on endlessly.

-Perhaps at one point on the river traversing, the tortoise would get annoyed with the human settlement on its back, from weight or some of the humans drilling through its shell and eating its flesh like parasites. Then it would do a roll and crush the city and everything on its back, leaving no survivors.

-END

Explanations about the text:

Spoiler :

Original concept: A tortoise so big that a city could be built upon its back. Not the most original story concept but one that got stuck in my head for a few days.

My thought process before starting the story went like the following.

The relationship between the city and tortoise: Tortoise dislikes the city and finds it pesky and a weight on its back. Due to this, it'll try to destroy settlements of humans it finds while walking around so it might be seen as an evil entity by most humans. While the humans on its back rely on it and are probably not the most scrupulous either, likely attacking those that attack the tortoise even if they're doing it out of self defense.

Why is the tortoise so big: We could either have the story take place in a span of thousands of years and have it grow at a natural pace but just not stop growing but still survive somehow. Or make it magical or demonic. Demonic being more fitting since it'll be seen as evil anyways.

How to start the story: I could've skipped right into the heat of the moment with a big tortoise with a group of humans living on its back due to its sheer size. Instead, I chose to start from the very beginning. It just doesn't feel right to me to start a story in its middle even if I've only thought about and conceptualized the middle. Add that onto the fact that I need something to look forward to while writing for motivation or I have a harder time writing.

Finally, I started the story without much research. I was in the heat of inspiration and came up with ideas constantly drawing from my subconscious and half-truths which resulted in a not so accurate story that was fun to write and almost documentary-like. However, a lot of it was wrong or made up. I never decided on the kind of tortoise or setting and used that as an excuse to avoid doing proper research.

Then it started to drag on. My solution to this was the tortoise becoming a demon. It wasn't supposed to happen until later on, but things were getting boring even for me the writer. I was going to make the tortoise suffer a bunch of hardship and then become a demon from that. However, it was executed somewhat badly and I forced in an introduction to a demon.

The Demon. This original demon was going to be one that controlled wind and storms, almost godlike. It was going to be humanoid and the tortoise was unable to see it clearly at the original meeting. Then a commenter mentioned something about a storm demon and I leaned more towards the storm itself is the demon with no organic element to it. Later, I had the vulture that was taken out by a mere fox after being a demon and decided to make the storm demon another vulture. This was to show a power gap between an old demon and a new one. They hold the same origins but one is further down the path than the other.

The events in the Oasis. They're loosely based on the ten plagues of Egypt. I struggled on how to adapt some of the plagues and ended up skipping out on a few. The point was that these events were to drive the tortoise out of the oasis. It was a bit of irony as it was driving the tortoise away from its promised land towards hardship and misery. No offense intended towards any religions, of course, just borrowing some of the setting with my own twists.

Later on, in the city that the latest chapter takes place in, I was putting in some parts borrowed from Sodom. I'll mention that in more detail in the summaries though.

Demons and magic in this story in general. We start the story with stuff being seemingly exaggerated and dramatic but then taking a turn for the literal. We have things like water sapping the tortoise's strength pre demon then taking the shape of a spirit literally assaulting the tortoise post demon.

The celestial bodies are treated like beings rather than far-off planets and stars, reinforced by this sun god thingy sending out flashes of demon burning holy light at noon, then disproved by it being displaced from the sun when it dodged. It's something close to what a demon is but follows the sun and pretends to be the sun.

Then there's a bunch of BS about paths and defying one's path. Just philosophical BS I found fitting. Given enough time and writing, I might've come up with some sort of logical system. It started as chaos and will remain as such.

I don't know where I was going with a lot of these themes. I was writing them because I felt like they fit and I like to wing things as I write.

Explanations about the writing itself:

Spoiler :

I'll be blunt. I started writing this story with the intention of publishing but that sentiment is getting weaker and weaker.

This account is an alt account. The name is basically Strong Tortoise or Fortress Tortoise. I made it for writing this story. Why? I keep writing stories and then dropping them midway. It's embarrassing and now I'm doing it again. At this point, dropping is a relief as there are other things I want to focus on.

A few months ago, I really wanted to publish a story. I started with concepts of well-planned serious stories. I kept losing motivation to write and I'm more used to unplanned winging it kind of stories, but those aren't too "professional." If I wanted to, I could slap this on Amazon, maybe make a few sales. However, I'd feel pretty scummy for doing so. This isn't publishing quality. The story is jumbled, there are factual inconsistencies, and it hasn't been edited properly. Trying to publish it would be failing myself far more than dropping it as I'd just be giving up in a greedy way rather than this self-depreciating way.

I don't think I'm cut out for professional writing. I'm going to take a break from writing for a bit then try my hand at a new work. Or maybe come back to this and edit it to be more factually correct and more suitable for publishing.

Thank you to all of you who read, commented, reviewed and whatever on my story while it lasted. Doubly so to people like Epickiller11 who got me a new cover, Mr. Bubbles for populating the comment section with dank memes and tomfoolery, Kezdet for turtle emotes.