I’ve been reading novels since I was in junior high. I started with Ni Kuang and Jin Yong, then got hooked on ghost stories, then drifted through every flavor of web fiction, and these days I mostly read on Zhihu. Novels have always been the most relaxing corner of my life.

I also tried to write my own, more than once. The images were there in my head — the scenes, the feelings, the story I wanted to tell — but the moment I picked up the pen, the words could never catch up to what I felt inside. I’ve always known my literary craft wasn’t strong enough. So after a few attempts, I quietly put it down.

But things are different now.

In the last couple of years, AI has grown powerful enough that I can see the possibility again. It isn’t here to replace writers — it’s here to become the partner that fills in the parts of me that were missing. So I started wondering: what if I built an entire AI novel team? I would bring the themes and the story beats I wanted to see, and they would take it all the way — from planning and structure, to characters and worldbuilding, to the chapters themselves.

Once I actually started building, ideas kept spilling out. A finished novel needs somewhere to live, right? And pure text felt like it was missing something, so I wired in Gemini to illustrate every chapter. And if there was going to be a site, why not give it a little corner where readers could talk to the AI? And then, of course, I needed a backend to manage the whole pipeline… one thing pulled the next, and before I noticed, it had grown into what you see today.

This is a beautiful era. So many ideas I used to just keep in my head can now, piece by piece, become real with a little help from AI. I know today’s AI output is still far from perfect, and the rough edges are obvious — but I believe it will keep getting better. And I want to properly record this whole process of figuring things out alongside it.