This is a bittersweet message. The thing that we’ve been waiting to announce (and why there haven’t been any new chapters recently) is that Rise is moving off WuxiaWorld and onto it’s own site.

We’ve been working pretty hard over the past few months to get everything squared away on the new site (https://risethewebnovel.com) to make sure that it offers just as good of a reading experience as what we have currently on WuxiaWorld. All of the old chapters are up there and we’ve pretty much fixed everything related to the reading experience. There are still things that need to be worked on (like the front page) and the rest of the site as a whole. But the chapters are up, we can upload new chapters to the site, and you guys should be able to read them with no issues.

Now let’s get into the reasons why we’re moving. Trust us, this wasn’t an easy decision to make. We’ve been translating webnovels since way before the scene exploded, and we’ve always been on WuxiaWorld. Ideally, we’d probably stay here too. But Rise is a complicated novel in terms of its legality, something we hadn’t fully considered when Wuxiaworld first licensed the story for us. The problem is that the translation uses IP that comes from League of Legends, including character names, map names, mechanics, attack skills, and pretty much everything that isn’t specific to Rise. We also use trademarked branding for professional leagues like the LPL, the Korean championship circuit, and the channels that broadcast them. That stuff we do not have a license for at all. But some of those, we don’t need a license for in order to write about. Like you can write a novel or a fanfic about the NFL/NBA/NHL without getting a license for that. No one cares because it’s considered to be a part of “common culture”.

The League of Legends IP though, that’s not exactly common culture. Saying “Oh, they’re going to a cybercafe to play League of Legends” counts as common culture. Because the game is well-known in popular culture. But talking about Yasuo or Lucian or Zed, describing their attack animations and the names of their skills, that’s not common culture anymore. Riot does allow for people to use their IP as part of what they refer to as “community projects” without a license. But there are terms involved with that – one of which is that it cannot involve anything that ‘involves a business or legal entity”, which Wuxiaworld certainly is.

Then there are other issues/clauses, such as a requirement that Riot Games (the publisher of the League of Legends game) must be granted permission to “use, copy, modify, distribute, and make derivative works of your Project in any form, on a royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide basis, for any purpose” – which Wuxiaworld simply cannot grant, based on the terms of its own license with the Rise Chinese publisher.

Even if we were somehow able to finagle our way around all these issues, the other big one that applies to us is that nothing can be paywalled. Unfortunately, that’s also the primary method of monetization for novels on WuxiaWorld. The advance chapter model is a soft paywall because chapters will eventually be released for free, but it still counts as a paywall for the time that chapters are available to read for people who pay without being available to everyone else. So we couldn’t do advance chapters at all without constantly worrying about a takedown notice for the novel.

We did try to come up with alternative models of monetization. But those never worked out for multiple reasons. The first was that WuxiaWorld’s technical infrastructure didn’t support them at all. We did try bending the existing infrastructure around to new models, but that ended up breaking more things. And as easy as it is to say “Well just code feature 4head”, that’s not how things work in real life. The people that work behind-the-scenes on the WuxiaWorld site and app already have a tremendous amount of work on their plate, and it wouldn’t exactly be fair for us to demand that WuxiaWorld dedicate a significant amount of time and resources to create a completely different experimental infrastructure that applies to one novel alone, especially when there’s still all the other outstanding legal issues.

Then there is the stuff that is absolutely not visible to you guys, such as the administrative support for things like accounting. Remember that WuxiaWorld licenses novels with some level of profit-sharing. That means everything needs to be visible and clear for the Chinese publishers. Companies work on processes, not exceptions. Creating an entirely different accounting book for one novel is a work-intensive and expensive process that requires a significant amount of time from multiple parties. The people at WuxiaWorld who create the process, then Ren who has to go explain the whole thing to 17K (the Chinese publisher), and then the people who work at 17K who have to go through all of this to make sure that its feasible and makes sense and also explain it to the Chinese author. It’s a lot of work and money when you put it all together for something that probably still runs afoul of Riot Games ‘community project’ guidelines.

We talked things over with Ren, and the only real way to continue Rise without creating an undue conflux of legal and administrative problems for WuxiaWorld was to spin off onto our own site. The decision wasn’t made lightly and we did spend a considerable amount of time trying to figure out how to create a compromise between the legal situation and the monetization one. In the end, it just wasn’t one that could be accomplished. The only other real option we had was to drop Rise and work on another novel, and that’s something we didn’t want to do.

We hope that you guys will come over onto the new site, https://risethewebnovel.com, to continue reading this novel that we’ve poured a lot of work into translating and will continue to translate. And also to follow along with Lin Feng’s Rise to becoming the best League of Legends player in the world with his new team!