Misc.

This is an excerpt from a 2020 interview with Priest where she talks about the ending of No Pollution, No Public Harm.

! This section contains spoilers for the ending !

The interviewer's question also contains very slight spoilers for Dage and Tuogui.

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Interviewer: In webnovels, inspirational plotlines about reaching the peak of one's life is a classic feel-good theme. For example, the adult period in Dage is about how to attain success as defined from the viewpoint of mainstream society. If Derailment continued for twenty thousand words after the end, it might also be able to do the same; however, it came to a sudden stop when the main character was still in the "as weak and helpless as a blade of grass" stage. In your story that serialised last year, No Pollution, No Public Harm, Yu Lanchuan chose to become a wanderer in the end but to a lot of "corporate drones" who are in similar situations, this is an answer that they can dream of but can't have. What do you think of this ending?

Priest: The ending of No Pollution, No Public Harm isn't meant to encourage everyone to sell their houses, but I also don't think that this is an answer that "corporate drones" can dream of but can't have. You may think that what Yu Lanchuan did was wrong—for example, what he did may be irresponsible and unreliable, and judging based on that, you are not willing to do the same as him. There's nothing wrong with that. But to say that this choice "can't be done" is not really appropriate. There are a lot of things where, after we weigh the pros and cons, we can choose not to do it, but we also have the freedom to make this choice, don't we? Being unrestrained is written in the genes of the ancestors of Yu Lanchuan's family; in the first place, he is a wanderer who was tied up. At his core, he has always been unreliable. On top of that, the rules and regulations binding him were things he took on willingly, so of course he can also take them off and throw them aside at any time.