Finished Reading Terry Goodkind's Soul of the Fire

I have just read the fifth book in Terry Goodkind's lengthy fantasy Sword of Truth series, this one titled Soul of the Fire.  As with the previous volumes, the protagonists Richard, Kahlan, and Zedd spend a great deal of time traipsing around various lands trying to deal with crises that they are usually responsible for creating in the first place.  This is so because the solution to the crisis at the end of one book almost inevitably creates a dire crisis for the next book.  In the preceding book, Temple of  the Winds, Kahlan had summoned something called the "Chimes" to heal Richard of the plague.  After the healing, though, these denizens from the underworld present a major problem as they go about sucking magic from the world.  And in a fantasy series, you just can't have critters running around depleting the world of magic.  No problem, though...the heroes in Soul of the Fire eventually figure out how to deal with them...and I'm confident that whatever they did will come back to bite them in the "aft end" in the next book! Also, there is usually some new country or kingdom introduced that is the focus of the story, and in Soul of the Fire this is more true than ever.  So in reading each successive book I feel as if I'm not really getting anywhere: volumes 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 are upcoming and I don't know how anything will change substantially.  Still, I must be a glutton for literary punishment as I plan to push through to the bitter end...