'Her na was…'
'Shiori…'
'Shiori Takahashi?'
As Haruto sat at his desk, scribbling furiously across page after page, the na of the girl whose lingering soul-mories slept deep inside his mind suddenly resurfaced.
It was like rembering the na of a kindergarten friend you had not thought about in years.
A strange excitent rose in his chest, sharp and inexplicable, but it faded almost imdiately.
What remained was only frustration.
A lot of ordinary people thought writing novels was easy. They imagined you just put pen to paper and sohow cranked out ten thousand words a day.
But think about it.
Ten thousand words was roughly the equivalent of writing a dozen full-length essay assignnts. Plenty of students ran out of things to say halfway through an eight-hundred-word composition exam. If you had not trained for it, ten thousand words was just torture.
That was exactly where Haruto was right now.
He had assud that turning the plot of Blue Spring Ride, as he rembered it from the ani, into prose would be simple.
In reality, it was anything but.
Characters, setting, expressions, pacing, tiny physical details, the emotional beats between lines, all of it was completely different from the kind of writing he did for school.
You could say he had eaten pork plenty of tis, but he had never raised a pig himself.
Haruto had never written a light novel before, but he had read enough to develop a discerning eye. His skills as a critic were far ahead of his skills as a creator.
After two hours of work, he looked back at what he had written.
What even was this?
It was so awkward he wanted to evaporate on the spot.
"So… it really is not that easy," he muttered. He had expected this outco, to be fair.
He trusted his Japanese grades, but being good at Japanese did not automatically an you could write smooth, vivid narrative prose.
And even if he was adapting the story from the ani in his head, that did not guarantee his version would feel as good as the original.
He had a perfect example for this. In the world Shiori Takahashi ca from, there was an ani called 5 Centiters per Second. After it beca famous, it received two different official novel adaptations.
One was written by the original creator, Makoto Shinkai, in his own style. The other was written by a professional novelist adapting the ani into prose.
They followed the sa core plot, yet the reading experience was completely different.
Haruto exhaled slowly and stared at the ssy pile of words on his desk.
Too much of it was pointless description.
He wrote, then crossed out, then rewrote, and the fatigue started to pile up.
By the ti he finally could not hold out any longer and went to bed, he had managed only about two thousand words, handwritten, based on the scenes he rembered.
It was painfully slow.
That night, in his sleep…
Haruto beca the girl again.
Shiori Takahashi.
This ti, the dream did not pick up where it had left off with the subway scene. Instead, she sat at her desk playing an online shooter, controlling female characters with flashy skins and tearing through zombies like it was the most satisfying thing in the world.
"Hey, how about you watch the rest of Blue Spring Ride instead of playing gas," Haruto complained silently, practically screaming inside his own head. "What are you doing, grinding a shooter right now?"
Of course, it was useless. Shiori Takahashi, or rather the mory of her, could not hear him. These were not conversations. They were fragnts.
When morning ca, Haruto woke up with a brain full of gunfire and ga nus.
For eight straight hours, the girl had rotated through ga after ga on accounts that were fully maxed out, like soone who had unlimited ti, unlimited money, and absolutely no guilt about it.
Not even a second of Blue Spring Ride's continuation.
Still, watching soone else play was oddly entertaining, and because his imrsion was so strong, her satisfaction carried over into him. In the end, the experience felt almost like he had played himself, and it left him strangely fulfilled.
He stretched, then turned toward his desk again.
"Alright. Ti to work," he told himself. "Today I have to get at least the early chapters done."
He wrote like his life depended on it.
His learning speed was fast.
The clumsy, stiff prose from the night before began to smooth out. When he got stuck and could not figure out how to describe a scene, he simply grabbed a light novel from his shelf and studied how other writers handled similar monts.
Little by little, the stack of pages grew.
His version of Blue Spring Ride, reimagined as a light novel, started to take shape in a way that felt real. Of course, it was still a first draft. After he finished, he would need to check for mistakes, polish the sentences, and revise everything again and again.
Three days later…
Haruto had more or less converted everything he rembered, up through episode 5.9, into a manuscript he could accept as good enough.
Why 5.9?
Because he had not actually finished episode six. The girl had shut the computer off right at the climax and gone to sleep, leaving him stranded there.
And during those three days, he only slipped into Shiori's mories once more, last night, when she went to a convention in cosplay.
As for the other two nights, he slept normally. Nothing happened at all.
That made one thing clear.
At least for now, Haruto could not control when these dream-mories would appear. He could only wait and hope the situation changed later.
When he thought back to the convention dream, to be honest, it was… hard to describe.
It was a sensation he had never experienced in his entire life.
In those mories, he had beco a cute girl in black stockings, wearing a gothic outfit, soaking in the awe of strangers, posing for photos, taking pictures with people, and hugging close with her gorgeous friends, clinging to each other like best friends do, laughing and wandering the venue together.
Smack!
Haruto slapped himself.
"What is wrong with you," he snapped at his reflection in the mirror. "Why are you jealous of that life? You are a guy!"
The fact that part of him had thought, That actually looks kind of fun, terrified him.
Was he… so kind of weirdo?
He spent a little extra ti forcing his thoughts back into order.
There were five days left until school started. Once the sester began, he would not have this kind of free ti. What he needed to do in those remaining five days was submit his light novel manuscript.
Japan was one of the most powerful nations on the planet, with a population of over a hundred million and a comfortable standard of living for a huge portion of its citizens.
Once a society moved beyond pure survival, just like in any developed country, sports, entertainnt, and cultural industries exploded.
And among them, the otaku sphere, built around gas, manga, novels, and ani, had beco a major pillar of the national economy over the past few decades. Japanese works were beloved at ho and exported worldwide. With such high acceptance of otaku culture, creators naturally gained status.
Famous novelists, mangaka, and animation staff enjoyed enormous prestige, and their incos were just as enormous.
The logic was simple. The "Japan" from Shiori's mories also had an extrely developed otaku industry, and it had produced a whole class of high-earning creators with a market of only around a hundred million people.
Japan's market was massive and deeply rooted. Successful creators here could earn far more.
Of course, signing with a top-tier publisher was still a distant fantasy for Haruto.
Those giant serialization magazines that sold hundreds of thousands, even millions of copies per issue were not going to gamble on so unknown kid's manuscript.
No matter how good your opening hook was, being a newcor ant risk.
Hiatuses, abandoned endings, authors vanishing without a word, editors desperately chasing deadlines, this kind of thing happened all the ti in the light novel world. Even famous writers pulled that nonsense, so for a complete rookie?
The industry giants had no reason to take that chance.
So Haruto did not foolishly submit his few days of work to the biggest publishers.
His real targets were five large local light novel publishers headquartered in the prefectural capital.
Competition in the light novel world was fierce. Only a handful of top publishers could dominate nationally and sell well in every region.
Most mid-sized and smaller publishers, based outside the biggest centers, mainly thrived within their own prefectures or neighboring areas.
That was normal.
Building sales networks, distribution chains, and nationwide marketing was brutally difficult. Even having strong influence locally ant years of fighting competitors, negotiating bookstores, and investing in promotion.
These prefecture-based publishers could not match the reach of the giants, but within their own territory, their sales were still impressive. Just counting local magazine circulation, they could even rival what the national giants sold in this region.
The quality of serialized works might not be as high, but local companies poured everything into their own ground. Their bookstore partnerships, advertising, and discount campaigns were often stronger in their ho area than what the big publishers could manage while spreading resources nationwide.
If you could not beat them in pure prestige, then you fought with practical advantages.
Haruto took his handwritten manuscript to a print shop and made seven or eight copies. Then he pulled out his student transit pass and stepped out through the gate of his apartnt complex.
_______________________
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