In May, the so-called Shanghai felt like a giant steamer. The sun beat down so hard that twisting heat ripples shimmered above the ground.
During the noon break, in classrooms all over campus, groups of students gathered to talk about the latest anime and manga.
"Have you seen the newest episode of Shadow of Water? The main character is so handsome…"
"It's mostly because Wan Feng-sensei's art is insane. The story itself is honestly pretty average."
"If we're talking art style, Lin Zheng is still the king… He used to be a total flop of a mangaka, his plotting was awful, but Chronicles of the Core War, the series he's doing with the novelist Liu Yue, looks so good I practically got on my knees…"
…
Xia Jing listened to his classmates excitedly discussing the most popular series in the latest issue of Monogatari Comic, but he felt completely uninterested.
As one of the top ten best-selling weekly manga magazines in China, every issue of Monogatari Comic sold over ten million copies. The series serialized in it almost always ended up adapted into anime, novels, stage plays, and even movies and TV dramas…
But after being spoiled in his previous life by a table full of much "tastier dishes," all the popular anime and manga of China he'd seen in the two months since arriving in this world felt… not completely empty, but if he had to describe them precisely, they were "chicken ribs."
Flavorless when you eat them, a pity to throw away.
He'd seen too many truly great works, his threshold was way too high, and at this point he was basically completely burned out on anime.
However…
Shouldering his bag, Xia Jing went up floor by floor along the first-year wing until he reached the rooftop of the teaching building.
He didn't have any strange thoughts about coming up here. It was just that if he wanted to draw manga, there were way too many distractions in the classroom.
It didn't really matter if other students found out—no big deal—but if some loudmouth decided to tattletale to the homeroom teacher, that would be a huge pain.
He took out the manga draft he'd almost finished from his backpack and, for what felt like the hundredth time, carefully examined the work he'd drawn with his own hands.
5 Centimeters per Second.
In his previous life, Xia Jing had died of overwork. The good news was that he'd been reborn.
The bad news was that his memories from his past life were still recovering bit by bit.
When he first arrived in this world, his initial thought was: since he'd been a hardcore otaku before, this would be easy.
Just dig out Dragon Ball, Naruto, Yu-Gi-Oh! and the rest from his memory, recreate them, grind for three years, and then coast for life as a rich guy. Perfect.
It sounded great in his head, but reality was much harsher. Even though he clearly remembered that those ultra-valuable works existed, whenever he tried to carefully recall their content, he realized…
He couldn't visualize them. At best, he could recall a few scattered fragments.
All he could remember of Dragon Ball was that it was about a monkey searching for seven glowing orbs.
All he could remember of One Piece was that it was about a boy determined to become the Pirate King.
As for why he wanted to be Pirate King, why everyone was searching for the Dragon Balls… he had no idea.
There was no way to reconstruct complete stories out of scraps like that.
Still, those memories were slowly coming back. Otherwise…
Xia Jing glanced at the 5 Centimeters per Second manga draft in front of him.
Otherwise, there's no way he would've clearly dreamed a month ago about watching that depressing tearjerker in his previous life, sobbing his eyes out, and remembering it in such detail afterward.
In this world, Xia Jing's parents had died in a car accident a few months ago.
But he wasn't completely homeless.
His parents had left him an extremely old, run-down three-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of Shanghai, worth a little over a million yuan or so…
However, because the accident had been quite serious, the insurance payout was small, and after the liability decision, his late father actually ended up owing more than two million in debt.
For now, Xia Jing was still living in the apartment, but no one knew when the court ruling would come down and when he'd be kicked out onto the street.
His parents' savings had been frozen. His living expenses were being covered entirely by the ten-odd thousand yuan the original Xia Jing had saved over more than ten years from pocket money and New Year's money, thanks to being a little money-grubber.
You could definitely call that a "sky-is-falling" starting hand.
Otherwise, after recalling the plot of 5 Centimeters per Second last month, he wouldn't have immediately started drawing the manga to submit for publication. Reality simply wouldn't allow him to live a carefree life as just another high school student.
"Sigh…"
He let out a small sigh, picked up his pen, spread out his tools under the eaves on the rooftop, and began working on the last part of the 5 Centimeters per Second manga draft.
It was worth mentioning that when he discovered this spot last month, he'd found a set of abandoned desks and chairs just sitting here on the rooftop, which made it a perfect place to draw manga.
Quiet, no one to bother him.
5 Centimeters per Second was the first animated film by Makoto Shinkai, one of the "national treasure–class" anime directors of Japan in his previous life. The original work was divided into three chapters: "On Cherry Blossoms," "Cosmonaut," and "5 Centimeters per Second."
The film wasn't particularly famous, and it wasn't all that commercially successful.
But of all the works Makoto Shinkai made in his previous life, the one that left the deepest impression on Xia Jing was not his breakout hit Your Name—
It was this film, 5 Centimeters per Second, that made his chest ache every time he thought about it after watching. It was the kind of work he would rewatch once a year.
In his past life, Xia Jing had basically been a flop of a mangaka and illustrator. Under his current conditions, drawing an entire manga by hand really had been hard at first, but after two months in this new world, he'd slowly gotten used to it.
Right now in China, the internet was just starting to develop, but print manga magazines were still huge thanks to big capital backing. The animation industry was booming, and famous mangaka enjoyed absurdly high status and income.
Back in his previous life, at its peak the most popular weekly manga magazine in Japan—the '90s Jump—sold a little over six million copies a week. That was the record set during Dragon Ball's serialization.
But in China's manga industry, that number could be pushed up to over twenty million copies per week, and it was still trending upward.
After all, the population here was ten times larger.
Every afternoon, the major TV stations would rotate through anime series adapted from hit manga.
Walking down the streets of Shanghai, he'd sometimes hear vaporwave music that felt incredibly retro and nostalgic to him.
On top of that, the number of teenagers in China was about to hit a historic peak.
Barring some unexpected disaster, the next few years were going to be a golden decade for anime and manga.
Even though Xia Jing was thinking about all that, his hand didn't slow down in the slightest.
Ever since he remembered the plot of 5 Centimeters per Second, maybe because his two souls had fused, his mental strength was unbelievably high.
Imagining scenes in his head took almost no effort. If he closed his eyes, he could clearly see the anime's visuals playing out, and he could freely shift the angle and perspective like a camera…
Put simply, his brain's CPU and GPU were probably at least twice as powerful as a normal person's.
Storyboards for animation—once he remembered the plot, they basically arranged themselves automatically in his mind. The scenes he wanted to draw, the details, the character designs, the lines—all of it could be rough-drafted and set up in his head at high speed.
So he didn't really need to do rough name storyboards like most manga artists. His pen moved quickly and he made very few mistakes.
The only reason it had taken him a whole month to get 5 Centimeters per Second—a manga of a bit over a hundred pages—to this stage was that most of the time had gone into getting used to drawing manga by hand.
The lunch break passed quickly as he drew. Even though he'd picked a spot under the rooftop eaves for shade, beads of sweat still slowly formed on the back of his neck.
A light breeze swept past, and a coolness spread from his back all the way into the core of his body.
"Here, take this. Wipe your sweat. It'd be a shame if it dripped onto such a good-looking original page."
"Oh, thanks." Xia Jing absentmindedly took the tissues from the side and wiped his nose and the back of his neck.
Then he suddenly froze.
"Wait, who are you…?"
Wasn't he supposed to be alone up here on the rooftop? Where had this person with the tissues come from?
He turned his head, only to see hair dancing lightly in the breeze, an exquisitely beautiful girl's features, the faint smile at the corner of her lips, and her bright eyes fixed intently on him—and on the manga pages in front of him.
"You're Su Qingxiao from Class One, right?" Xia Jing said.
"You know me, Xia Jing?" Su Qingxiao asked in surprise.
"Of course I know you. You're really famous in the first year—no, in our whole school… Wait, how do you know my name?" Xia Jing blinked, thrown off.
"Oh, when I came up here last month and saw you drawing manga, I got curious and asked around a bit. That's how I learned your name." Su Qingxiao spread her arms and closed her eyes for a moment, enjoying the breeze on the rooftop.
Then she opened her eyes and looked over the pages in front of Xia Jing and the title written on the first page of the draft.
5 Centimeters per Second.
"I don't remember seeing you up here last month…" Xia Jing frowned, trying to recall.
"You were really focused on drawing that time. I stood behind you watching for half an hour, and you never noticed me." Su Qingxiao chuckled softly.
"And two weeks ago, last week, three days ago, and today—I've stood behind you watching you draw a total of five times. You didn't notice me even once."
"Your focus when you're drawing is seriously impressive, Xia Jing. If I hadn't seen your sweat about to drip onto the original pages today—which would've been such a waste—I probably wouldn't have said anything this time either."
Xia Jing's expression stiffened. He felt a sudden wave of panic.
Did I ever mutter anything weird when I was drawing? Did I accidentally reveal I'm a transmigrator from Blue Star or something?
"So this is… spying on me?"
"Spying…"
A hint of amusement flashed across Su Qingxiao's fair, delicate face. She looked straight at him and spoke softly.
"That's kind of a harsh way to put it, don't you think? Why do you think there's a random set of desks and chairs sitting here on this empty rooftop… Did you really think they just fell from the sky?"
She rummaged in her own bag and pulled out a stack of blank manga manuscript paper and a few professional pens.
"There are over four thousand students at this school. Why would you think you're the only one who wants to draw manga, the only one who thinks the rooftop is the perfect place to spend lunch break drawing… that before you came here last month, the only person who ever used this spot to draw manga was you?"
"I'm only pointing out the truth. Honestly, I'm not actually mad."
Xia Jing was stunned for a moment. Then, as he thought it through, his face turned a little embarrassed.
"Sorry, you… you could've just told me at the time," he said.
"Mm. But when I saw someone else at school drawing manga, and drawing this well, this focused… I tried to put myself in your shoes. I hate being disturbed when I'm drawing. And besides…" Her tone softened. "For all I knew, you might just have been dropping by the rooftop once in a while and temporarily hogging 'my' seat."
Hearing that, everything clicked into place for Xia Jing.
Last month he'd taken over someone else's carefully chosen drawing spot on the rooftop. At first, she'd probably assumed he was just going through a three-minute phase and hadn't interrupted him.
A week later, she came to check—he was still there.
Two weeks later—still there.
And today—still there.
"Forget it, let's not dwell on that. Let's introduce ourselves properly." Su Qingxiao held out her hand to him.
"I'm Su Qingxiao. And right now, I'm a professional mangaka—part-time high school student."