'Her name was…'
'Shiori…'
'Shiori Takahashi?'
As Haruto sat at his desk, scribbling furiously across page after page, the name of the girl whose lingering soul-memories slept deep inside his mind suddenly resurfaced.
It was like remembering the name of a kindergarten friend you had not thought about in years.
A strange excitement rose in his chest, sharp and inexplicable, but it faded almost immediately.
What remained was only frustration.
A lot of ordinary people thought writing novels was easy. They imagined you just put pen to paper and somehow 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 assignments. 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 assumed that turning the plot of Blue Spring Ride, as he remembered it from the anime, 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 times, 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 outcome, to be fair.
He trusted his Japanese grades, but being good at Japanese did not automatically mean you could write smooth, vivid narrative prose.
And even if he was adapting the story from the anime 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 came from, there was an anime called 5 Centimeters per Second. After it became 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 anime into prose.
They followed the same core plot, yet the reading experience was completely different.
Haruto exhaled slowly and stared at the messy 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 time 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 remembered.
It was painfully slow.
That night, in his sleep…
Haruto became the girl again.
Shiori Takahashi.
This time, 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 games," 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 memory of her, could not hear him. These were not conversations. They were fragments.
When morning came, Haruto woke up with a brain full of gunfire and game menus.
For eight straight hours, the girl had rotated through game after game on accounts that were fully maxed out, like someone who had unlimited time, unlimited money, and absolutely no guilt about it.
Not even a second of Blue Spring Ride's continuation.
Still, watching someone else play was oddly entertaining, and because his immersion 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. Time 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 moments.
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 remembered, 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 memories 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-memories 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 memories, he had become 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… some kind of weirdo?
He spent a little extra time forcing his thoughts back into order.
There were five days left until school started. Once the semester began, he would not have this kind of free time. 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, entertainment, and cultural industries exploded.
And among them, the otaku sphere, built around games, manga, novels, and anime, had become a major pillar of the national economy over the past few decades. Japanese works were beloved at home 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 incomes were just as enormous.
The logic was simple. The "Japan" from Shiori's memories also had an extremely 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 some unknown kid's manuscript.
No matter how good your opening hook was, being a newcomer meant risk.
Hiatuses, abandoned endings, authors vanishing without a word, editors desperately chasing deadlines, this kind of thing happened all the time 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 meant 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 home 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 apartment complex.
_______________________
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