After hanging up, Sakuraba tossed his phone aside and collapsed onto the sofa in the Nishikino Academy dormitory, staring at the ceiling as he let out a long, gloomy sigh.
The principal of Kasamatsu's worshipful, excited voice was still echoing in his ears.
What "using smears to fuel popularity"?
What "stimulating fan cohesion"?
What "textbook-level event marketing"?
Every word was like a tiny needle, stabbing precisely into Sakuraba's fragile heart.
When had he ever thought through that many twists and turns?
His idea had been pitifully simple from beginning to end.
The hype was too high, so he had to spend money to push it down.
How would he push it down?
Hire paid posters to spam bad reviews!
Spend the money, worsen the reputation, kill two birds with one stone. Plan accomplished!
And the result?
The money had been spent, but the reputation... under the joint anti-slander wave from fans and passersby, not only had it not worsened, it had been tempered into something even more solid. It had even turned into a nationwide carnival.
As for the hype?
It was not even riding a rocket anymore. It had practically boarded a warp-drive spaceship and set off straight for the sea of stars.
"I just wanted to spend the money..."
Sakuraba muttered weakly, covering his eyes with the back of his hand.
It felt like being a bottom-ranked student determined to score zero, racking his brains to write a test paper he believed was full of wrong answers, only for the teacher to read it, be shocked by his genius, slam the desk, and shout, "Genius! Reverse psychology! This is a revolutionary deconstruction of the existing theoretical system!" Then give him full marks, plus a newspaper article praising him.
The fantasy played out in his head.
Frustrating. Far too frustrating.
Looking at the forum discussions still raging hotly, Sakuraba's feelings were complicated to the extreme.
On one hand, this level of popularity really did give Oguri Cap a perfect explanation. The boast he had made had been covered...
But on the other hand, it was as if a whole Himalaya had been erected out of nowhere on his path toward the great cause of losing money—and one that came with elevators and sightseeing cable cars, making the difficulty of his climb grow exponentially.
A work's popularity and its ability to make money were basically positively correlated.
With Cinderella Gray's current popularity, it would be hard for it not to make money.
"Damn it... This really is me dropping a rock on my own foot."
Sakuraba scratched his hair in frustration.
A brilliant plan he had thought would guarantee losses had somehow been reversed into divine assistance by the sharp eyes of the masses and their blazing protectiveness.
Now that the manga serialization was right around the corner, and the early momentum had already grown this huge, it was basically impossible to "cool things down" through ordinary methods.
Unless...
Sakuraba's gaze focused again, and a faint glimmer of hope flickered in his eyes.
Unless the work itself flopped.
Right!
The content!
That was the root of it!
No matter how high the early hype was, it was only a castle in the air.
If the content of Cinderella Gray after serialization failed to live up to this epic level of expectation, its word of mouth would face a true avalanche.
When that time came, however much these fanatical fans loved it now would be how hard the backlash hit.
And those paid posters he had hired before... no, when that happened, they would be called "critics with foresight." Their seemingly unreasonable bad reviews would be dug back up as "accurate prophecies," becoming the final straw that broke the camel's back.
Now that would be a boomerang!
"That's right... That's exactly it!"
Sakuraba sat up straight on the sofa.
"Now all my hopes rest on Kinosaki-sensei!"
He clasped his hands together and began praying with unprecedented devotion.
"Kinosaki-sensei... I'm begging you! Exercise your free will as a manga artist! Please don't let yourself be bound by the real-life model! Please, absolutely, without fail, make the plot melodramatic, the logic chaotic, and the characters collapse!"
"If that's still not enough... A sudden art-style shift works too! You can turn the second half straight into a superpower battle manga!"
Sakuraba imagined all sorts of divine developments that would be enough to make fans furious and send the reputation collapsing, and the more he thought about it, the more possible it seemed.
The higher the early hype, the higher the expectations, and the harder the fall.
As long as Kinosaki-sensei showed the normal stubbornness of an artist, or even if the plot was only slightly mediocre, it would be enough to create a disaster when set against this overwhelming expectation.
"Right, that's the plan!" Sakuraba clenched his fist, as though he had caught hold of his final lifeline.
"Now I can only believe in... no, hope that Kinosaki-sensei's plot arrangement is a total pile of crap!"
To be honest, Sakuraba's thinking was not entirely unreasonable.
Japanese creators always had their own little ideas.
And those little ideas did not always bring good results.
Rather, many times, a good work was ruined precisely because of those little ideas...
So the possibility Sakuraba imagined, of Kinosaki suddenly going insane and turning the manga into a pile of dogshit, was not nonexistent...
Although no matter how one looked at it, Sakuraba pinning his own project's failure on the content of the work flopping carried a thick air of tragic absurdity. But for Sakuraba, whose entire heart was set on losing money, this was already the only firefly in the darkness.
He picked up his phone again and opened the forums. Looking at the still-explosive, almost one-sided anticipation, he curled his lip with complicated feelings.
...
Of course Sakuraba knew how ridiculous and unreasonable it was to place all his hopes for Cinderella Gray losing money on Kinosaki-sensei making a mistake, having a sudden burst of inspiration, and ruining the story.
Kinosaki-sensei was a veteran manga artist with an excellent reputation in the industry, solid drawing skills, and a particular talent for hot-blooded sports stories. On top of that, he was a loyal Oguri Cap fan.
In terms of emotion, reason, and ability, he should have been the most reliable creator for this project, the one most likely to hand in an excellent answer.
By normal logic, Sakuraba should have been praying for him to overperform, make the manga even more exciting, and bring the project tremendous success.
But... Sakuraba's "normal logic" had long since been twisted beyond recognition by his obsession with losing money.
"Ridiculous or not, who cares!"
Sakuraba muttered through gritted teeth to the empty room.
"This is already... the last shred of possibility I can see for this project to lose money!"
The painful lesson from his earlier attempt to throw money at reverse marketing was still vivid in his mind.
That negative PR expense had not only failed to cool the hype, it had become fuel that ignited a towering blaze.
Now, expectations for Cinderella Gray had been pushed to a dizzying height. Fan cohesion and willingness to buy were higher than ever before.
Ordinary methods, and even the extraordinary method of "smearing his own work," had already been declared ineffective.
If he wanted to lose money, only one theoretically possible, low-probability window remained.
The work's content itself had to fall severely short of this explosive expectation, triggering a total collapse in word of mouth and a cliff-like drop in later sales.
"It's not like... every good thing can happen to me, right?"
Sakuraba rubbed his swollen temples, his tone filled with a gambler's stubbornness.
"I invest in Umamusume, and every single one pops off. I try to spend money suppressing popularity, and it turns into fuel on the fire... This time, surely it's finally my turn to get unlucky, right? At least let me... truly lose money for once!"
And so, during the following days as he waited for serialization, Sakuraba fell into an extremely contradictory state.
On one side, he closely followed the increasingly feverish anticipation on the forums, watching with complicated feelings as Cinderella Gray-related tags remained high on the trending searches across all major platforms.
On the other side, he silently carried out some twisted prayer ritual in his heart.
Time passed, second by second, amid Sakuraba's anxious and complicated mood.
Finally—
The day watched by countless manga readers, Umamusume fans, and one investor with a completely different set of intentions arrived.
Cinderella Gray officially began serialization.
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