Kamiyā Yuu uploaded a Saber fan illustration through the Blank account.
Inside a magnificent castle hall, armored knights stood ramrod straight on both sides of a red carpet, raising longswords overhead with both hands. Their cold blades crossed to form an archway of swords. Beneath those intersecting blades, Saber, clad in armor and radiating heroic dignity, slowly walked toward the throne at the end of the red carpet.
Although Saber was the main visual focus of the illustration, the scenery and supporting characters had received no less attention. Every character, including the Twelve Knights of the Round Table, possessed distinctive features and a different expression. Considerable care had also gone into the background details, from the folds in the characters' clothing and patterns on the banners to even the cracks running across the walls.
Less than thirty seconds after the illustration was uploaded, comments beneath it began increasing crazily, surpassing three digits in no time.
["First! — 4528514"]
["Blank-sama posted another new work? One fan illustration a day on average? Holy crap! Even an octopus doesn't have that many hands. — Attractive"]
["Which professional artist is this?! I'm kneeling before the master! — A Moment in Summer"]
["Mom asked why I'm kneeling. As an amateur artist, Blank-sama, please accept my knees! — Usernames Are Such a Pain"]
["Coming up next: 'How to Evolve from a Hopeless Beginner into a Master Artist,' starring Blank-sama. I'm kneeling.jpg — Unbroken Longing"]
["Feels even better than yesterday's! New desktop wallpaper acquired. — Bench Nyan"]
["Coin tossed! My King looks so insanely cool in this fan art! My King is the best! The King of Knights is the best! — Otaku Angel"]
...
"China's illustration community is still in its infancy. It'll be quite difficult for it to really develop."
Click, click.
Kamiyā Yuu clicked the mouse and switched to the homepage of the Original Art section. The monthly popularity rankings had already been completely dominated by his works. Both the childish scribble he had first uploaded and his recently uploaded high-level fan illustrations occupied places among the top three.
Popularity TOP 10
1. 'The World at the End' — Blank. This was the Akemi Homura witch-form fan illustration Kamiyā Yuu had uploaded yesterday. Its artistic quality was extremely high.
Popularity: 1,928,751 — Comments: 18,271 — Coins: 21,985
2. 'Madoka Kaname' — Blank. His first uploaded fan illustration, with artistic quality equivalent to a child's doodle.
Popularity: 158,286 — Comments: 20,917 — Coins: 11,927
3. 'Gazing into the Distance' — Blank. A Saber fan illustration uploaded during the second week, with artistic quality equivalent to that of a hopeless amateur artist.
Popularity: 130,272 — Comments: 152,039 — Coins: 19,028
...
["Excuse me, are you Mr. Blank, the artist of 'The World at the End'? I'm a member of the planning team at Dream and Imagination Games. Your fan illustration is the highest-quality work I've ever seen. Would you be willing to cooperate with our company? My contact number is 13126380... If you're interested, please get in touch. We'll provide terms that satisfy you."]
["Mr. Blank, your artistic skill is outstanding. Our company is currently short of illustrators. If you're interested, please contact 137..."]
["Kneeling forever before the master. May I repost 'The World at the End'?"]
The Blank account's private messages had been completely taken over by advertisements and fan messages of every kind. After thinking about it, Kamiyā Yuu changed the account setting to Do Not Accept Private Messages from Strangers.
"Sorry, but I already have more work than I can handle."
Kamiyā Yuu clicked to confirm the setting, then shook his head with an amused smile.
Aside from wanting to inject some popularity into the Original Art section, he hadn't had any particular motive in uploading his work to BIUBIUBIU.
After his popularity exploded there, however, the first drawing he had uploaded instead became a focal point of user attention.
What exactly had been the purpose of that childish scribble he uploaded three weeks ago?
Judging from how every subsequent illustration had dramatically surpassed the previous one in quality, it seemed to document Blank's progression from a complete outsider who knew nothing about art into a top-tier illustrator.
Hey, hey, hey!
Wasn't that complete nonsense?
Some bored users compiled all of Blank's uploaded illustrations into a complete timeline and posted it in BIUBIUBIU's social area under the title:
['The Process of Going from Beginner Artist to Master in Three Weeks']
The most common response was that the user known as Blank had deliberately staged the entire thing. Blank must have possessed extremely advanced artistic ability from the very beginning. After all, no matter how astonishing someone's talent might be, a complete outsider couldn't become a top illustrator in just three weeks.
An artist's ability wasn't measured solely by the quality of their drawings.
Even if someone's rendering accuracy exceeded mechanical printing, without an enormous accumulation of experience and theoretical knowledge, they could never become a high-level artist.
The heated discussion attracted several Chinese artists. Eventually, after analysis from one well-known Chinese illustrator, the temporary consensus became that Blank had possessed formidable artistic skill from the start.
As for why he had deliberately uploaded those poor-quality works, no one could figure it out.
Strictly speaking, saying Kamiyā Yuu had possessed top-tier drawing skill from the beginning wasn't actually wrong.
When he drew the first illustration, he already had top-level artistic skill, experience, and theoretical knowledge. Consciousness Drawing merely required him to become familiar with the process itself so that he could maintain precision while drawing through consciousness.
Once the shortest stave in the "barrel" was repaired and his Consciousness Drawing ability stabilized, his overall artistic level would naturally change with it.
Another of the hottest topics surrounding Blank on BIUBIUBIU was:
Who exactly was Blank?
It was a newly registered account with practically no personal information.
Even professionals who deliberately tried to identify the artist through their style came away empty-handed. Blank's style changed constantly. The only thing that could be confirmed was that his drawing ability was exceptionally high—high enough that he could easily overcome the disadvantages involved in switching between different styles.
Why would an artist whose skill rivaled Japan's top illustrators suddenly appear out of nowhere?
Why had there been no prior information about him and no earlier works?
This situation reminded some players of 'Modern Battlefield 4' of the video known as 'The Ultimate Textbook'.
In that video, a player with the English ID Blank had used seemingly cheat-like marksmanship and terrifying situational awareness to single-handedly destroy a reasonably strong professional team.
Even now, 'The Ultimate Textbook' remained a frequent topic of discussion among players.
Large numbers of professional players had analyzed the entire match in detail, including Blank's shooting, awareness, positioning, and strategy.
The more they analyzed it, the more frightening the implications seemed.
That one-sided massacre appeared to have been under Blank's complete control from the very beginning. Even information that should theoretically have been impossible to know seemed to have been accounted for.
From the start, the professional team had simply walked into a vast trap that had already been laid for them.
Claims that Blank had been cheating eventually forced both the game's developers and several top-level players to publicly explain the matter.
["Blank was playing on a console. The backend data showed no abnormal gameplay data."]
["Every shot Blank fired can be traced logically, yet it's still impossible to fully understand. Compared with this, actual cheats look far less impressive. I'd rather believe he was cheating, but my experience tells me he wasn't."]
["Pay attention starting at 15:34 in the video. Blank's crosshair passes through the gap in the heavy soldier's armor. I don't know of any cheat that can identify and exploit the heavy soldier's weak point with that level of precision."]
The two Blanks had little connection beyond causing equally astonishing commotions in completely unrelated fields, so the comparison was only briefly mentioned by some gamers before being forgotten.
...
"It feels quite a bit better than drawing by hand. There's still plenty of room for improvement in my overall level."
Seeing the flood of astonished reactions to the fan illustration he had uploaded, Kamiyā Yuu sat on the sofa with his arms folded and considered the result.
The fan art he had spent an hour creating that afternoon had come extremely close to his usual hand-drawn level, yet he still felt many places could be further optimized.
Digital painting software offered a far more detailed color spectrum than traditional drawing, far more varied techniques, and even allowed him to create freely without having to consider the physical difficulty of drawing certain effects.
In his previous world, no fully immersive sensory simulation system had been developed.
The greatest obstacle lay in the immaturity of neural-interface technology.
What would happen when a person's consciousness connected directly to a network?
How could a computer determine what a human was thinking?
How could the five human senses be simulated?
That was why technologies similar to VR had instead become mainstream and gradually improved.
However, the inability to draw directly through consciousness didn't mean digital art technology had remained stagnant.
In reality, there was a wide variety of drawing software available on computers.
The most commonly used was RD, a painting program released by a famous Japanese software-development company. When it launched, its promotional slogan claimed it would save Japan's declining animation industry.
The remarkable thing about this software was that even someone who knew absolutely nothing about art could, after becoming familiar with its controls, use the software's "assistance" to create fairly impressive illustrations.
For key animators and animators, using it was like giving wings to a tiger.
Kamiyā Yuu had briefly analyzed the software's structure and also had Blake provide large-scale data analysis as reference.
At present, his theoretical knowledge of digital drawing didn't merely surpass this world's overall level—it also left the overall technology of his previous world far behind.
Since he was already home, Kamiyā Yuu had no intention of adding more burdens to his rest time.
He closed BIUBIUBIU and clicked into the largest Chinese web-fiction website in this world—Fantasy Book Alliance.
Fantasy Book Alliance had apparently been founded around 2005 in this world. It was China's earliest web-fiction platform and remained the largest online fiction creation hub today.
Several years earlier, its capital chain had broken, and it had been acquired by another large internet company.
That company seemed extremely optimistic about the future of web fiction. It spared no expense in investment, allowing the site to develop by leaps and bounds over the past few years.
The number of paying legitimate readers alone had doubled, never mind the countless pirate readers.
However, piracy remained rampant, the web-fiction market was immature, and a complete industrial chain had yet to form.
Although the number of legitimate readers had doubled, it still hadn't compensated for the investment.
Several years of revenue barely equaled one-fifth of the money originally spent acquiring Fantasy Book Alliance.
The investment capital had sunk into the sea without even making a splash.
"Sure enough, the homepage looks no different from a pirate site. What the hell are these ads... 'One slash to level 999, kill pigs and drop the Dragon-Slaying Saber.' Was your pig transformed from a dragon or something?"
The corner of Kamiyā Yuu's mouth twitched.
He clicked the Become an Author option on the homepage and entered a fairly simple registration page, then began filling in the information he had already prepared.
"Title: 'Battle Through the Heavens' — Pen Name: Doesn't Eat Tomatoes — Synopsis: This is a world belonging to Dou Qi. There is no dazzling, extravagant magic here—only Dou Qi, developed to its very peak..."
"It even has scheduled publishing? That's useful. In the future, I can upload fifty thousand characters all at once and release one chapter every hour. Haha."
Kamiyā Yuu could already imagine 'Battle Through the Heavens' exploding in popularity throughout this world's Chinese web-fiction scene.
Complicated emotions filled him as he sighed.
"At last, I finally get to experience what it feels like to become a supreme webnovel god. It hasn't been easy. Sure, I'm still basically a transporter, but with material this high-quality, becoming president of the Transporters Association is only a matter of time."
Becoming one of the great gods of the web-fiction industry had always been one of his dreams.
Unfortunately, in his previous world, he had only managed to remain a struggling author by relying on a little creativity in his novels.
With the web-fiction market already saturated at the time, simply surviving in the field had been quite an achievement.
As usual, Kamiyā Yuu hadn't copied 'Battle Through the Heavens' over in its entirety.
Just as with the 'Fate/Zero' series, he had extensively revised the whole work.
He retained the core appeal of simple wish-fulfillment fiction and its pacing, but the vividness of the characters and the emotional force of the plot had been elevated to an entirely different level.
Although the original 'Battle Through the Heavens' had ushered in the golden age of straightforward wish-fulfillment web fiction, its inherent quality wasn't actually that outstanding.
It had numerous shortcomings in prose, plot, characterization, and other areas. Even calling it high-quality wish-fulfillment fiction would have been somewhat generous.
After Kamiyā Yuu spent several days rebuilding it inside the Consciousness Space, the overall framework of 'Battle Through the Heavens' remained unchanged, but the work itself had undergone a complete transformation.
Its characters were vivid, the plot was reasonable yet thrilling, and the prose was polished without deliberately trying to sound profound or becoming excessively blunt.
Even judged by the standards of the mature web-fiction industry of 2030 from before Kamiyā Yuu's transmigration, his revised 'Battle Through the Heavens' would still qualify as a god-tier example of straightforward wish-fulfillment fiction.
Having uploaded the novel that had ushered in the peak era of that genre in his previous world, Kamiyā Yuu contentedly began exploring the other functions in the author dashboard.
The process for publishing web fiction in this world was similar to the early days of his previous world.
The first uploaded chapter required review, and the review period usually lasted no more than three days.
"During these three days, I'll finish the cover for 'Battle Through the Heavens' and an illustration for Chapter One. I definitely need a close-up for that classic scene—' Dou Qi Strength'."
Kamiyā Yuu had decided to create illustrations for 'Battle Through the Heavens'.
Naturally, he wouldn't use a Japanese-style art direction.
Instead, he would employ an illustration style that carried a faint Japanese influence while remaining completely distinct.
The greatest difference lay in its cultural presentation.
This was a Chinese illustration style that had emerged during the later development of web fiction in his previous world. Although influenced by Japanese aesthetics, it retained its own characteristics and originality.
Visually, it was also extremely well suited to the kind of stories found in web novels.