After the trial illustration received Akiyama Gojō's approval, the illustration style for 'Mechanical Era' was officially set as Kamiyā Yuu's style. Since the novel itself had already been completed long ago, it could basically enter formal publication as soon as Kamiyā Yuu's illustrations arrived.
Kamiyā Yuu wasn't the type to procrastinate. Whenever someone entrusted him with something, he tried to finish it as soon as possible so it wouldn't become an unnecessary burden. The day after settling on the illustration style for 'Mechanical Era', Kamiyā Yuu had already completed the ten illustrations needed for the first volume.
Due to the distinctive style of the novel's story, only two of the ten illustrations focused on characters. Three were close-up scenes, while the remaining five were wide landscape illustrations, emphasizing the decaying atmosphere of the wasteland and the unique worldbuilding of 'Mechanical Era'.
"Normally, light novel illustrations should focus on the characters, especially the female characters, yet I'm doing exactly the opposite. I already asked Akiyama for his opinion, and he had the same idea as me—that expansive landscape illustrations can portray the desolate atmosphere of this world to the greatest extent. The illustrations don't do the novel any disservice, but quite a few readers probably won't appreciate them."
Looking through the finished illustrations on his computer screen, Kamiyā Yuu couldn't help smiling bitterly.
People often joked that buying a light novel meant "buying the illustrations and getting toilet paper for free." A considerable number of readers who bought books for the illustrations were specifically there for the female characters. "Otaku are disgusting" had another meaning as well: otaku money was ridiculously easy to make.
That said, Kamiyā Yuu still had considerable confidence in his illustrations.
Aside from the two exquisitely drawn character illustrations of the male and female leads, every image he had produced was of a quality suitable for a top-tier desktop wallpaper. Drawing through consciousness gave his illustrations a structural quality entirely different from hand-drawn artwork, combined with a delicate style and masterful use of color. No one's first impression of these illustrations could be poor.
Kamiyā Yuu set his price at eighty thousand yen per illustration.
In theory, that was already close to the upper limit of what illustrators normally charged for ordinary commissioned work.
In his previous world, the famous Japanese illustrator Kurehito Misaki had once seen one of his prints auctioned for as much as three hundred thousand yen. Prints he had drawn for the light novel 'Saekano: How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend' had originally sold for only tens of thousands of yen, but after the anime aired, prices had once soared into the hundreds of thousands. And those light novel prints even had reproduced editions.
Drawing illustrations was by no means simple work. Famous illustrators often had their own dedicated teams.
Kurehito Misaki and his partner Shinobu Kuroya, for example, founded a team called Cradle, with each of them handling different aspects of the work. Although Kurehito Misaki was extremely famous in Japan, his partner Shinobu Kuroya lived a much more secluded life and rarely appeared before the public. Kurehito Misaki had once revealed in an interview for an artbook that Shinobu Kuroya's actual illustration skills were even better than his own.
Another interesting fact was that Shinobu Kuroya was a female illustrator and was actually Kurehito Misaki's wife.
Kamiyā Yuu simply couldn't muster much interest in Japan's illustration industry. He had even once confused Kurehito Misaki with the manga artist Oh! great. His knowledge of Kurehito Misaki was basically limited to the anime 'Saekano: How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend', plus the fact that the texture of the stockings he drew was exceptionally good.
Eighty thousand yen for a beautifully rendered digital illustration might seem unbelievable to ordinary people, but this was actually a quote Kamiyā Yuu had given only after deliberately restricting several pricing factors.
Among the collaboration requests he had rejected, quite a few game companies had offered more than one million yen per illustration.
That price wasn't even exaggerated.
Back when players of 'Warship Girls Collection' wanted to obtain the Madokami ship-girl mental model designed by him, the total amount of money players poured into the game had exceeded one hundred million yen.
"All right. I'll bundle them all up and send them to Akiyama."
After finishing his review, Kamiyā Yuu sent all ten completed illustrations to Akiyama Gojō's email in one go.
Once that was done, he opened another folder containing illustrations.
An image entirely different from Japanese-style illustrations appeared before him, filled with a distinctly classical Eastern aesthetic.
While drawing the illustrations for 'Mechanical Era', Kamiyā Yuu had also finished the cover art for the novel 'Battle Through the Heavens', which he had "transplanted" from his previous world.
He first used image-processing software to reduce the resolution of the cover art, then frowned in thought.
"The cover art for 'Battle Through the Heavens' is finished. Next, I need to turn it into an actual novel cover. But once I do that, the resolution of the image will become quite low, and the website doesn't support uploading large-format images directly into the novel."
There was another issue regarding the illustration style of 'Battle Through the Heavens' that required careful consideration: the style of the novel itself.
Eastern fantasy?
Western fantasy?
Judging purely from the cultural atmosphere of the novel, it clearly leaned toward the former. However, the settings involving battle qi, magical beasts, and characters similar to Medusa carried a Western fantasy flavor.
This was the old web novel trend of combining different genres into what was called Eastern fantasy, which would later become one of the most toxic elements in the web novel industry.
That kind of genre fusion might have been barely tolerable when it existed only in prose, but if it were turned into illustrations, the visual dissonance would be overwhelming.
Just imagine a knight wearing Western-style armor charging into a xianxia world, or cultivators battling a Western dragon.
With that in mind, Kamiyā Yuu simply revised the entire cultural atmosphere of 'Battle Through the Heavens' into something closer to pure Eastern fantasy. Any settings or objects in the novel that carried a distinctly Western flavor were carefully reconsidered and altered.
The illustration style wasn't Japanese, nor was it Hong Kong comic style.
If he absolutely had to describe it, it was something like an ultimate 2D-enhanced version of the Chinese animated series 'The Legend of Qin', filled with the atmosphere of an Eastern wuxia world.
After frowning in thought for a long while, Kamiyā Yuu placed both hands on his desk and murmured, "Then I might as well upload the illustration to my account on 'BIUBIUBIU'. The illustration's popularity should make the novel's initial launch a little more stable. The quality of the revised 'Battle Through the Heavens' won't disgrace the illustration."
The revised version of 'Battle Through the Heavens' had greatly improved many aspects of the original that had been criticized. Kamiyā Yuu was confident there wouldn't be any situation where the quality of the novel failed to match the illustrations.
Kamiyā Yuu opened the 'BIUBIUBIU' bullet-comment video website he had founded and logged into the account named Blank.
He uploaded the illustration, which carried a strong classical Eastern aesthetic, to his portfolio and added an explanation:
"I drew this cover illustration for a friend's novel, 'Battle Through the Heavens'. 'Battle Through the Heavens' will officially begin serialization tomorrow on Fantasy Book Alliance. Readers who enjoy web novels are welcome to check it out. In addition, I'll be drawing custom illustrations for this novel from time to time, so please look forward to them."
Although he still had no intention of publicly revealing his true identity to avoid unnecessary trouble, he decided to present 'Battle Through the Heavens' as a novel written by a friend.
The moment this illustration filled with Eastern cultural aesthetics was uploaded, it immediately attracted considerable attention.
In China, where the professional illustrator industry had yet to fully develop, this style—which would later become mainstream for web novel illustrations—was undoubtedly something exceedingly rare.
Ten minutes after he uploaded it, the comment section beneath the 'Battle Through the Heavens' cover illustration easily surpassed one hundred comments.
[Holy crap! What kind of art style even is this!? — Yujiang]
[I'm going to die if I don't get more fan art of my King. — Miku8AFE]
[Casual viewer turned fan! What a gorgeous Chinese-style illustration! — Dox's Cat]
[The style is completely different from the previous illustrations. Honestly, this is already at the level where I'd believe it came from a completely different artist. Still, I have to admit this illustration is seriously good. Is the character in it the novel's male protagonist? — Lord Meow~]
[A Japanese-illustration foundation combined with a Chinese cultural atmosphere, yet it doesn't feel out of place at all. Absolutely insane! — Limited Edition HY Game]
[Since when do web novels get illustrations this high-end and luxurious!? How much does one image like this even cost? — Short Guy Afraid of Heights]
[It already says Blank drew it for a friend, so obviously it's the friendship price. — Troubles Are Too Luxurious]
[Master May charges three thousand RMB per illustration. A master like Blank has to start at five thousand at least. Even at a friendship price, that's not an expense an ordinary web novel can afford. Isn't this kind of wasting something priceless on the wrong thing? — Alishan Fox]
[A custom illustration for a web novel? Even god-tier authors don't get treatment like this! Fine, I'll follow the novel for the sake of the illustrations. — Eric Cartman]
...
Elsewhere, Akiyama Gojō received the email sent by Kamiyā Yuu.
"Don't tell me that Kamiyā guy mobilized Yosuganosora Animation Studio to help him draw these illustrations. This speed is ridiculous enough to give me a headache."
Akiyama Gojō, who had told himself more than once that there was no point being surprised by anything involving Kamiyā Yuu, looked at the ten illustrations displayed on his computer screen and slapped his forehead with a bitter smile.
Ten illustrations in a single day.
No matter how one looked at it, that wasn't a speed a human illustrator should be capable of.
His most conservative guess was that Kamiyā Yuu had drawn the main framework of each illustration and then had other artists continuously fill in the remaining details.
He scrolled through the illustrations with his mouse.
When it came to the light novel illustrations, he hadn't given Kamiyā Yuu much advice at all. He had handed complete creative control over to him.
That was also the sort of treatment a top-tier illustrator deserved.
Before long, his gaze stopped on one of the character illustrations, his expression becoming complicated.
"Designation 7..."
Designation 7.
The heroine he had created.
The instigator of the intelligent-machine rebellion.
In Kamiyā Yuu's character illustration, Designation 7 was portrayed as an expressionless silver-haired girl who usually appeared in the form of a loli.
There were some differences from the character described in his novel, but Kamiyā Yuu's version of Designation 7 possessed even more of the complex quality Akiyama Gojō had always wanted to convey.
That alone was enough to prove that Kamiyā Yuu must have studied his novel carefully before drawing the illustration.
"And these must be the wide landscape illustrations Kamiyā mentioned."
He continued scrolling.
One panoramic image after another depicting the wasteland world entered his vision.
In the first, the male protagonist held the heroine's hand as they entered a ruined city head-on. Fallen skyscrapers blocked the roads at ground level. Once-beautiful vehicles had become scrap metal scattered haphazardly among the rubble. Weeds grew everywhere—along the roadsides, through the ruins, and across the fractured towers.
The city's greenery had mutated and spread until it occupied the entire city, presenting a strange beauty created by the fusion of nature and artificial structures.
The second illustration depicted a ruined city constructed from piles of steel.
Mountains of electronic waste blocked out the sunlight. Just looking at the image almost made one imagine the pungent stench of rust.
Humans dressed in ragged clothing moved back and forth through the settlement. Occasionally, the silhouettes of intelligent machines could be seen, along with the strange looks some pedestrians directed at them.
The third depicted a world engulfed by an endless sandstorm.
It was merely an ordinary desert, yet the war caused by the intelligent-machine rebellion had left its scars even here. There were crashed fighter jets and enormous circular craters left behind by nuclear bombardment.
Everything was slowly being eroded by wind and sand as the male and female protagonists traveled through the barren desert.
Of course, Akiyama Gojō knew what light novel illustrations were ideally supposed to look like.
There was even a joking saying in their editorial department:
"A light novel illustration without the heroine is merely an illustration unrelated to the work."
In other words, if the heroine wasn't present in a light novel illustration, then the illustration might as well have nothing to do with the novel at all.
It indirectly emphasized just how important illustrations of the female lead were.
Yet as the chief editor of light novels, when Akiyama Gojō received Kamiyā Yuu's phone call saying that the illustrations would primarily consist of wide landscape shots, not the slightest doubt had arisen in his mind.
Perhaps it was because he trusted Kamiyā Yuu.
Or perhaps it was because he had originally thought the same way.
Even he wasn't entirely sure.
Now, however, as he looked at the panoramic illustrations Kamiyā Yuu had created, the answer became clear.
"Knock, knock."
A knock sounded from the door.
"Come in," Akiyama Gojō replied.
His gaze remained fixed on the landscape illustration before him, as though he were trying to uncover every last detail hidden within it.
"Akiyama, these are this month's light novel review materials... What are you looking at?"
Akiyama Gojō's editorial assistant, Tōmizu, became curious when he saw how intently Akiyama was staring at the screen. He walked over and saw the uniquely styled illustrations.
"What's with these illustrations?"
Even though he was only an editor, he could immediately tell that there was something different about them.
Akiyama Gojō folded his arms, turned toward his assistant, and nodded.
"They're all works by Kamiyā-sensei."
"That Kamiyā Yuu-sensei? I was just wondering which famous illustrator had drawn these. As expected, they're extraordinary. Are these illustrations for the novel 'Fate/Zero'?" Editor Tōmizu exclaimed in admiration.
Akiyama Gojō shook his head.
"They're for another light novel, but it's not a new work by Kamiyā-sensei."
"Not one of Kamiyā-sensei's works?"
At those words, Editor Tōmizu examined the illustrations more carefully.
The art style was completely different from 'Fate/Zero'. Yet after staring at them for a short while, his eyes widened in surprise, and he frowned.
He blurted out, "'Mechanical Era'!"
Hearing that, Akiyama Gojō looked at him in astonishment.
"Tōmizu, I'm impressed you could recognize it."
Editor Tōmizu shook his head with a smile.
"I did read that novel of yours, after all. I don't know why, but these illustrations just gave me that feeling. More importantly, you've finally decided to publish 'Mechanical Era'?"
Before becoming Akiyama Gojō's assistant editor, he had been the editor responsible for Akiyama Gojō's novel. He was also one of the few people who knew why Akiyama had eventually become an editor himself.
"What do you think?" Akiyama Gojō asked.
"Isn't it great? I've always thought you had the talent to write light novels. Now you've even gotten help from Kamiyā-sensei. Either way, I'm optimistic about it. Speaking of which, these illustrations really are incredible. How exactly were they drawn? They don't even feel like they're on the same level as ordinary illustrations."
Editor Tōmizu patted Akiyama Gojō on the shoulder, then curiously leaned closer to get a better look at the novel illustrations.
His unserious answer left Akiyama Gojō helpless.
When Editor Tōmizu had recognized the illustrations as belonging to 'Mechanical Era', Akiyama Gojō had actually felt a surge of joy.
The fact that the novel had left enough of an impression on Tōmizu for him to recognize it was itself a form of acknowledgment.
Besides, it had already been several years since Akiyama Gojō had last shown him 'Mechanical Era'.
Kamiyā Yuu's illustrations had also given him considerable confidence.
Even if the novel ultimately failed to become popular, at the very least, he had created the light novel he truly wanted to write.