After dinner, Chihaya Higashino stayed in the living room to watch television for a while before going to bed.
Tsukasa Higashino, meanwhile, returned to his room and sat before a desk covered with manga-drawing tools, lost in thought.
Your artistic talent from your previous life allows you to quickly master any form of drawing and techniques related to art.
Thanks to that system ability, Tsukasa had bought a wide assortment of manga tools and quickly learned how to use most of them.
For shadows, there was specialized screentone paper that could be cut with a craft knife.
Many professional manga artists didn’t bother drawing shadows by hand at all; they simply cut and pasted screentones onto the manuscript.
It was convenient, clean, and visually effective.
For curved lines, there were curve templates.
As for the main linework, he used a dip pen fitted with a G-pen nib—the same kind commonly used by professional manga artists.
A G-pen nib could produce an impressive variety of strokes, making its lines highly expressive.
But there was one problem.
The damned thing was incredibly difficult to use.
Tsukasa still remembered the first time he had tried drawing with one.
Either the nib split apart in the middle, or its tip was so sharp that it dug straight into the manga manuscript paper and left an ugly gouge.
At one point, Tsukasa had nearly wanted to swallow the cursed thing whole.
But that was life.
No profession was truly easy.
Even with his artistic talent and solid foundation, it had still taken Tsukasa an entire week to become proficient with the G-pen.
Having a system didn’t automatically make him invincible.
As for the other tools?
Those had been much easier to handle.
Manga supplies were also somewhat cheaper than professional fine-art materials.
A pack of twenty manga manuscript sheets cost only around a thousand yen.
Tsukasa had bought ten packs to keep at home, though he had already burned through an entire pack while practicing with the G-pen.
Fortunately, once he learned how to use tools like the G-pen properly, the waste dropped considerably.
“All right.
Let’s get started.”
Tsukasa picked up his G-pen and lowered the nib onto a clean sheet of manuscript paper.
He was working on the manuscript for Chapter Two of Ring, which was already more than halfway finished.
Unlike the first chapter, Chapter Two began by explaining the circumstances surrounding Tomoko’s death before properly introducing the heroine, Reiko Asakawa, and drawing her into the mystery of the cursed videotape.
The chapter would be twenty-one pages long—a fairly standard length for a serialized manga installment.
It was one of those unwritten conventions of manga serialization.
The first chapter of a Japanese manga series was usually somewhere in the forty-page range.
That might sound like a lot, but it really wasn’t.
A debut chapter had to establish the setting, introduce the story, present the characters, and most importantly, show readers exactly what made the manga worth following.
Forty-something pages was neither excessively long nor particularly generous.
It was simply enough.
Tsukasa’s first chapter of Ring, for example, had been forty-eight pages long—just about perfect.
Some inexperienced newcomers, however, would sit down to draw their very first manga and somehow produce more than a hundred pages.
Those were the authors who were a little too impressed with themselves—the manga equivalent of someone writing their first web novel and immediately believing they were about to create the next Lord of Mysteries. Follow the newest chapters on NovelPing.
Publishers generally had only one response for that sort of creator: if you’re that determined to draw it, you might as well publish the book yourself.
There was no helping it.
A weekly manga magazine normally contained only a little over four hundred pages, or perhaps five hundred for an especially large issue.
No manga received such absurdly special treatment that a single chapter was allowed to swallow a quarter of the entire magazine.
Even if the work was genuinely excellent, the author would still be told to cut the debut down to somewhere around forty pages.
After that, subsequent manuscripts submitted to the publisher generally settled into the range of roughly seventeen to twenty pages.
Tsukasa activated his Empathic Projection drawing skill once again.
As the ability took effect, he could distinctly feel himself slipping into the role of Reiko Asakawa, as though he had become the woman he was drawing.
When he reached a panel showing a character’s horribly twisted corpse, even Tsukasa felt a chill crawl down his back.
This skill really was unsettling.
The pen in his hand seemed to possess some strange magic, dragging him directly into the eerie, terrifying world of Ring.
As his awareness blurred, Tsukasa could even hear the pounding of his own heart—
No.
That wasn’t a heartbeat.
It was the frantic ringing of a telephone!
Tsukasa raised his head.
A pair of cold, blood-red eyes stared directly at him.
Tsukasa merely set down his pen and glanced sideways at them, completely unruffled.
Then, in the same tone someone might use to shoo away an annoying insect, he said, “Shoo.
Go away.”
The icy crimson eyes dissolved like mist.
Tsukasa abruptly returned to his senses.
On the desk before him lay the completed nineteenth page of Ring’s second chapter.
It had taken him ninety minutes to finish a single page.
On the manuscript, the supporting character’s corpse stared outward with a grotesque, horrifying expression, its venomous gaze so vivid that it almost seemed capable of piercing through the paper and entering reality.
“An hour and a half per page.”
Tsukasa rubbed his chin.
That was actually a fairly normal pace.
As for those monsters in novels who somehow drew thirty or forty finished manga pages in a single afternoon?
Frankly, people like that didn’t exist in real life.
Just carefully cutting and applying screentone with a craft knife could easily take ten or twenty minutes if the artist was particular about the details.
“I’ll find time to finish the rest tomorrow.”
Tsukasa yawned.
He had dealt with far too many things today.
He wasn’t made of iron, so naturally he was tired.
Tomorrow, he was scheduled to meet an editor from Urashima Publishing.
If his guess was correct, they wanted to discuss serializing Ring.
After all, if the publisher had rejected the manuscript outright, they wouldn’t have gone out of their way to call him, much less request a face-to-face meeting. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
At most, the rejection letter would contain some tactful line such as:
Your manga is very good, but it is still just a little short of the standard required for publication in our magazine.
And that seemingly tiny “little short” had probably tormented countless aspiring manga artists.
Tsukasa, however, wasn’t nervous in the slightest.
He had always been confident.
First, he trusted his own drawing ability.
Second, he trusted the story of Ring.
As for the hallucination he had just seen…
That was nothing new.
He had started seeing things like that quite some time ago.
It appeared to be a side effect of using Empathic Projection.
Tsukasa suspected that certain people who read his version of Ring might experience the same kinds of hallucinations.
He wondered which lucky readers would get to enjoy that privilege.
Muttering to himself, Tsukasa glanced toward his wardrobe.
The Higashino household had originally had five hundred thousand yen left.
After subtracting their recent expenses—and adding the small amount Tsukasa had earned by selling paintings…
“So we have about four hundred thousand yen left?”
Tsukasa murmured.
Four hundred thousand yen was definitely not much.
Gas, water, and electricity together came to around ten thousand yen.
His mobile phone bill was another fifteen hundred yen.
Daily transportation and food expenses could easily climb past one hundred thousand yen, and there was also the mandatory four-thousand-yen national insurance payment.
Once everything was added together…
Four hundred thousand yen wouldn’t even last them two months.
And that was without having to worry about rent.
“People who could afford to study abroad back then really must have been loaded.”
Tsukasa sighed, though he wasn’t particularly distressed.
If tomorrow’s discussion with Urashima Publishing went well, he probably wouldn’t have to calculate every living expense so carefully anymore.
He would also be able to focus properly on preparing for the Tokyo National Youth Art Award.
“Still…
winning only the Gold Award in the student division probably won’t give me enough leverage.”
Tsukasa fell into thought.
Chihaya’s circumstances were unusual.
Even if Tsukasa won the student-division Gold Award, it would probably only persuade Principal Ryuichi Yoshimine to make a few concessions—and those concessions would almost certainly be limited.
“Looks like I really do need to find another way.”
Tsukasa quietly made up his mind.