After dinner, Tsukasa Higashino stood up to clear the dishes, only for Chihaya Higashino to stop him.
“Tsukasa is a boy who’s going to accomplish great things!
Leave this kind of work to your big sister!” Chihaya declared, patting her chest proudly.
“You should go rest.”
Her psychiatric disorder affected her awareness and judgment, but she was still perfectly capable of handling ordinary household chores.
Because of that, there were many things she refused to let Tsukasa do, insisting on taking care of them herself.
It was practically the treatment of an emperor.
Naturally, Tsukasa had no intention of letting a mentally unwell young woman wait on him hand and foot.
After all, he wasn’t sick, injured, or disabled.
“It’s fine.
I don’t have anything else to do anyway.” Tsukasa smiled and naturally took the dishes from Chihaya’s hands.
After reassuring her, Tsukasa returned to his room.
Looking around the sparsely furnished room, he rubbed his chin and sighed.
“I’m a little short on money.”
Yes.
Money was the biggest problem currently facing the Higashino household.
Chihaya needed money for treatment.
Food, housing, transportation—everything cost money.
There had even been a saying back in China in his previous life:
“I’d rather cry in a BMW than laugh on the back of a bicycle.”
If nothing else, that saying demonstrated just how important something as vulgar as money could be.
Tsukasa had never cared much for material possessions, nor had he ever been particularly obsessed with wealth.
But with the family’s parents gone, figuring out how to secure enough money for their living expenses was now something he had no choice but to think about.
He certainly couldn’t expect Chihaya to figure out how to earn money in her current condition.
Tsukasa walked over to his desk and pulled a pale-yellow envelope from one of the drawers.
He opened it.
Inside were printed manga pages, already filled with characters and even completed backgrounds.
That was right.
Manga.
This was the solution he had come up with.
In fact, Tsukasa had already begun preparing his first manga some time ago.
He understood perfectly well that if he and Chihaya simply kept living off whatever savings they had left, they might not literally starve to death, but their lives certainly wouldn’t be comfortable.
At Shibuya Station, he could earn as much as 5,000 yen from a single portrait, but in truth, he was exploiting a legal gray area.
Street artists were indeed allowed to draw within Tokyo, but only to create art.
Charging customers directly on the street was another matter.
If he wanted to set up a stall and openly sell paintings, he would have to go to designated street-market areas in Tokyo or participate in local festivals and similar events.
Tsukasa had only managed to make decent money so far because he was an experienced adult in a teenager’s body.
With his excellent drawing skills and the original Tsukasa’s handsome face, he could smile at customers, charm them, and sell a fair number of portraits.
But that kind of income was unreliable.
There was no guarantee of what he would earn from one day to the next.
That was why he had turned his attention to manga.
As for why Tsukasa didn’t simply follow the same path he had taken in his previous life and become a traditional painter again?
Forget it.
Tsukasa was confident that he could eventually make a name for himself.
After all, he had already been a professional painter in his previous life, and now he had a system on top of that.
He had started several steps ahead of ordinary people.
No matter how badly things went, he probably wouldn’t starve.
But becoming famous as a traditional painter took far too long.
That profession demanded years of accumulation—experience, reputation, connections, and recognition all had to be built slowly.
It might sound strange coming from a former painter, but most lower- and mid-tier professional artists survived largely on reputation.
Otherwise, why had there been so many so-called “masters” back in his previous life who splashed ink, sprayed ink, or even painted with mops?
That wasn’t painting.
That was putting on a show.
But amateurs loved spectacle.
What could anyone do about it?
You could create the most beautiful painting in the world, but if no one knew who you were, then commercially speaking, it was worthless.
To the market, it might as well have been a sheet of scrap paper.
And Japan was, in Tsukasa’s view, even harsher in that respect—a society with clearly defined hierarchies and seniority.
Credentials and professional background mattered even more here.
Right now, he was only a high school student.
How was he supposed to compete head-on with elite graduates from Tokyo’s five major art universities?
With his forehead?
Creating art was all well and good, but before pursuing artistic ideals, a person first had to fill his stomach.
Start over from the bottom as a traditional painter?
Tsukasa might as well close his eyes, jump off the roof of a building, and see whether he could transmigrate a second time.
His odds might actually be better.
Even taking an ordinary part-time job would be more reliable.
More importantly, Chihaya didn’t have years to wait for him to slowly build a reputation.
After thinking the matter over from every angle, Tsukasa realized there was only one path that could fully exploit his artistic skills while producing money quickly enough.
Manga.
This wasn’t a conclusion he had reached on a whim.
Tsukasa had researched the industry carefully.
First, the barrier to entry for manga was relatively low.
As long as you could draw, you could create a manuscript and submit it directly to a publisher.
If the submission was accepted, you could start earning money from the publishing company.
Second, producing manga didn’t require an enormous upfront investment.
If Tsukasa tried to begin again as a traditional painter, professional art supplies alone could drain what little money he had.
Painting had always been an expensive profession.
On top of that, 2003 happened to be a difficult period for Japan’s manga industry.
The market was sluggish overall, suffering from a shortage of outstanding original concepts and compelling stories.
For Tsukasa, however, that weakness represented an excellent opportunity.
As mentioned before, Tsukasa was a transmigrator.
He had spent an entire month adjusting to Japanese society in 2003.
After the bewilderment and disbelief of his first day, he had quickly pulled himself together and begun investigating the state of this world’s Japan.
Japan was still Japan.
On the surface, there were no major differences.
And yet, perhaps through some mysterious twist of fate, many of the outstanding works that had existed in his previous life were missing from this world.
Not only manga.
Literature, paintings, television dramas, movies—across all kinds of creative industries, many famous names and works Tsukasa remembered simply did not exist.
There was no Natsume Soseki and his famous literary association between love and the phrase “The moon is beautiful tonight.”
There was no Yasunari Kawabata’s The Izu Dancer or Snow Country.
Likewise, acclaimed Japanese horror films such as Ring and Ju-On: The Grudge did not exist here.
Unfortunately…
Tsukasa could only sigh helplessly.
In his previous life, he had graduated from an art academy.
Most of what he had studied and remembered in detail were famous paintings from around the world.
As for literature, anime, and mainstream manga?
To be perfectly honest, Tsukasa didn’t know much about them.
He had heard about the settings and major concepts of famous Japanese manga such as One Piece and Detective Conan, and he retained some general impressions of them.
He might be able to recreate a chapter or two from memory, but producing a long-running serialization was completely impossible.
At times like this, Tsukasa couldn’t help envying the protagonists of those web novels he had read.
Those guys could casually “print” entire manga series and novels straight from their memories, then take them out and make a fortune.
If Tsukasa possessed a human-printer ability like that, why would he ever have to worry about making a living?
Fortunately, although Tsukasa hadn’t read many manga in his previous life, he had watched plenty of Japanese dramas and movies.
Whenever he grew bored while painting in his studio, he would prop up his phone and watch something as he worked.
Ring, Ju-On: The Grudge, Unnatural, The Great White Tower, The Solitary Gourmet…
He still remembered the plots of works like these quite clearly, with very few parts he couldn’t recall.
But Tsukasa had never studied film or television production.
The system’s bonuses were centered on drawing and painting.
Why abandon his greatest strength and try writing television scripts, then march into a TV station hoping to get absurdly lucky?
Every profession had its own expertise.
Making Tsukasa gamble his future on scriptwriting would be like asking Spartacus to put down his sword and write a scholarly treatise on military strategy.
Whatever came out of it would probably be complete nonsense.
There was no reason to discard his strengths in favor of his weaknesses.
Tsukasa was already an excellent artist.
With the system enhancing his abilities, he had an even greater advantage.
More importantly, he still retained broad memories of the plots of many famous Japanese movies and television dramas that had been popular across Japan and elsewhere in his previous world.
So why not adapt those stories into manga?
In Japan’s currently struggling manga industry, those adaptations could potentially earn him a fortune.
After all, a man couldn’t let himself be defeated by money.
Tsukasa spent weeks studying, remembering, reconstructing, and refining everything he could.
Then, after two or three weeks of frantic work, his first completed manga finally took shape beneath his pen.
Its title was Ring.