In only a few days, the sales results of Blue Spring Ride and Yesterday's Starlight spread throughout the entire light novel industry like wildfire.
For a novel, the best calling card was always its standalone sales.
Yesterday's Starlight moving over sixty thousand copies in its first week was already an impressive debut.
But Blue Spring Ride hitting one hundred and eighty thousand copies in its first week was not "impressive."
It was a detonation.
Sure, about half of those sales came from outside Minamijo, but who cared? Money earned in Tokyo was still yen, and money earned in Hokkaido was still yen. The royalties were real either way.
Within those few days, the name "Shiori Takahashi" started circulating through editorial departments and author circles at every major imprint.
Everyone knew it now.
At Minamijo Third High School, there was a rookie light novelist hiding in plain sight, and their skill was the real thing.
Not long after, Crimson Maple Literature officially released the sales figures to the industry. Fans of both books celebrated like it was a festival, and a surprising number of students at Minamijo Third High got swept up too.
"Did you hear? A student from our school wrote a light novel and it blew up."
"I heard Yesterday's Starlight is already past eighty thousand total copies, and Blue Spring Ride is about to hit two hundred and fifty thousand. That's insane. What class are these monsters even in?"
"Do you think either of them could get a manga adaptation? Or even an anime?"
"It's not impossible. It depends on investors. If an animation committee thinks it can make money, they'll buy the rights."
"Yesterday's Starlight might be a bit weaker, but Blue Spring Ride is absolutely in the zone. With those numbers, Volume One will easily clear four hundred thousand total, and it might even spike up to five hundred thousand. With popularity like that, it meets the industry threshold for an anime adaptation."
"I seriously want to know which genius from our school wrote something like this. People always call Third High a cram-school full of exam robots, but look at this. We can compete in grades, and we've got hidden monsters in other fields too."
That week, you could hear conversations like that in almost every classroom. Both novels already had plenty of readers inside the school, and now that they had posted results like this, a new obsession swept through campus.
Find out who Shiori Takahashi and Airi really were.
For Haruto and Reina, it felt surreal.
They sat there hearing classmates speculate about Shiori Takahashi and Airi as if they were urban legends.
Reina thought, If they knew the "high school girl genius author" Shiori Takahashi they keep talking about is actually a quiet, easygoing guy who rarely smiles, would their brains just short-circuit?
Haruto thought, If they knew the bestselling author Airi is actually Reina, the school's beautiful honor student, their eyes would fall out of their skulls.
On Wednesday, Haruto used a real estate agent to find a new apartment complex in the southern part of the city. He hired movers, and the relocation went smoothly.
The new place was only ten minutes from school.
The neighborhood was clean and quiet, the building was well maintained, and the unit itself was a three bedroom with high-end renovations.
He was on the top floor.
Every morning, sunlight poured in through the massive living room window, and when he looked out, he could see the whole skyline of Minamijo City, glittering and alive.
The biggest advantage was obvious.
No more subway crush every morning.
The downside was also obvious.
The rent was 90k yen a month.
For most working adults, that kind of rent was painful. For a high school student, it was almost ridiculous.
But Haruto had a few thousand yen saved up already, and more importantly, he had a very clear idea of what Blue Spring Ride would earn him.
The magazine serialization ran for fourteen issues.
At the beginning, his manuscript fees had been only around sixty thousand yen per issue, which was decent but nothing crazy.
Then Blue Spring Ride climbed to the top of Fleeting Blossoms, and starting from Issue Seven, Haruto's fee jumped to 210,000 yen per installment.
Even though the market had only serialized up to Issue Thirteen so far, the total manuscript payment for the full run was easy to calculate.
It would land somewhere around 2.4 million yen.
And that was only the serialization fee.
Right now, the total standalone sales for Blue Spring Ride had already surpassed 270,000 copies. Even if he simply assumed Volume One would reach 500,000 copies, and Volume Two could maintain the same momentum, then the two volumes combined would exceed one million copies sold.
At a 10 percent royalty rate, Haruto's earnings from standalone sales alone would exceed ten million yen.
And that still did not include the uncertain but potentially huge extra streams.
Manga adaptation rights.
Anime rights.
Live-action film rights.
When Haruto chatted with Yukino through email on his phone, she had casually mentioned that a few companies in Minamijo were already interested in negotiating for Blue Spring Ride's rights.
Still, even ignoring those uncertain future deals, Haruto could confidently say one thing. Over the next few months, the income he would receive from Blue Spring Ride would exceed 15 million yen.
With that kind of money, paying rent was nothing.
He could practically buy the apartment outright if he wanted.
Back in January, Haruto had been stressing about survival and schoolwork.
Now, in early April, he already had a confirmed seven-figure income in yen.
Life really could flip that fast.
"Being a light novelist is basically gambling. If you lose, your income is nearly zero, you sit at the bottom of society, and even your relatives look at you like you're a failure."
"But if your work hits…"
He stared up at the ceiling and let out a quiet laugh.
"Then being a light novelist becomes a job everyone envies."
"In Japan, when you succeed in creative work, people don't call you by name anymore. Light novelists, manga artists, anyone with real success, they get the same honorific."
"Sensei."
"In the end, this world is the same everywhere. Once you make money, you are 'successful.'"
Haruto fell back onto his new, ridiculously soft bed and let his body sink into it.
In two more days, Blue Spring Ride would finish serializing.
After that train-platform choice scene in Chapter Eight, the later story was basically a steady, satisfying school romance between the leads. It was cute, it was warm, and it flowed smoothly.
The popularity had held steady. It had not surged higher, but it definitely had not dropped either.
As for the ending, it stayed open in the right way. The male and female leads liked each other, they became a couple, and the story ended with the clear feeling that they would walk toward a happy future together.
If he wrote beyond that point, the messy late arcs from the original manga would start to show their face.
It was not that the later manga was objectively terrible, but compared to the early part, it was like going from a ninety five to a seventy.
If he reproduced that quality drop, readers would feel the difference immediately, and instead of praise, he would be rewarded with complaints, ridicule, and furious forum posts.
No, this was better.
Let Blue Spring Ride be born in praise, and let it end in praise.
But once it ended, what came next?
Haruto's eyes drifted shut.
A strange heaviness pulled him down, and before he could even think about it properly, he slipped into sleep.
In the dream, he once again became the girl named Shiori.
She had just finished a match of League.
Completely destroyed.
Her score line flashed like a cruel joke.
0/16/1.
The enemy Draven was six items at twenty minutes, and he stood at their fountain like a tyrant, deleting her teammates one by one. The only assist Shiori's Lee Sin got was when Draven got cocky and dove too deep. She threw a shield on a teammate and accidentally tagged the kill credit.
After getting crushed in game, she endured thirty straight minutes of flame from her four teammates.
Her mood was beyond miserable.
So, still sulking, Shiori opened the familiar anime streaming site and followed a friend's recommendation.
If you had been bullied by both the enemy team and your own team, then obviously you needed something warm and healing to patch your heart back together.
Her friend had strongly recommended one title.
"This one will save you. It's gentle, it's emotional, and it's perfect when you feel like crap."
That was the exact phrasing.
The title was long.
But it had a short nickname everybody used.
AnoHana.
Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day.
The moment Haruto saw that title, his spirit snapped awake.
He had been waiting two whole months for this.
Finally.
The girl was watching something new.
Gaming was poison.
Shiori always had another match to play, another convention to attend, another endless feed to scroll. Getting her to watch anime again felt like waiting for a rare comet.
Before she started, Shiori did what she always did. She checked the basic info first, careful to avoid spoilers.
On that parallel world's site, this series had everything.
Views.
Rating.
Buzz.
Discussion volume.
Across the board, it outperformed Blue Spring Ride.
"Looks fine," Shiori murmured, her mood lifting slightly. "So many people rated it highly, it should be pretty heartwarming."
Haruto nodded in satisfaction.
In the light novel market, stories like this were exactly what people loved.
If it was truly as good as its popularity suggested, then pitching something like it to Crimson Maple magazine should not be a problem at all.
Haruto held his breath.
He steadied himself, then leaned deeper into the memory fragments, preparing to absorb every bit of the story's charm.
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