It was, without question, a strong start.
To break it down properly: the creation of a single manga chapter for weekly serialization could be divided into two broad stages.
The first was story creation and storyboarding. This covered everything from plotting the direction of the main narrative, writing character dialogue, planning double-page spreads, and working out panel pacing, through to the back-and-forth discussions and revisions with an editor once the name, the rough storyboard, was submitted.
This stage typically consumed roughly half of the total production time for any given chapter. When inspiration dried up or an editor rejected the original direction, it could consume considerably more.
The second was the actual drawing. Once the storyboard was finalized, the rest followed: rendering characters, laying in perspective, constructing large double-page spreads, drawing backgrounds, adding special effects, and producing everything else the reader ultimately saw on the page. This stage also accounted for roughly half the production cycle, though it was always squeezed by whatever time the first stage had eaten up.
All-nighters were standard. If a deadline became truly impossible to meet, the only option was to submit half-finished pencils and bow deeply in apology.
Looking at both stages together, the role his cheat ability could play became quite clear.
For story creation and storyboarding, he could draw entirely from his knowledge of future works. Choosing a successful title and reproducing it faithfully wasn't something that weighed on him much. As long as he wasn't dealing with adaptation or original creation, his time cost in that stage was effectively zero.
For the drawing stage, the original owner's talent and foundational skill had already turned him into something close to a human printer. Beyond that, the extraordinary control over line work he had just demonstrated meant errors during the drawing process would be minimal, and his overall speed would be far higher than any average working manga artist.
Put it all together, and his production efficiency would sit at a level most serialized manga artists could never approach. Managing a weekly serialization, the kind of schedule that ground most artists into the ground, might be genuinely comfortable for him.
"If that's really the case..."
Akira rubbed his chin and let the thought settle.
It had been less than an hour since he transmigrated. He was still finding his footing, still uncertain about the shape of things. But one goal was already clear, and it happened to align naturally with what the original owner had wanted most.
Money.
The saying was old but accurate: money wasn't everything, but the absence of it made everything harder.
He wasn't someone with extravagant wants. In his previous life, he had understood his limitations, accepted what he could realistically earn, and lived a quiet, reasonably satisfying life within those boundaries. But this life was different. He had capabilities now that his previous self had never possessed. If he could earn more, there was no sensible reason not to.
Becoming the richest person in the world wasn't the ambition. Financial freedom was the target. Reach that, and whatever he chose to do afterward would rest on solid ground.
That thought led him to glance up at the clock on the wall.
Ten thirty in the morning. He was on the afternoon shift today, so there was still time.
He cleared his head, washed up, ate, and got ready for work.
...
The apartment Akira had rented sat near Nakano Station in Nakano Ward. Twenty square meters, a compact one-room layout, fifty thousand yen per month. For the area, that was already on the cheaper end.
The initial cost, however, had been something else entirely.
Japan's rental market came with its own particular customs. In the first month alone, on top of the rent itself and the security deposit, a new tenant was expected to pay key money, a guarantor agency fee, fire insurance, a lock replacement fee, and various other charges that accumulated without much warning. Added together, the total Akira had paid upfront came to two hundred and fifty thousand yen, which had wiped out more than half of the savings he had carefully built up over the years.
And aside from the security deposit, none of it would ever be returned.
The same system would still be in place twenty years later, unchanged.
Because of that initial hit, finding part-time work hadn't been optional. Without a supplementary income, Akira would have burned through his remaining funds before completing a single chapter to submit, and ended up back in Nagano with nothing to show for it.
Of course, even with the income, the original owner hadn't made it far enough to face that problem.
"...Right."
He caught himself and cut the thought short. Eulogizing the original owner mid-morning felt a little grim. He coughed once, stepped out of the elevator, and pushed through the building's entrance into the street.
Nakano Ward was home to a lot of young working residents, many of whom commuted out to other parts of the city during the day and returned only to sleep. The streets in the daytime were quiet, nothing like the energy of Shinjuku or Shibuya.
Even so, the scene outside gave him a small jolt.
It was 1999. But looking at the street in front of him, he could not have told the difference from a photograph taken twenty years later. The buildings, the layout, the general texture of the neighborhood, all of it was essentially identical to what he might have seen in the future.
He was pulled back to reality by the flip phones in the hands of people passing by, small blocky devices with a distinctly dated look.
He thought about the city he had grown up in during his previous life, the constant churn of construction, the skylines that shifted decade by decade, the feeling that nothing ever stayed the same for long. Then he looked at this street, static and settled, the same now as it would be a generation from now.
"So this is what they call the Lost Thirty Years."
He said it quietly and kept walking.
He entered Nakano Station and boarded the JR Chuo-Sobu Line toward Akihabara. The moment he stepped into the train car, the era hit him harder than anything he had encountered on the street outside.
The first thing that drew the eye was a group of three girls whose entire look was built for impact. Tanned skin, bleached brownish-blonde hair, heavy layered makeup in bold colors, low-rise shorts, platform shoes stacked several inches thick, and loose socks bunched down around the calves, the whole ensemble topped off with an assortment of small accessories covering every available surface.
Gyaru.
The style had been developing throughout the nineties, gaining real momentum under the influence of singer and cultural icon Namie Amuro. By now it had branched into several distinct sub-genres, the specifics of which were entirely outside his knowledge. But the core aesthetic was unmistakable.
Running in a completely different direction was the Yankee style, the delinquent look popular among young men of the same era. The formula was a standard school uniform jacket on top paired with baggy wide-legged trousers that dragged along the ground, the fabric covered in bold embroidered text along the lines of "Unrivaled Under Heaven," and hair sculpted into shapes that defied easy description.
Both styles served the same underlying purpose: youth, rebellion, individuality, a visible rejection of the standard mold. They were, in their own way, the two defining looks of the generation.
There were no Yankee-styled young men in this particular car, which meant he couldn't observe that half of the equation in person. But the Gyaru girls more than delivered on their end of things.
What surprised him slightly was the contrast between their appearance and their actual behavior. Despite the outfits, the three of them sat together in relative quiet, flipping through fashion magazines with an occasional murmur exchanged between them. Perfectly well-mannered.
The businessman in the suit who had just boarded, by contrast, was carrying on a loud, increasingly irritated phone call despite the patchy signal in the car, his voice filling the space in a way that made several passengers glance over.
The Gyaru girls, he decided, were considerably more pleasant company.
Beyond the obvious, there were other details scattered through the car worth noticing.
The world's first MP3 player had gone on sale at Akihabara back in May 1998, but at forty thousand yen the price had kept it firmly in enthusiast territory.
Coming into this year, other manufacturers had entered the market, competition had driven prices down to around twenty thousand yen, and the device had become something that students and young office workers could just barely justify.
The result was visible right here: a handful of young people sitting with oversized palm-sized players in their laps, headphones on, nodding faintly or simply staring into the middle distance, somewhere inside a private world of music.
The devices looked nothing like the sleek compact players he remembered from later years, but there was no mistaking what they were.
Across the aisle, a young child sat beside his mother, head bent over a handheld game console. He leaned over slightly to get a look at the screen. Game Boy Color, running the color version of Tetris. He recognized it immediately and felt a quiet smile form.
The Game Boy line had always been a strange category for him, familiar and foreign at the same time. He had never owned an authentic one, but as a child he had saved up pocket money to buy a knockoff handheld from a market stall, loved it completely, and watched his father destroy it in a moment of discovered contraband.
It was only years later that he found out the knockoff had been a direct clone of the Game Boy hardware.
The rest of the car was filled with readers. Most of them had manga magazines, light novels, or fashion publications open in their laps. A few older men held newspapers.
The scene was ordinary and dense with detail, and it finally did what the street outside had failed to fully accomplish.
It made it real.
This was Japan, 1999, the last year of the twentieth century.