"Good work today, everyone!"
As five o'clock approached, the flow of customers on the street and inside the store thinned out noticeably. The peak was over. The two student part-timers clocked out one after the other, leaving Akira and Sakamoto Kayo to hold the shop through the quieter evening stretch.
All three of the part-timers were temporary workers, but where the other two were students picking up a few hours here and there, he was full-time temp, in every shift the store needed him.
With the rush behind them, the occasional scattered customer was easy enough to manage, and he finally had room to let his thoughts wander back to the question he had been turning over earlier. Drawing manga.
He had no real objection to the idea itself. He had shared that dream once, in a different life. His main hesitation had always been the weight of weekly serialization, the relentless schedule, the physical toll, the way it wore people down from the inside out.
But with his cheat ability working in combination with the original owner's drawing talent, that concern was largely neutralized. The production efficiency he could realistically achieve was on a completely different level from what an ordinary manga artist had to work with.
Beyond that, his immediate goal was financial freedom, and manga could accomplish that. Layered on top was the fact that it had been the original owner's deepest wish. When he put all of it together, the conclusion was obvious.
He was going to draw.
But the moment that decision settled, the next question arrived immediately behind it.
What should he draw?
"I'm back. Go get some dinner, Mochizuki-kun."
Sakamoto Kayo came in from outside and nodded at him with a smile. Since the store always needed at least one person on the floor, meal breaks were staggered.
"Right. Thanks."
He was genuinely a little hungry. He set the thinking aside, pulled off his apron, and headed out.
He found a noodle shop nearby, ate quickly, and still had roughly half his break remaining when he finished. Rather than heading straight back, he sat down on a bench along the street and gave himself a few minutes to breathe.
He rubbed his calves, which had developed a dull ache from standing for hours, and muttered quietly to no one in particular.
"Standing all shift with no chair. Truly brutal."
The store had no stools behind the counter, and employees were explicitly expected to remain on their feet throughout their shift. Several hours of that without a break was its own particular kind of suffering.
It wasn't as bad as it had been for the original owner in the early weeks, at least. The body had adjusted somewhat. The memories held a vivid record of those first weeks, legs and feet and lower back all screaming by the end of each shift, the kind of exhaustion that made lying down feel like a reward.
He rubbed his calves a while longer until the ache faded to something ignorable, then leaned back against the bench and let his mind go quiet for a moment.
It was dusk. The sky between the buildings had turned a deep orange, the clouds lit up at their edges by the last of the sun, though the sun itself was invisible behind the towers on every side.
The street had thinned out. There was a particular stillness to Akihabara in the gap between the daytime crowd and the evening one, almost lonely in a way that suited him just fine right now.
In another hour or so, the streetlights would come on, the neon signs on the commercial buildings would light up, and the whole area would transform again into something brighter and louder.
"Come to think of it..."
Something occurred to him. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small palm-sized sketchbook and a mechanical pencil, items the original owner had always kept on hand for gathering visual reference.
He hadn't reached for them with any particular plan. He simply wanted to try something.
There was an old drama he had watched as a child, a scene in it where the male lead sat on a Tokyo street with a small notebook and drew what he saw. The image had stuck with him for no clear reason over the years.
Now, somewhat absurdly, he had both the setting and the ability to recreate it.
He didn't need reference lines or a preliminary sketch. He didn't need to keep glancing up to compare against the real scene. The streetscape in front of him was already fixed in his memory with complete precision.
All he had to do was translate that image into lines on paper, stripping out the noise and keeping only what mattered.
He put the pencil to the page and began.
The lines came without hesitation, one after the next, no pausing, no correction, the outline of the street emerging steadily and then filling in until the sketch on the paper was a close match for what sat in front of him, reduced to clean lines and shadow but unmistakably the same place.
The whole process felt similar, he thought, to what he had seen in footage of Kim Jung Gi, the Korean artist famous for working without any preliminary sketch, composing the entire image in his head before committing it directly to the page with complete confidence. The results spoke for themselves.
He looked at the finished sketch. A streetscape built entirely from lines and tonal shadow, simplified down from the complex reality in front of him, but still immediately recognizable as this specific place at this specific moment.
It was genuinely good. Even accounting for the fact that he had drawn it himself, he was a little impressed.
If nothing else, this level of draftsmanship alone was a reliable source of income. He would never be without options.
That being said, the break was almost over.
He exhaled, preparing to stand, and then noticed that someone had appeared beside him at some point without him registering it.
He turned to look, and paused.
She was striking.
A white linen shirt and gray jeans, simple and uncluttered. Thick, smooth hair falling to her shoulders in a clean sweep, framing a fair face with sharp, neat features.
The slight set of her mouth carried a coolness to it, a quiet signal that said she was not particularly interested in being approached.
What drew the eye beyond her appearance was what she was carrying. A guitar on her back, and a speaker roughly the size of carry-on luggage being dragged along with her right hand.
A street performer.
The original owner's memories surfaced, shallow but clear enough. She had been coming to Akihabara to perform for a while, arriving sometime after the original owner had already settled into his shifts at the bookstore.
He had seen her in passing a handful of times on his way home from work, always from a distance. Music hadn't interested him. Manga had consumed every available unit of his attention, and she had remained a peripheral figure he had registered but never stopped for.
He had never heard her sing. They had never exchanged a single word.
The one thing that had left a genuine impression on the original owner was this: among all the street performers who showed up in Akihabara, whenever this girl was there, she consistently drew the largest crowd. Whatever she was doing, people stopped for it.
So when she spoke, it caught him slightly off guard.
"Can I help you with something?"
"No, it's nothing."
She shook her head.
"I was just passing by. You draw very well."
"Thank you."
She had probably noticed him sketching as she walked past and paused without thinking about it. Simple as that.
He sat with the moment for a beat. In his previous life he had been thoroughly ordinary, the kind of person who watched others do remarkable things from the outside.
Being on the receiving end of that, someone stopping because of something he had done, was genuinely new.
The exchange seemed to be wrapping up naturally. She gave him a slight nod and turned to leave.
He thought about it for a second, then spoke.
"One moment, please."
She stopped and looked back, expression mildly questioning.
He stood up from the bench, tore the sketch from the sketchbook, and held it out to her.
"If you'd like it, please take it."
"Really? Is that alright?"
Her eyes widened slightly, surprise visible in her face.
"Of course. It's nothing precious."
The sketch had been a passing whim, and keeping it served no real purpose. It would sit forgotten in a drawer somewhere. Better to give it to someone who had actually stopped to look at it.
"Then I'll accept it. Thank you."
She set the speaker down carefully, took the drawing with both hands in a way that felt genuinely respectful, and studied the streetscape in it for a quiet moment before folding it carefully and tucking it into the inner pocket of her jacket.
Watching her, he felt the decision had been the right one. Something that might have gathered dust would instead be kept with care.
He gave her a brief nod and turned back toward the bookstore.
His break was nearly over.
She stood where she was for a moment, something quietly curious in her expression as she watched him go. Then she turned and headed in the opposite direction.
When the sun finally dropped below the city, the streetlights and neon signs of Akihabara came on in stages, and the whole area shifted into something that felt like a different place entirely. Foot traffic picked up again.
The evening window, roughly seven to ten, was Akihabara's second rush of the day. The volume never matched the afternoon peak, but the crowd skewed toward office workers finishing their shifts, and their spending habits reflected it.
Izakayas, maid cafes, game centers, and convenience stores all hit their evening stride. Street performers emerged along the main stretch, adding a layer of sound and movement that the daytime crowd didn't bring.
The bookstore caught a small piece of that energy, though not much.
At eight o'clock it closed on schedule. What remained was the closing routine: unpacking and restocking new stock, running inventory, settling the accounts, cleaning, locking up. With no more customers to manage, the atmosphere loosened. The work still needed doing but it didn't require the focused alertness of the open hours.
"Good work today, Mochizuki-kun. Get home safely."
Sakamoto Kayo saw him off with a wave and a smile. As store manager she still had tasks to finish and would be there a while longer.
"You've worked hard too, Manager."
"Thank you," she said, and her smile broadened. "Though honestly I'm fine. The assistant manager is coming in soon to take over, and then I have three days off in a row."
"..."
He decided he had never said anything at all.
Walking toward the station, he moved through a street that had settled into its evening rhythm. Most of the retail shops had shuttered, but the izakayas and maid cafes were doing well, their lights warm and their entrances busy.
Groups of office workers moved along the pavement in loose formations, laughing and talking, their conversations layering over the background noise of the neon-lit boulevard in a way that felt alive without feeling frantic.
Then he noticed a cluster of people gathered at the roadside ahead, drawn together around some central point.
From the middle of the crowd came music he recognized immediately.