Walking home, Akira found himself murmuring the name under his breath.
"Shimizu Rin."
It was a strange thing to sit with. Unlike the relationships he had inherited from the original owner, like the easy familiarity with Sakamoto Kayo built up over weeks of shared shifts, Shimizu Rin was genuinely the first person he himself had met since arriving in this world.
A friend? That felt like too strong a word for two brief exchanges in an evening.
Someone he could talk to, perhaps. That was about the right measure.
Either way, it wasn't the most pressing thing on his mind. He shook the thought loose and let it go.
Back at the apartment, he took off his shoes, changed, washed up, and settled into the chair at the desk beside the bed. One hand propped up his chin.
The other turned a pencil slowly between his fingers without purpose. He stared at nothing in particular and thought.
If he was going to draw manga, what should it be?
The Japanese manga industry of the future had moved away from the ultra-long-running format, shifting toward series of long to medium length.
But that shift hadn't happened yet. In 1999, the ultra-long-running series was still the dominant model, and nowhere was that more visible than in Shonen Jump.
The defining examples of that format were the works that would come to be known as the Big Three: One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach.
One Piece was already running, already establishing itself as the magazine's new pillar. Naruto, if things proceeded as he remembered, would begin serialization this very year.
Bleach was a few years out still, but when he had flipped through this morning's issue of Jump, he had spotted a short series called Zombie Powder. The author was Kubo Taito. The character designs and visual sensibility in those pages already carried the early DNA of what would eventually become Bleach.
None of those three were options. One Piece was already there. Touching Naruto or Bleach would be pointless.
Not that he had ever intended to go the ultra-long-running route to begin with.
His production efficiency far outpaced a typical manga artist, and deadline pressure was unlikely to be a serious concern. But the time commitment of a series that ran for decades was something else entirely.
He wasn't looking to spend most of his remaining life behind a drawing desk. He wanted to build a financial foundation, fulfill the original owner's dying wish, and keep enough freedom for whatever came after.
What he needed was something long or medium in length, proven popular by the readership of the future, and capable of making real money.
Even with all of those constraints, the list came together quickly. Death Note. Fullmetal Alchemist. Parasyte. Attack on Titan. Jujutsu Kaisen.
"Wait."
He stopped when Jujutsu Kaisen surfaced.
The memories came flooding back unbidden. The reader reactions, the memes, the discourse, the sheer chaotic energy of following that serialization in real time. Gege Akutami pulling stunt after stunt.
Half the readership furious, the other half somehow more invested than before. Popularity that rose precisely when conventional wisdom said it should have collapsed.
He exhaled slowly.
"I genuinely respect you, Gege Akutami. I don't think I'll ever stop thinking about what you did."
Setting the nostalgia aside and looking at it practically: before the infamous moment that divided the fandom, the actual quality of Jujutsu Kaisen had been solid and consistent, with a plot that kept developing in interesting directions.
And the concern about the premise being derivative, which had come up in reader discussions early in its run, simply wouldn't apply here. Hunter x Hunter had only just started. Naruto wasn't out yet. The tropes Jujutsu Kaisen would be criticized for borrowing didn't exist in the public consciousness of this era.
And Gojo Satoru, before everything that happened to him, was a genuinely exceptional character, one whose popularity had extended well beyond the work he came from.
Still, with so many options available, there was no reason to reach for something with that particular track record when he had cleaner choices sitting right beside it.
He pulled his thoughts back to the broader picture.
If he was willing to put in some additional work, he didn't have to limit himself to manga at all. Anime, light novels, visual novels, any of those could be adapted into manga format.
The extra work would be in designing the storyboards himself rather than copying structure directly, but compared to true original creation, that was a manageable gap.
As the saying went, great artists borrow. He could draw from the best of what he knew and shape it into something that worked on the page.
The problem was that with so many viable options, nothing was jumping out as the obvious choice. He let his gaze drift across the desk without really looking at anything, hoping something would surface.
Then his eyes stopped.
On the corner of the desk, half-visible under the edge of a reference book, was the sheet of manuscript paper from that morning.
A blonde girl in armor, hands resting on a sword, gaze steady and forward, expression composed and serious. The single ahoge at the top of her head contradicting all of it.
Artoria Pendragon.
The idea arrived fully formed and hit him like a small electric shock.
What if he drew the Type-Moon series?
He sat up straight and let the thought settle properly, turning it over with genuine attention rather than dismissing it as a passing whim.
To be precise, Type-Moon was not a single work. It was a shorthand for the entire body of interconnected fiction built around what fans called the Type-Moon universe, the creative project centered on writer Nasu Kinoko.
The core works included Witch on the Holy Night, Tsukihime, The Garden of Sinners, Fate/stay night, and the expanding network of sequels and spinoffs branching out from each of those.
Of all of them, the most widely known, the most beloved, and by a considerable margin the most commercially successful was the Fate series, the branch originating from Fate/stay night.
The character he had drawn that morning, Artoria Pendragon, was one of the central heroines of Fate/stay night, and also the single most recognizable face in the entire Type-Moon catalogue.
And the work now sitting at the front of his mind, the one he was genuinely considering, was Fate/stay night itself.
Fate/stay night, commonly shortened to FSN, was a visual novel released on PC on January 30, 2004. The two foundational figures behind it were Nasu Kinoko handling the script and Takeuchi Takashi handling character design.
The story revolved around the Holy Grail War, a hidden conflict in which seven pairs of Mages, referred to as Masters, and summoned heroic spirits, referred to as Servants, fought one another through binding contracts until only one pair remained.
The player assumed the role of protagonist Emiya Shirou, who accidentally formed a contract with a Servant of the Saber class and was pulled into the battle with no preparation and no real understanding of what he had stepped into.
The game contained three distinct story routes. The Fate route followed Artoria as its central heroine. The Unlimited Blade Works route, shortened to UBW, centered on Tohsaka Rin.
The Heaven's Feel route, shortened to HF, followed Matou Sakura. Each route was a largely separate story running parallel to the others, sharing a common starting point before diverging significantly in both plot and tone.
In 2006, Studio DEEN produced a twenty-four episode television adaptation drawing primarily from the Fate route with elements folded in from the other two.
It performed well, and the image of Artoria as a female reimagining of King Arthur began to take hold in the broader public consciousness.
Years later, ufotable's 2014 television adaptation of the UBW route would become the version more familiar to newer audiences, praised widely for its production quality and faithfulness to the source material.
Back to the matter at hand.
As a classic IP with over twenty years of sustained popularity still ahead of it in the timeline he remembered, the Type-Moon series sat comfortably among the upper tier of long-running franchise properties, even if it couldn't compete with the very top names in commercial scale.
The Fate branch in particular had generated spinoffs continuously, each one finding its audience, for two decades running. And in 2015, the release of the mobile game Fate/Grand Order had taken the franchise to a different level entirely.
Carried by a plot of uneven but often genuinely compelling quality, a card battle system that had its defenders, and the deep loyalty of a fanbase built up over years, FGO had held a position at or near the top of mobile game revenue rankings for ten consecutive years.
In short, the commercial question, whether drawing Fate could make money, had a clear and unambiguous answer.
The harder question was something else entirely.
"This is not going to be simple."
He tapped his pencil lightly against his forehead.
The core problem with adapting FSN into manga was structural. Visual novel games, by their nature, tell different stories across different routes.
Those routes are parallel lines that share a starting point and then diverge, each one complete in itself and incompatible with the others.
Adapting one meant either choosing a single route and accepting what was lost, or attempting to weave all three into a single coherent throughline, which required significant creative restructuring and almost always meant sacrificing something essential from each.
In practice, adaptations of visual novels generally took one of two approaches. The first was to merge all available routes into a unified story, blending plot threads and compressing divergent narratives into one.
The second was to select a single route and adapt it faithfully, treating the other routes as outside the scope of the project. The 2006 DEEN anime had attempted the first approach with mixed results. The 2014 ufotable series had committed fully to the second.
If he were going to adapt FSN for serialization in Shonen Jump, neither approach was simply going to drop into place. The work needed to be thought through carefully.
The rational thing, honestly, was to step back from this particular idea and choose one of the cleaner options sitting alongside it. There were plenty.
But rationality was not what was driving him right now. He felt something closer to excitement, and instead of pulling back, he kept thinking forward.
He may as well admit it.
He had spent years as a deeply embedded member of the Type-Moon fanbase while simultaneously being one of its more vocal internal critics. He had strong opinions about Nasu Kinoko's writing.
He had catalogued at length, in his own head if nowhere else, every creative decision in the franchise that he felt had been bungled, wasted, or simply not taken far enough.
And now, sitting at a desk in 1999 Tokyo with Artoria Pendragon drawn in pencil on the paper in front of him, years before Fate/stay night even existed, he had the ability to do something about it.
He had wanted to do exactly this for a very long time.