Chapter 217 - 215

Words : 1130 Updated : Oct 14th, 2025

As the summer season approached, major animation studios were already busy lining up their releases. "Natsume's Friends was originally just one of many manga and light novels being adapted into anime by studios across the seven major publishers. Every year, multiple projects entered production nothing unusual." But unexpectedly, Natsume's Friends had begun to cast a long shadow over the summer lineup, creating mounting pressure for other studios aiming to dominate the season. Though Haruki had become a respected figure in the manga world, many artists still had greater name recognition. But in the animation industry? Mizushiro's name had become a sensation. Of the three anime titles he had helped produce so far, the least successful still had an average view count of nine million. That kind of record? Practically unheard of. In the domestic animation scene, a typical hit averages around four to five million views. Shows that break into the seven or eight million range are considered standouts for the year. But the elite tier titles that cross the ten-million mark in average viewership are extremely rare. Over the past decade, only sixteen series had achieved that feat. Nine of them came from one legendary year: 2013. The industry still referred to it as the "year of the gods." Outside of that anomaly, in the remaining nine years combined, only seven anime had reached such numbers. Some years had none at all. In fact, in both 2020 and 2021, there wasn't a single anime that passed the ten-million mark. The closest contenders were The Hermit (9.13 million in 2020), Anohana (9.2 million in 2021), and devil's journey (9.7 million in 2021) the latter being crowned that year's most popular new anime.(average across all episodes) So when 5 Centimeters per Second and Voices of a Distant Star each surpassed ten million views in January 2022, the entire industry was abuzz. Everywhere you looked, people were discussing these two works and the man behind them: Mizushiro, alongside director Kazuya Mori. Still, their overwhelming numbers revealed a caveat: short-form limitations. If either series had been a full-length season, their impact would've been exponentially larger. Mizushiro and Mori could've ridden that momentum to the very top. But short stories are harder to pull off and harder to monetize. Even with the same average numbers, they don't generate the same long-term revenue or cultural presence. That's precisely why full-season short stories were so rare in the current industry landscape. Even so, Mizushiro's reputation as a scriptwriter had already been cemented—his storytelling talent was undeniable. In fact, within industry circles, Mizushiro's achievements had reached a level that many professionals might not touch in a lifetime. That's also why the anime adaptation of Natsume's Friends, set to begin airing in April, was making other companies nervous. For better or worse, they had no choice but to take it seriously. Some media outlets even named it a top contender for the summer's most popular anime. This left the team at Kazanami Animation Studio responsible for adapting Natsume's Friends in a bit of a bind. The studio had allocated a modest budget of only 200 million yen for the project's thirteen episodes. And yet, they were now being compared to other productions with double or triple the budget. Fans of Natsume's Friends were already hoping the adaptation would live up to the visual standards of 5 Centimeters per Second and Voices of a Distant Star. Which was... a lot to ask. Those previous works had the advantage of Mizushiro providing scripts and music essentially for free, as a favor. The animation teams were veteran-level but worked cheaply. Mizushiro even personally handled most of the intricate background designs. Hiring staff to polish visuals or increase frame rates isn't hard if you have money but where do you find another Mizushiro who can turn a background into a piece of art? That was the real pressure for the Natsume team. If they produced something well-crafted, people would say, See? It's all Mizushiro's writing. But if the production stumbled, the blame wouldn't fall on him—it'd fall on them. Imagine Mizushiro spends 50 million yen producing a four-episode masterpiece, while you're handed his script and given 200 million yen to animate thirteen episodes only for your series to flop. Who's going to take the heat? The answer was obvious. March had arrived. The weather was warming up, and after months of juggling multiple serializations, Haruki's schedule was finally becoming manageable. He had settled into a steady rhythm: drawing two chapters in one day, then taking the next day off. Rinse and repeat. Four workdays a week. Three days off. And despite that, he had never once missed a deadline. Of course, that had a lot to do with the system. Without needing to spend time plotting out new stories from scratch, he could focus entirely on execution. And one of the earliest "newbie rewards" from the system had proven to be indispensable: an efficiency skill that boosted his drawing precision. The longer he worked, the more it helped. By now, Haruki estimated that without that ability, his output would be less than one-third of what it was. Humans aren't machines, after all. They make mistakes. But that skill allowed Haruki's hands to operate almost mechanically precise, clean, efficient. Of course, physics still applied. After hours of drawing, his arms would ache just like anyone else's. The system couldn't cheat fatigue. Still, as long as he wasn't redrawing or adjusting the original mental image, he could finish a chapter at breakneck speed. These days, however, Haruki often found himself tweaking original panels or redrawing moments that he felt could be improved. Ironically, that was now the most time-consuming part of his process. At this point, calling him a "tentacle monster" didn't do him justice. Even those legendary speed-drawing manga artists would probably bow down to him in awe if they saw his output. Meanwhile, his two assistants were barely keeping up. It took both of them two full days just to complete the post-production cleanup on the chapter he finished in one. In their minds, Haruki wasn't human. And they didn't mean that as an insult they meant it literally. By mid-March, though, they weren't the only ones grumbling. The latest chapter of Initial D had just gone live, and like clockwork Haruki's feed exploded again. Fans were rioting. Shout out to Best Manga for joining my p-atreon! your support means everything to me. (TL:- if you want even more content, check out p-atreon.com/Alioth23 for 60+ advanced chapters)

Chapter 217 - 215

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