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The following day, the twenty-first chapter of Parasyte was officially released alongside the flagship issue of Kiyozawa.
Due to the massive surge in popularity and its recent promotion to the main magazine, the series was enjoying unprecedented levels of recognition. Furthermore, the themes explored in the work were significantly more sophisticated than your average light novel.
The fate of humanity.
The meaning of existence.
The evolution and competition of species.
One could argue that the plot of Parasyte might not suit everyone's personal taste, but its thematic depth was undeniably rich for a piece of otaku media. As the praise mounted, the sales of the collected volumes naturally followed suit.
Many regular readers of the flagship Kiyozawa magazine were heading to bookstores to purchase the tankobon volumes just to catch up on the earlier chapters they had missed.
In the twenty-first chapter, the most shocking development centered on the man running for mayor. Readers had assumed that this man, who was surrounded and protected by a group of parasites, was a parasite himself.
However, his true identity was finally revealed in this installment.
He was human.
A human who had chosen to collaborate with the parasites.
Once the government identified the nature of the group he led, he found himself facing a line of soldiers with their rifles pointed directly at him.
"Environmental protection? That is nothing more than a biased idea dreamed up by humans. What exactly are you protecting? You are only protecting the environment that allows humanity to survive."
He continued his speech even as the tension mounted. "Why won't you admit it? You should consider the well-being of all living things, not just the proliferation of the human race. Only then would you be worthy of being called the lords of all creation."
"You shout slogans of justice, but where is the true justice? Compared to the parasites who inhabit human bodies and carry the burden of maintaining the biological balance of the world, aren't humans the true parasites devouring the Earth? Aren't you the monsters feeding on the world itself?"
Amidst a hail of bullets from the soldiers, the man who had embedded himself with monsters in a desperate bid to change the biological order fell into a pool of blood. His death served as the trigger for the strongest creature in the series, Gotou, to finally take action.
This chapter wasn't satisfying in a traditional sense. However, it provoked the same deep reflection that had become the hallmark of the series.
The more oppressive the atmosphere became, the more the readers felt compelled to keep reading. That was the current state of the Parasyte fanbase.
The most captivating part of the work was the collision of philosophies between the protagonist and the parasites, the exchange of worldviews between two different species. As for the actual fight scenes, most readers were honestly less interested in the combat than the conversation. It was a battle-themed novel where the action was the secondary attraction.
In this issue, Parasyte remained at the sixth rank in terms of reader votes, but its vote count continued to grow by a large margin. After this chapter, the critical acclaim from fans on the forums reached yet another peak.
"The mayor... he was actually a human."
"Honestly, that twist caught me completely off guard."
"While the war between humans and parasites is reaching a boiling point, this candidate viewed the relationship between the two species and the world from a much more objective angle. Just as he said, in terms of the disaster and destruction brought upon nature, the parasites don't even account for one-ten-thousandth of the damage caused by humanity."
"The parasites are monsters living on humans, but humans are monsters living on the world. That viewpoint completely elevated the core theme of the work for me."
"It's not as tear-jerking as To the Moon, but I feel the depth of this work is even higher."
"I used to prefer To the Moon before this chapter, but now, I think I like Parasyte more."
"I wonder how the war is going to end? There are only three chapters left before it's over. I'm going to miss it so much."
"All good things must come to an end. A heavy work like Parasyte is better off with a perfectly timed conclusion. If it were dragged out, the characters might lose their integrity."
"That's true."
"Everyone, keep voting! We're only at the sixth rank in Kiyozawa, and the Naoki Awards are coming up. How embarrassing will it be if the fans of other novels see us like this? They'll think Parasyte fans only offer lip service. Everyone needs to go vote right now. Buy extra copies of the magazine if you have to; get your family members to register and cast a vote too!"
Now that the series was a staple of the flagship Kiyozawa magazine, it was frequently featured in the columns of Japan's top literary critics and media outlets. With the full backing of Kiyozawa Library, promotional posters for Parasyte began to appear in bookstores, subway stations, airports, and on the sides of buses all across the country. In the second week of its release, the tankobon sales saw another massive spike.
By mid-March, the twenty-second chapter was successfully serialized. This installment primarily focused on the battle between the protagonist and the final boss, Gotou. There weren't any massive philosophical bombshells, so the popularity and vote count remained stable, holding its sixth-place position in the magazine.
Haruto let out a long breath when he saw the results. The light novel industry was incredibly competitive, after all. While Parasyte was an exceptional work, it wasn't a high-octane power fantasy or a standard action series, which meant its audience was naturally somewhat limited.
Under those circumstances, it was difficult to accumulate enough fan momentum in such a short window to replicate the same total dominance it had enjoyed in Azure Kiyozawa against the titans of the flagship magazine.
---
On March 14th, exactly half a month after the start of the new semester, Haruto received a text from Shizuru asking him to attend a club gathering. She had been so preoccupied with her own serialized manga lately that she hadn't contacted Haruto, the sole other member of the Manga Research Club, for two weeks.
When Haruto arrived, he found her slumped over a table with a miserable expression. She was dressed in a pale green long dress, her hair pinned up in an elegant bun. Even with her fair skin and delicate features, she looked utterly defeated.
"What happened?" Haruto asked, blinking as he took in her dejected state.
"It is nothing..." Shizuru glanced at him, and her expression grew even more gloomy.
"Well... if something is wrong, you can talk about it," Haruto said, trying to prompt her. Given what she had been working on lately, he took a guess. "Is the manga you were working on with that senior from the Light Novel Club not doing so well?"
"I wouldn't say it's 'not doing so well'..." Shizuru hesitated. "It's doing terribly. I, and the senior I was collaborating with, got a call from the manga magazine last night. The series has been axed. They told us to wrap up the story in a summary format for next week's submission."
"Oh..." Haruto's voice trailed off.
The magazine they were serializing in was just a local Tokyo publication, wasn't it? The weekly circulation was only a few tens of thousands of copies. To be axed in a magazine like that? Just how badly must the senior's story have collapsed for it to be unsalvageable even with Shizuru's level of artistic skill?
"Well, win some, lose some. Failure is the common thread that runs through the life of an ordinary person," Haruto said after a pause, trying to comfort the frustrated girl.
"What about you then? Why hasn't failure been the thread of your life? Hearing a successful person like you say that doesn't feel very convincing," Shizuru replied. Her eyes were rimmed with red, but she managed to strike back with a half-hearted joke.
She truly envied Haruto. He had become famous the moment he debuted, and by his fourth light novel, he had already earned a promotion to the flagship Kiyozawa magazine. Compared to him, her years of persistence felt like a joke.
"That is because... I am probably not an ordinary person," Haruto joked back. No ordinary person spent their nights watching someone else's memories like a movie. "So, what about you and that senior? Do you have any plans for a new collaboration?"
"No. Our partnership fell apart over this..."
"It fell apart?"
"She blamed the cancellation of the manga on my lack of artistic skill, so we got into an argument. I worked myself to the bone every single night on those drafts. I'm not saying my art is the best in the world, but there wasn't a single other series in that small magazine that had higher quality art than mine. If she had said our coordination was off or that the serialization simply didn't work out, I could have accepted that. But I cannot accept someone insulting the work I gave my absolute everything to every day."
After her frustrated outburst, Shizuru picked up a volume from the club's bookshelf and began aimlessly flipping through the pages to calm her nerves.
"Haruto..." she said suddenly, her eyes still on the manga. Her refined, beautiful face was clouded with a mix of boredom and deep-seated anxiety.
"Yeah? What is it?" Haruto was busy looking over the notes on animation storyboarding techniques she had given him.
Club activities usually consisted of studying manga or simply reading it. Occasionally, she would also teach him bits of music theory.
"A genius like you... how do you come up with such excellent and interesting stories? Like Parasyte or To the Moon. Under what kind of circumstances do you create these works?" she asked. Her expression was tense; she knew that asking such a question was like trying to steal a master's secrets, and she was afraid he might get angry.
"I just take a nap," Haruto replied after a moment of thought, flashing a smile. "The plots of my novels just appear in my mind during my dreams."
That was, technically, the absolute truth.
"Are you serious?" Shizuru looked up, her expression one of pure bewilderment.
"I'm serious. Cross my heart."
"Sigh..." Shizuru looked searchingly at his face for a long time before feeling the weight of the blow once again. Her intuition told her he wasn't lying. "Is that really what it's like to be a genius?"
"Well... can I ask you something?" Haruto waited a moment before continuing. "Now that your collaboration is over, are you planning to give up on drawing manga?"
She had worked so hard for so many years, only to have her first chance at serialization ripped away after less than three months. That kind of blow could be devastating for a university student. It wouldn't be surprising if she walked away from it entirely.
"How could I?" Shizuru looked at him, a defiant smile returning to her face. "Even if I fell out with that senior, I can still keep going on my own. Haruto, you might get inspiration from a dream and come up with a masterpiece just like that. I don't have that kind of talent. But I figure that if I persist for ten years, if I wring my brain dry for a decade, I should eventually be able to come up with one decent story, right?"
Haruto was momentarily stunned by her answer. There really were people like this, people who didn't look at the results and simply worked for the love of the craft.
"I... really admire your resolve," Haruto said. "But what I meant was... since you fell out with that senior but don't want to quit, and since you recognize your own weaknesses in storytelling, have you ever thought about finding another partner?"
"A different partner? Who?" Shizuru asked suspiciously.
"For example... me," Haruto said, seizing the opportunity. He had intended to ask her if she had time today, but he hadn't expected so much to have happened in her personal life recently.
If he were going to find someone to collaborate with on a manga, he would much rather trust Shizuru, whose character and temperament he already knew, than a complete stranger.
She was a genuinely good person; after all, she had spent the entire previous semester teaching him music theory and storyboarding for free.