Sora Kamakawa opened his eyes and, for a moment, remained completely still.
The white ceiling, the desk piled high with documents, the faint metallic smell of an old air conditioner-everything told him he was in the company office. His office.
Before he could fully process the situation, a flood of memories surged into his mind.
Five months earlier, his father, Hiroshi Kamakawa-founder and true pillar of that small animation studio-had passed away suddenly after an abrupt illness. It had been too fast, too cruel, leaving Sora no time at all to prepare himself.
At the time, Sora had just turned eighteen. Fresh out of high school, he was thrust into a crossroads no one his age should ever have to face.
Two choices lay before him.
The first was simple, almost tempting: give up the inheritance.
Abandon the animation studio entirely. Leave behind the life's work his father had built through stubborn effort and relentless perseverance. Along with it, he would also give up the rights to the company's original anime, The Sacred Knight and the Princess-a project already more than halfway complete, yet never aired and not having earned a single yen.
Choosing this path would also free him from the invisible burden his father had left behind: a debt of one hundred million yen, not yet due.
The second option was to take everything on.
Not just the assets, but the debts as well. Take over the studio, finish the unfinished anime, put it on air, and try to use the revenue to save an animation company already teetering on the brink of collapse.
Thinking coldly, the decision seemed obvious.
The apartment and car left behind by his father were worth about twenty million yen combined. On top of that, more than one hundred and ten million yen had already been invested into The Sacred Knight and the Princess.
If-and only if-the anime managed to recover its investment after airing, the assets would easily outweigh the liabilities. In that ideal scenario, Sora wouldn't just clear the debt; he would still have thirty to forty million yen in reserve, enough to keep the studio alive.
If everything went right, the second option was infinitely better than the first.
And that was the choice he made.
Then reality struck.
Three months earlier, the final work personally overseen by Hiroshi Kamakawa-the fantasy anime The Sacred Knight and the Princess-began airing on a regional television channel in the provincial capital.
Now, months later, the outcome was impossible to sugarcoat.
A total failure.
From the massive investment of one hundred and ten million yen, even the most optimistic projections estimated a return of only twenty million.
Sora redid the math carefully. He added the value of the apartment and car-already used as collateral-combined it with the pitiful revenue from the anime, and then subtracted the hundred-million-yen debt.
The result made his stomach sink.
On the very day he arrived in this world, he had earned a thoroughly dishonorable title:
dozens million yen in debt.
When it finally sank in, his vision darkened for a second.
"…This… this is just too cruel…"
The salary standards and cost of living in Japan weren't much different from the world he had known before. In other words, dozens million yen was still an absurd amount of money.
An eighteen-year-old with only a high school education, owing that much?
Even finding a job just to survive would be hard enough. Working, supporting himself, and still saving enough to repay such a debt bordered on the impossible.
Even if he spent his entire life tightening screws in a factory until his fingers went numb, there was no guarantee he'd ever escape this burden.
Sora felt his mind short-circuit.
What kind of cursed opening was this?
Still, no matter how unfair it felt, reality wouldn't disappear just because he rejected it.
The animation industry had always been a minefield. A single failed project was enough to drag an entire company into the abyss. Cases like that were anything but rare.
On top of that, before The Sacred Knight and the Princess, his father had already led another production-one that had also ended in catastrophic losses.
Two consecutive failures had been enough to consume everything Hiroshi Kamakawa had accumulated over a lifetime… and leave his son with a crushing sixty-million-yen debt.
After the initial shock, all Sora could do was let out a heavy sigh.
The original Sora Kamakawa hadn't been a complete novice in the animation industry. He'd grown up watching his father work in studios, listening to endless conversations about schedules, budgets, and impossible deadlines.
Starting in middle school, whenever production got tight, he helped the company by contacting subcontracted studios and collecting key animation drawings. Later, he lost all interest in university. Right after graduating high school, he spent a full year working at his father's company, starting from the very bottom as a production assistant.
After his father's death, taking over the company hadn't been an entirely irrational decision.
So much money had already been poured into the project, and the anime wasn't finished. If he had simply walked away, how could that work ever be completed?
The problem was that no one could have imagined a project with over one hundred million yen invested would fail so spectacularly, resulting in a ninety-million-yen loss.
And it was precisely the suffocating weight of that debt that had driven the original owner of this body-a boy of just eighteen-to a sudden death.
That was how Sora Kamakawa had ended up inhabiting this body.
Now, the question was simple and cruel.
The old Sora was gone.
And all the weight of that disaster had fallen, mercilessly, onto him.
…
So what now?
The previous owner was gone. The burden had changed shoulders.
Sora furrowed his brow, anguish etched deep across his face.
The Sacred Knight and the Princess had already finished airing. Negative reviews piled up online, Blu-rays barely sold, overseas broadcasting rights brought in next to nothing, and merchandise wasn't even worth mentioning. Those two million yen would only materialize thanks to broadcasting fees paid by the station and earlier advertising contracts.
Arriving in another world already six million yen in debt… how was anyone supposed to deal with that?
Still…
The repayment deadline was still a few months away.
Until then…
Sora sank into silence.
The company's account was practically empty. The house he lived in was already mortgaged, leaving no room for additional loans. Even so, the two million yen from The Sacred Knight and the Princess would be deposited within a week.
In the end, he could only see two possible paths.
The first was simple.
Accept fate. Lie down and let everything run its course.
The second…
Use those two million yen as starting capital to produce a new animation-one that would truly succeed.
And then, turn everything around.
The moment that thought took shape, his vision warped, and in the blink of an eye, he was enveloped by a golden space.
An overwhelming amount of information flooded into his mind. Only a few minutes later did Sora finally grasp what was happening.
A system… tied to otaku culture?
According to the information he received, to bring works of otaku culture from his previous life into this world, he needed to consume something called emotion points.
The concept was simple: every time one of his works stirred emotion in a person, he would gain one corresponding point.
These points could be used in gacha-style draws. If he obtained a related work, he could bring it fully into this world.
Broadly speaking, the works were divided into three main categories: animation, novels, and games.
Sora could choose the type of draw-one specific category, a combination of two, or even all of them together.
That eased his mind a little. He only had an animation studio; pulling a game would be useless. As for novels or manga, those weren't a problem-he could simply adapt them into anime.
After a brief moment of thought, Sora accepted the existence of the system with surprising ease. After all, if reincarnation was possible, a system didn't seem that strange.
Continuing to read the rules, he learned that the more emotion points he spent, the higher the chances of obtaining a high-value work.
It was also possible to directly exchange points for a specific work, though the cost was several times higher than obtaining a work of similar popularity through a draw.
And then came the surprise.
Checking his balance, Sora realized he already had over a hundred thousand emotion points.
After a moment of reflection, he immediately understood where they had come from.
After Hiroshi Kamakawa's death, he had officially taken over The Sacred Knight and the Princess. That anime had disappointed tens of thousands of viewers across Japan. All that frustration, anger, and sadness had been converted into emotion points-directed straight at him.
…
With everything now clear, Sora knew he had no room left to hesitate.
If he didn't want to spend the rest of his life working in a factory to pay off six million yen, there was only one option left: spend all those points, obtain a suitable work, turn it into an anime, make it explode in popularity-and pay off the debt.
"Draw categories: animation and novels. Consume all emotion points. Initiate draw."
His voice echoed firmly through the golden space.
In an instant, thousands of titles he knew from his previous life surged through his mind, accompanied by promotional images, flashing past like a speeding reel of film.
Sora's heart raced. Countless trash works existed in that other world as well. If the draw handed him something worthless… everything would be over.
The scrolling began to slow.
Until it stopped.
The final image fixed itself on a single work.
Sora's pupils contracted.
That one?
A short animated film he loved deeply. A melancholic, tear-jerking drama he had watched more than ten times during high school-though he hadn't revisited it in years.
A work by the renowned director Makoto Shinkai.
"Voices of a Distant Star."