"Over ten thousand votes? Are you kidding me?"
"Ten thousand six hundred and thirty-one. Is that number actually real?"
"How did it jump that high?"
"Blue Spring Ride blew up overnight. Readers all over the prefecture are recommending it on forums and in group chats. I've already seen two or three posts this morning alone pushing it."
"I predicted the numbers would rise after chapter eight, but I never imagined it would rise this much. Are we sure the system didn't mess up?"
"It didn't mess up. This is the real performance of chapter eight."
"Honestly, this kind of thing isn't unheard of. The hardest thing in the world to predict is the market. There are only so many of us in the editorial department, and we can't represent the massive reader base out there. Sometimes our predictions are simply wrong. The real vote count is what actually shows the potential this series has in the local market."
"It's still insane. Fleeting Blossoms sells, what, about three hundred thousand copies? And Blue Spring Ride pulled over ten thousand support votes. That means on average, one out of every thirty readers finished it and still bothered to go vote. And that's not even counting the people who never vote at all, the ones who just quietly keep buying the magazine to follow their favorite series. How high is the support rate, really?"
"You can tell from the rating alone. A 9.5 is basically screaming how strongly readers are behind it. It's just… such a shame this series is running in Fleeting Blossoms. If it had debuted in Crimson Maple instead…"
The moment one editor said that out loud in the shared office area, the room fell silent.
The flagship magazine Crimson Maple sold somewhere between seven hundred thousand and eight hundred thousand copies every issue.
Almost triple Fleeting Blossoms.
And yet even there, among the fourteen serialized titles, only one or two series per issue typically broke ten thousand support votes.
In the five major publishing houses of the prefecture, each company had a signature magazine like that, the kind you put on the front page of your brand and use as proof of power.
And in this prefecture, it had been eight years since any author had achieved ten thousand votes while serializing in a non-top-tier magazine.
Blue Spring Ride had just snapped that record that had held for nearly a decade.
There was no denying it anymore.
Serializing Blue Spring Ride in Fleeting Blossoms really did feel like hiding a masterpiece in the back row.
"Talking about 'if' doesn't change anything," someone said, breaking the silence. "Shiori Takahashi was a newcomer when he submitted. Nobody could have known the series would end up performing like this."
"I know," another editor replied. "I'm just… regretting the missed chance. If it ran in Crimson Maple, it might have boosted the magazine's sales too. Maybe we could've pushed toward nine hundred thousand copies per issue."
"And its popularity would have doubled at least. After the tankōbon release, it might even have had a shot at breaking into this year's local best-seller rankings for light novel volumes."
"Yeah… that's the painful part."
Yukino stood quietly in a corner near the office walkway, listening to them talk. She agreed with them. It was a waste. But there was no way around it.
There had never been a precedent where a brand-new light novel author got to serialize in Crimson Maple right from the start.
'Sometimes,' Yukino murmured under her breath, 'if you want to become famous, you need at least a little luck too, Haruto…'
These past two days at school, Haruto kept hearing students talk about Blue Spring Ride's plot as well. After all, it had already been officially confirmed that both Shiori and Airi were students at Minamijo Third High, so the school naturally paid extra attention to Blue Spring Ride and Yesterday's Starlight.
After chapter eight dropped, it got even crazier.
Quite a few students had spontaneously formed things like the "Minamijo Third High Shiori Takahashi Fan Club!"
And about sixty to seventy percent of the members were boys.
Boys in that awkward, restless age who were full of dreamy admiration for a rumored "genius high school girl author." They had already guessed through every famous pretty girl in the school by name. But even now, nobody knew who Shiori Takahashi actually was.
Or who Airi was.
Their real identities were still a mystery.
"This… feels kind of dangerous," Haruto muttered, his expression turning weird.
'Blue Spring Ride keeps getting more popular, but everyone at school and in the prefecture's light novel community keeps insisting Shiori Takahashi is a girl. A cute one, too. If I ever have to reveal the truth for some reason…' He swallowed.
'Am I going to get jumped by an angry mob of betrayed male fans?'
Just imagining it made his sense of impending doom flare up.
Meanwhile, in Class 7, during the break between periods, Reina sat at her desk without saying a word. Ever since she'd finished reading chapter eight last night, her mood had been… low.
Because chapter eight was just too good.
And it left her feeling defeated.
She had basically finished drafting the full manuscript of Yesterday's Starlight already. All that remained were detail edits and polishing.
That was why she knew, with painful clarity, what the truth was.
Yesterday's Starlight was not going to beat Blue Spring Ride.
Not even close.
Across her entire novel, there wasn't a single scene that hit the way Blue Spring Ride chapter eight did.
"…Hah."
Reina let out a quiet sigh.
And without meaning to, she pictured Haruto.
How did that guy write something like this?
He was a boy.
How could he create a heroine like Futaba, a girl who was so adorable not just in how she acted, but in how she thought?
Was there really such a thing as someone born knowing? Someone who could imagine their way past differences in perspective and still write a romance that made people melt?
Reina couldn't understand it.
She only knew one thing.
Losing to Haruto hurt.
"I can't keep thinking about this," she told herself, pressing her lips together. 'Yesterday's Starlight is almost finished. Instead of drowning in defeat, I should be thinking about what comes next. I should be thinking about how to write an even better new series… and beat him with that.'
But even as she tried to fire herself up, one thought slipped into her mind anyway, sharp and uncontrollable.
'What if… I lose to him again in the new series?'
Her gaze hardened. A painful memory surfaced, the humiliation of getting crushed by him in that fighting game again and again. She didn't even need half a second to answer her own question.
'Then I'll just keep chasing you. I'll fix my eyes on you and never look away. I refuse to believe you can beat me for the rest of your life.'
To Haruto, that platform scene where Kou and Futaba finally reached a decision, where they quietly confirmed their feelings under the orange glow of evening, was the true highlight of Blue Spring Ride.
Everything after that was still great, but once Futaba's heart settled and she started moving toward action, the shimmering mystery of the story inevitably began to fade.
What stage is the most addictive in a youth romance?
The uncertain stage.
When both leads have feelings, but neither of them has fully realized that the feeling is love.
That is where the heart flutters the hardest.
Once the heroine and hero both understand what they want, once the plot starts leaning toward a confession, the tension naturally drops.
Still, Blue Spring Ride had one huge hook left.
Even if Futaba had chosen her feelings, there was still the question of Yuri, and how the two best friends would handle each other.
That was why chapter nine remained just as strong as ever.
The reader support votes climbed to 11,323, and the rating held steady.
At that point, it was basically the ceiling of what Fleeting Blossoms could offer.
The magazine only sold three hundred thousand copies. For a single series to pull over ten thousand votes was already as high as it could reasonably go.
As Wednesday passed, another deadline began to loom larger in Haruto's mind.
Not the serialization.
Not the weekly ranking.
But something else.
The planned tankōbon release date.
The first collected volumes of Blue Spring Ride and Yesterday's Starlight were only two days away.
'They keep calling it a nationwide release,' Haruto thought, 'but outside our prefecture, there's basically no marketing at all. I honestly have no idea what the total national sales are going to look like…'
And he cared.
A lot.
Because at a cover price of around ¥1,500 per volume, he earned about ¥150 per copy in royalties. Which meant every single volume sold directly affected how much money ended up in his pocket.
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