Chapter 60: Sakurajima Mai Wants to Live Together!
Saku had a pretty good idea of how the light novel business worked.
Signing a contract was inevitable, but he'd expected the manuscript to be sent back once or twice for revisions. He hadn't expected it to receive a green light at every stage.
Still, there was no reason to complain about good news.
The faster it passed review, the faster he could sign the contract, negotiate his royalty share, and start waiting for money to roll in.
If this were a story he'd created entirely by himself, Saku might've lacked confidence.
But a story he remembered from his previous life?
How could he not be confident?
The moment he imagined his increasingly thin wallet finally swelling back up, an enormous smile appeared on his face.
And this wasn't operating funds for HoYoMix.
This was money that would genuinely land in his own pocket.
Mai transferred money to him too, but that counted as their joint assets.
"Utaha-senpai."
Saku quickly finished washing the dishes and placed them inside the dish sterilizer.
After drying his hands, he strode toward Utaha with a bright smile.
"My friend."
"You are the real hero."
Watching Saku approach while rubbing his hands together excitedly, Utaha suddenly discovered that even this handsome boy was capable of looking strangely shady.
She instinctively leaned farther back.
"Utaha-senpai, here I come!"
"Huh?"
Utaha couldn't begin to describe how complicated her feelings were.
This scene was...
Not quite how she'd imagined things going.
'Wait. Don't come over here! (ΩДΩ)'
Unfortunately, she was sitting on the sofa with one leg crossed over the other.
There was nowhere to escape.
In her rapidly widening eyes, Saku's reflection grew closer and closer until, a moment later, she felt herself pulled into a firm, warm embrace.
His arms wrapped around her waist.
Their chests pressed together, his breathing close enough for her to feel, while every beat of his heart seemed unusually clear.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Utaha couldn't even tell whether the frantic rhythm belonged to him or herself anymore.
For a moment, the outside world seemed to disappear.
Her body gradually relaxed from its initial stiffness.
Almost unconsciously, her arms slid around Saku's back, and the corners of her lips curved into a soft smile.
"Senpai."
Saku's teasing voice sounded beside her ear.
"Now I've treated everyone equally, right?"
That immediately snapped Utaha out of her daze.
The smile vanished from her face, replaced by practiced composure.
"Hmph."
"It's barely acceptable."
She turned her face slightly away.
"And haven't you hugged me long enough? You're pressing against me."
「Huh? It's just a hug. Why did your character archetype suddenly change?」
「Come on, repeat after me. You're the sharp-tongued one, not the tsundere. Tsundere belongs to Eriri. You can't just steal her role.」
Mai: 'Just a hug? Wonderful. I leave for a little while and you're already hugging another girl. Wait until I get back.'
Eriri: 'Shameless! Betraying Tomoya was bad enough, and now she's already throwing herself at another guy? She really is awful.'
Megumi: 'She's already making her move? As expected of Utaha-senpai.'
Saki: 'Aaaaah! I can't take this anymore! I'm going over there to beat that woman up!'
Shino: 'See? I told you a flirt like him doesn't deserve you, Saki.'
Little Kaede: 'A hug? Would it feel like hugging Onii-chan? I'm kind of curious... No! What am I thinking?! Stop!'
Yukino: '...Improper relations between boys and girls.'
Michiru: 'Huh? Should I go downstairs?'
Utaha's brows twitched.
She planted both hands against Saku and pushed him away, then quickly fixed her hair and turned her face aside, refusing to meet his eyes.
"D-Don't get carried away."
"One hug was enough."
"What else were you planning?"
「What else? You really shouldn't ask questions like that when you know I'll come up with an outrageous s*xual answer.」
Utaha froze.
She genuinely hadn't expected him to find a way to turn even that into something suggestive.
"Forget that."
She immediately changed the subject.
"When are you coming with me? Editor Machida really wants to meet you."
Saku crossed his arms and stood upright.
His eyes wandered thoughtfully for a few seconds before he finally answered.
"This weekend."
"I don't really have time on weekdays."
"Fine. It's settled."
With business concluded and her heart still far from calm, Utaha no longer wanted to linger in the living room.
She quickly escaped upstairs and returned to her room.
Saku watched her retreat as though she were fleeing from a disaster and shook his head before heading back to his own room.
Signing the contract sooner was obviously better, but there was no need to treat it like an emergency.
After thinking it through, Saku decided to simply follow his existing schedule.
Besides, if Icy Tail's Idol became a hit, he'd receive a share from that too.
His finances weren't desperate enough to throw everything else aside.
「The light novel is ready to sign. According to the normal process, I'll probably need an illustrator later too.」
「But I can save that expense. After all, I know how to draw.」
「Tsk, tsk. Sometimes being good at too many things is troublesome. If I earn all the money myself, won't everyone else hate me?」
Yukino: 'Other people use clever strategies to compete. You're just shamelessly bragging.'
Mai: 'As expected of the guy I chose. He really is talented at everything. That said, I'm still not forgetting what happened earlier.'
Utaha: 'Damn it. Does a genius really get to talk like that? Just wait. One day I'll have you completely wrapped around my finger.'
Saku's shameless self-praise irritated almost everyone who could hear him.
Naturally, he remained completely unaware.
「Most of my plans here are finally moving onto the right track. It's probably time to start serializing a web novel in China too.」
「The market there is much larger, so the earning potential should be higher as well.」
Getting around regional internet restrictions posed basically no difficulty for Saku.
The real problem was serialization itself.
Chinese web novels depended heavily on consistent updates.
Authors had to release chapters at fixed times and in fixed quantities every day. Even without mass releases, two chapters a day was practically the baseline.
Miss an update at the wrong time, and a novel's performance could fall off a cliff.
In other words, writing web novels was almost a year-round job with no holidays.
It demanded serious persistence.
That system was completely different from Japan's.
Utaha's Metronome in Love, for example, had only published two volumes, while the third had somehow spent one or two months crawling toward completion.
If a Chinese web novel updated at that pace, it would've died long ago.
Here, however, that schedule wasn't particularly unusual.
Of course, the business models were different.
Books intended for publication in Japan went through repeated revisions and polishing before release, naturally slowing everything down.
Chinese web novels didn't have someone reviewing and refining every chapter before it went online.
Without that step, authors weren't given the luxury of endlessly delaying updates.
Fortunately, Saku already had a solution.
He planned to finish the entire manuscript of Release That Witch before submitting it for publication.
That way, he wouldn't need to carve out time every single day for updates.
The downside was obvious.
He'd suffer now by writing an enormous backlog.
The advantage was that once it was finished, there'd be no pressure. He could work whenever he had time without worrying about daily deadlines.
Of course, ordinary writers shouldn't blindly imitate that strategy or stockpile too much before publishing.
You never knew whether something you'd written would actually become popular.
Saku was different.
He was standing on the shoulders of his memories from his previous life.
After spending around half an hour rapidly typing away, Saku heard the door open.
Mai had returned.
What Saku didn't know was that Mai had already decided to stay here temporarily.
He only realized something was different when his bedroom door opened and she walked straight inside.
"Mai?"
He looked up from the computer.
"Why are you..."
"Hmph."
Mai smiled.
"What? Don't tell me you don't welcome me, Saku-kun."
Without any warning whatsoever, she walked over and wrapped her arms around the seated Saku.
"I finally have some free time."
Her voice sounded playful, but her eyes were serious.
"So I want to live with you for a while."
Mai tightened her embrace slightly.
"If you say no, I'll cry."
She was clearly joking about the crying part.
The desire to move in wasn't a joke at all.
After all, if she couldn't even live together with her boyfriend...
What kind of girlfriend was she supposed to be?
…