'Her name was…'
'Shiori…'
'Shiori Takahashi?'
As Haruto sat at his desk, scribbling furiously across page after page, the name of the girl whose lingering soul-memories slept deep inside his mind suddenly resurfaced.
It was like remembering the name of a kindergarten friend you had not thought about in years.
A strange excitement rose in his chest, sharp and inexplicable, but it faded almost immediately.
What remained was only frustration.
A lot of ordinary people thought writing novels was easy. They imagined you just put pen to paper and somehow cranked out ten thousand words a day.
But think about it.
Ten thousand words was roughly the equivalent of writing a dozen full-length essay assignments. Plenty of students ran out of things to say halfway through an eight-hundred-word composition exam. If you had not trained for it, ten thousand words was just torture.
That was exactly where Haruto was right now.
He had assumed that turning the plot of Blue Spring Ride, as he remembered it from the anime, into prose would be simple.
In reality, it was anything but.
Characters, setting, expressions, pacing, tiny physical details, the emotional beats between lines, all of it was completely different from the kind of writing he did for school.
You could say he had eaten pork plenty of times, but he had never raised a pig himself.
Haruto had never written a light novel before, but he had read enough to develop a discerning eye. His skills as a critic were far ahead of his skills as a creator.
After two hours of work, he looked back at what he had written.
What even was this?
It was so awkward he wanted to evaporate on the spot.
"So… it really is not that easy," he muttered. He had expected this outcome, to be fair.
He trusted his Japanese grades, but being good at Japanese did not automatically mean you could write smooth, vivid narrative prose.
And even if he was adapting the story from the anime in his head, that did not guarantee his version would feel as good as the original.
He had a perfect example for this. In the world Shiori Takahashi came from, there was an anime called 5 Centimeters per Second. After it became famous, it received two different official novel adaptations.
One was written by the original creator, Makoto Shinkai, in his own style. The other was written by a professional novelist adapting the anime into prose.
They followed the same core plot, yet the reading experience was completely different.
Haruto exhaled slowly and stared at the messy pile of words on his desk.
Too much of it was pointless description.
He wrote, then crossed out, then rewrote, and the fatigue started to pile up.
By the time he finally could not hold out any longer and went to bed, he had managed only about two thousand words, handwritten, based on the scenes he remembered.
It was painfully slow.
That night, in his sleep…
Haruto became the girl again.
Shiori Takahashi.
This time, the dream did not pick up where it had left off with the subway scene. Instead, she sat at her desk playing an online shooter, controlling female characters with flashy skins and tearing through zombies like it was the most satisfying thing in the world.
"Hey, how about you watch the rest of Blue Spring Ride instead of playing games," Haruto complained silently, practically screaming inside his own head. "What are you doing, grinding a shooter right now?"
Of course, it was useless. Shiori Takahashi, or rather the memory of her, could not hear him. These were not conversations. They were fragments.
When morning came, Haruto woke up with a brain full of gunfire and game menus.
For eight straight hours, the girl had rotated through game after game on accounts that were fully maxed out, like someone who had unlimited time, unlimited money, and absolutely no guilt about it.
Not even a second of Blue Spring Ride's continuation.
Still, watching someone else play was oddly entertaining, and because his immersion was so strong, her satisfaction carried over into him. In the end, the experience felt almost like he had played himself, and it left him strangely fulfilled.
He stretched, then turned toward his desk again.
"Alright. Time to work," he told himself. "Today I have to get at least the early chapters done."
He wrote like his life depended on it.
His learning speed was fast.
The clumsy, stiff prose from the night before began to smooth out. When he got stuck and could not figure out how to describe a scene, he simply grabbed a light novel from his shelf and studied how other writers handled similar moments.
Little by little, the stack of pages grew.
His version of Blue Spring Ride, reimagined as a light novel, started to take shape in a way that felt real. Of course, it was still a first draft. After he finished, he would need to check for mistakes, polish the sentences, and revise everything again and again.
Three days later…
Haruto had more or less converted everything he remembered, up through episode 5.9, into a manuscript he could accept as good enough.
Why 5.9?