Ever since their last WeChat chat, Su Ruo hadn't bothered Chu Yu again. After all, the concept for his new work was something only he could come up with. At most, she could offer a few suggestions once he had finished working it out. So for the past few days, she had stayed hidden in Chu Yu's world.
"Isn't that obvious?" Chu Yu said irritably.
"If I still hadn't figured out the concept for my new work by now, how could I possibly have three chapters drawn up for the serialization meeting next Friday?"
"Mm-hmm... That's right. You look pretty energized, so I guess you haven't been slacking off..." Su Ruo said, nodding.
But she immediately noticed something off about what Chu Yu had said.
"Drawn up... what?"
"Huh?" Chu Yu looked at her as if she were messing with him.
"What do you mean, what? Of course I mean the original pages for the new work! Didn't you tell me to draw three chapters of it by next Friday?"
"Did you come all this way just to waste my precious drawing time with a question like that?" Chu Yu said irritably.
Su Ruo finally understood what had been bothering her.
"You mean you haven't been drawing storyboards for the new work this past week. You've been drawing the finished pages?"
Chu Yu blinked. He seemed to realize something was off, too. He hesitated, then said,
"Uh... yeah!"
"How much have you drawn?" Su Ruo asked, giving him a strange look.
"A little over one chapter, I guess. Around twenty-five or twenty-six pages." Chu Yu replied.
"What?" Su Ruo's eyes widened.
"Twenty-five or twenty-six pages... in one week, all by yourself?"
"You're kidding!"
"Forget that for now. Where are the pages you've drawn? Let me see."
"That stack on the desk." Chu Yu looked baffled. What was up with Su Ruo today?
Su Ruo didn't bother answering. She hurried over, carefully picked up the pages, and began reading.
Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal. The words leaped into view.
"The times are rotten to the core..."
"So are the hearts of men..."
On a quiet night, a handsome, refined-looking man sat alone by a stream, gazing up at the night sky as he spoke.
It was a simple scene, yet the pages conveyed an oppressive, sorrowful atmosphere.
This...
Su Ruo's expression grew serious.
The next scene shifted.
A group of women fled for their lives, a child with them.
Behind them came a band of vicious human traffickers.
Slaughter—merciless slaughter.
There wasn't the slightest trace of reverence for life in the traffickers' expressions or eyes.
The women and child were caught. None of them could escape the slaughter.
"Please, spare the child..."
The women shielded the child and begged the bandits.
But the only answer they got was the gleam of blades.
After one of the women was pierced through the neck by a blade, she turned her gaze to the little boy with her last breath and whispered,
"...Live!"
Just as the little boy was about to be slaughtered as well, the handsome man appeared and dispatched every bandit at the scene with clean, swift strikes.
To the man, saving someone had been nothing more than an impulsive act. But what good did it do?
Things like this happened every moment in this wretched age.
He could save the person right in front of him, but he couldn't save a world that had already rotted away.
With that thought, he left.
But when he passed by again the next day,
he found that the little boy he had saved had already buried everyone there, including the human traffickers who had tried to kill him...
After talking for a while, the man took the boy as his disciple and renamed him Kenshin.
The scene shifted again. Now grown, Kenshin killed a man one night with an impassive expression. The man's final strike left a scar on Kenshin's face.
As he lay dying, the man recalled the face of a beautiful woman and murmured,
"I don't... want... to die..."
That was as far as Chu Yu's pages went.
To be honest, Su Ruo still didn't understand what kind of work Chu Yu was trying to create.
But after reading that brief chapter, she found herself desperately wanting to read on.
Judging by the story in Chu Yu's manga, it seemed to be set on RB Island, in RB over a hundred years ago.
Although RB was now a province of the Dragon Kingdom in this world, would readers in Luo Province accept such an overt choice of protagonist and setting?
Su Ruo didn't know. But when she saw the Red Bull and coffee Chu Yu had left on his desk, she decided not to nitpick over something like that.
She believed Chu Yu must have thought the matter through. If he had considered it and still chosen that setting, then it had to be essential to the story.
So, setting all that aside and looking at the chapter simply as an editor, Su Ruo could only think of one thing.
"You're incredible!"
An hour later.
Chu Yu stared at Su Ruo, completely dumbfounded.
"So when you said I had to hand in three chapters by next week, you didn't mean three finished chapters. You meant three chapters' worth of storyboards?"
"Exactly!" Su Ruo said.
A manga storyboard was basically a rough draft made before creating the finished pages. It laid out the panels and content in broad strokes.
Usually, editors reviewed the storyboard first. Once they confirmed it was fine, they had the artist draw the finished pages.
But Chu Yu didn't follow the usual process. When he'd submitted his first work, he'd drawn the finished pages for all seven chapters of The Garden of Words and submitted them directly.
So Su Ruo had unconsciously stopped treating him like a newcomer and hadn't explained things in detail.
But when she thought about it, Chu Yu really didn't know anything except how to draw manga.
Su Ruo had never imagined that he'd spent the past week drawing finished pages instead of storyboards.
Even more absurdly, he'd managed to draw over twenty pages by himself in a week.
It had completely upended her understanding of what was possible.
Of the artists she'd worked with before, which of them hadn't struggled to finish twenty pages in a week, even with several assistants helping?
Chu Yu, meanwhile, was practically a tentacle monster and a workhorse of the Ming City manga industry.
He was preparing to draw three finished chapters in two weeks, all on his own.
And at the rate he was drawing, it actually seemed possible.
"So what do we do now?" Chu Yu asked, dumbfounded.
"I stop drawing the finished pages and draw the storyboards instead?"
Since storyboards were just rough sketches, there was no need for Chu Yu to put so much effort into them. Thinking about how he'd spent all this time worrying that he wouldn't have enough time to draw, and how he'd planned to stay up all night fueled by Red Bull and coffee, Chu Yu felt like a complete idiot.
"No..."
Su Ruo thought for a moment, then said,
"Though it happened by accident, it doesn't seem like all that work was for nothing..."
"After talking with you, I still don't really understand why you'd switch from a light, refreshing manga like The Garden of Words to a work like this, or what the finished product will be like. I can't judge that yet."
"But there's one thing I did understand: this work is only going to be sixteen chapters long, right?"
"To be honest, that's still a bit short compared with the length requirements for works serialized in Man Ying, though it's not too far off. At least it's much longer than The Garden of Words."
"So, if you really can bring three polished, compelling finished chapters to next week's serialization meeting, I think... it'll give you a considerable advantage in competing for this slot."
"But the key is, are you sure you can finish all three chapters by then?"
(Note: The protagonist's drawing reference in the author's version is the anime adaptation of Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal, not the original manga. The author chose this because, after comparing the manga and anime, they felt the anime was better in both pacing and some of the story details it changed.)
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