Nineteen: Completion

(Some readers pointed out that my pacing was too slow and that I described the female characters too much. I've noticed this too. After careful consideration, I'm not some great author who can bury a bunch of foreshadowing and expect readers to have the patience to wait. I'll speed up the pace and cut out the plotlines of some less important characters! If you find a supporting character disappears later on, please ignore it.)

Zhao Qinyin's spirits drooped for a few seconds before immediately reigniting her fighting spirit.

The reason she had come to be an assistant to other manga artists was to learn their strengths. Getting discouraged here was not an option.

Time passed day by day, and a week went by quickly!

The students of Ming City Fifth Middle School didn't notice any difference in their daily studies. The students of Class Three Grade Three didn't notice that their class monitor would occasionally glance at a manga during breaks and then look back at someone in the row behind her.

The students of Class Five Grade Three also failed to notice that their class monitor, Zhao Qinyin, often zoned out during class recently, and would always smile and nod when she ran into someone in the hallway.

Today was the day "The Garden of Words" concluded.

As soon as the afternoon classes ended, Qin Qianyv bought the latest issue of Man Ying on her way home.

"What... what kind of ending is this!" Qin Qianyv muttered in confusion as she walked, having just finished reading the final installment of "The Garden of Words."

After six chapters of emotional buildup, Qiu Yue's confession was brushed off by Xue Ye with the excuse of their teacher-student relationship. After Qiu Yue left dejectedly, Xue Ye finally made up her mind and chased after him. In the open-air stairwell, after Qiu Yue broke down emotionally, Xue Ye also lost control of her emotions... and embraced Qiu Yue.

"Every morning..."

"I'd get dressed properly, ready to go to school..."

"But I was always too afraid to take the first step."

"There, it was you..."

"Who gave me the strength to move forward."

Xue Ye said these words while hugging the male protagonist and crying.

The scene abruptly ended there.

The close-up shifted to a long shot, with only the pouring rain and the beautiful sun serving as their backdrop.

It also became the final page of this manga.

The words "The End" in large characters made Qin Qianyv wonder if she was reading it wrong!

"It's over just like that?" Qin Qianyv blinked.

Whether the ending was them getting together or not, Qin Qianyv could accept it.

But she truly couldn't accept such an ambiguous ending.

It really left the readers to imagine the rest for themselves.

"This is a bad ending!"

Compared to Qin Qianyv's confusion, many professionals in the industry, while feeling a bit regretful about the ending, also found it within reason.

Leaving an open ending was perhaps the best conclusion for the two characters in the manga who had a significant gap in age and identity.

Otherwise, if the two really ended up together, it would be too melodramatic and inconsistent with Yukino's character setting established in the first six chapters. If drawn that way, Yukino, the female protagonist, would have her character ruined!

Of course, some people could accept this ending, while many others could not.

On the voting website page for Ink Shadow, a large group of The Garden of Words fans who had read the ending turned into haters. They voted for the worst-quality work on the site and left comments saying they would never read Shui Xin's works again.

Of course, there were also many fans of The Garden of Words who could accept the ending. As the final chapter concluded, they didn't hesitate to use their fingers to vote and give the work their support at the very end.

For a time, Chu Yu's The Garden of Words vote count surged to nearly three thousand. Meanwhile, the Ink Shadow manga that was about to be canceled due to poor performance, supported by the haters, saw its vote count climb to second place, with around fifteen hundred votes. The two works occupied the top two spots on the Voting Chart.

For a moment, the person in charge of the Ink Shadow magazine developed a different view of the manga artist Shui Xin.

Only the authors of the original second-place and second-to-last-place works on Ink Shadow felt depressed.

The former was naturally depressed that their work's fans were fewer than The Garden of Words' haters. The latter had thought they at least wouldn't be last, with someone else at the bottom of the magazine. Who knew something like this would happen? The work with the lowest votes last issue suddenly jumped to second place, while their own work directly landed at the bottom, making them feel the strong threat of the cancellation axe.

In short, during the two months The Garden of Words was serialized, Chu Yu transformed from an unknown ordinary person into a well-known Pedestrian Manga Artist in Mingcheng.

In Mingcheng, many people liked his manga, and quite a few also became his haters.

At one o'clock in the morning on Thursday, after working for seven consecutive hours, Chu Yu finally put down his Drawing Pen.

His Drawing Pen stopped at the scene where Kenshin killed an enemy in the rain, but the enemy's blood splattered onto his umbrella, his clothes, and his face.

A dark and narrow alley.

The corpse of the enemy killed by Kenshin.

Kenshin, kneeling on the ground, holding his sword, the scar on his face from a man he killed long ago reopened and bled again.

Kenshin looked up. Before him stood a woman in white.

The woman looked at him and spoke.

"You really..."

"Can summon..."

"A storm of blood!"

A full-page panoramic view of the woman occupied the entire page. Chu Yu clearly depicted her expression, clothing, background, and the bloodstains on her clothes, face, and umbrella with his Drawing Pen.

Zhao Qinyin, standing beside him, also watched Chu Yu draw with rapt attention.

Chu Yu didn't let her assist at all with this drawing. It took him a full six hours to complete this full-page illustration of Xuedai Ba holding an umbrella all by himself.

Zhao Qinyin, in turn, stood next to Chu Yu and watched for the entire six hours.

"So beautiful!" Zhao Qinyin exclaimed unconsciously as she looked at the manga page.

Indeed, despite standing amidst bloodshed and having bloodstains on her person, the woman in the drawing exuded a unique kind of beauty in contrast.

After a week together, Zhao Qinyin had grown accustomed to Chu Yu's unconventional working style for a manga artist.

How to put it?

If one were to describe Chu Yu's drawing process with an idiom, it would be "having a well-thought-out plan."

He only used the manga draft as a reference for Zhao Qinyin, his assistant; he never looked at it himself. Apart from drawing errors, his compositions and panel layouts were drawn directly without any revisions.

This full-page illustration of Xuedai Ba, in particular, brought Chu Yu's artistic skill to its full potential. Chu Yu even felt that his drawing technique had made a significant breakthrough after completing this page.

"Yeah!" Chu Yu said, looking at the manga page.

This was undoubtedly the page he had poured the most effort into and represented the peak of his artistic skill to date.

With this, the first three chapters of Rurouni Kenshin: Remembrance were fully drawn.

"Hey, Su Ruo, wake up!"

It was already past midnight. Su Ruo, who had been waiting for the manga draft to be finished, had fallen asleep on Chu Yu's sofa.

"What's up?" Su Ruo mumbled groggily.

"Is it morning yet?"

"..." Chu Yu.

"..." Zhao Qinyin.

After handing over the manga to Su Ruo and seeing them both off, Chu Yu washed up and lay down on his own bed.

Although he wanted to tell them not to bother and just rest at his place, he felt awkward saying it due to the difference between men and women.

All three of them had been quite tired this past week. Fortunately, with Zhao Qinyin's help, Chu Yu wouldn't have been able to refine the earlier manga drafts after completing the three new original pages.

Now that he had finished his own work, everything was just waiting for the Serialization Meeting on Friday!

Compared to the minor skirmishes of The Garden of Words, Chu Yu was certainly not content with being a third-rate manga artist at Ink Shadow. Man Ying, Luo Province, even the manga hub of Dragon Country, Modu, and furthermore, the birthplace of manga, RB Island, were Chu Yu's future goals.

But one had to take things step by step. If he couldn't make a name for himself in places like Luo Province and Ming City, Chu Yu truly doubted that his submissions would even be looked at by major manga companies like the Modu Seven Greats. They would probably just toss them straight into the trash bin without a second glance.

After all, manga companies like the Modu Seven Greats rarely published serialization manga for newcomers. Typically, only well-known manga artists from various provinces had the qualifications to submit to such companies, and even then, they might not be interested!