Parallel world Manga Artist

Chapter 272: The Avalanche

Once something of this scale gets moving, it does not stop.

In the early serialisation period, Demon Slayer’s popularity had run entirely on Rei’s existing reputation. Even that goodwill had a limit. After three or four months of underwhelming performance, the natural trajectory of the work should have been a steady decline into a modest but unremarkable position in the market.

Then episode nineteen had aired.

Since that night, casual anime fans had been entering the audience through every available channel, joining in waves that had not slowed. The theatrical release had not capped that growth. It had accelerated it.

The fan base was expanding the way an avalanche expanded, each new section of the audience pulling the next one in, fed by promotional presence across the manga industry, the anime industry, the film industry, the news media, the internet, and physical space in every major city.

The domestic box office was moving toward 60 billion yen.

Overseas, fans in dozens of countries were waiting for their local release the following day.

The volume three tankōbon had just set a first-week sales record that the industry was still processing.

Ion TV was running Demon Slayer content across every available slot, already building anticipation for the Entertainment District arc premiere in September.

Demon Slayer had already broken the historical records of the Japanese anime industry. Above those records, it turned out, there were more records still waiting.

Ion TV understood this. The film industry understood this. Hoshimori Group understood this. None of them had seen it coming. Only Rei, carrying the knowledge of where this property had gone in his previous life, had known the shape of what was building.

For everyone else, each new peak had arrived as a surprise, and none of them knew where the ceiling actually was.

With the most pressing work around the Demon Slayer manga and theatrical release handled, Rei’s attention began moving to the next set of problems.

The past six months of Demon Slayer’s serialisation, plus the nearly year-long production cycle before its launch, had been directed at a single goal: establishing the Demon Slayer IP in Japan. That goal had been achieved beyond what most people involved had thought was achievable.

Once an IP reached this level of cultural penetration, the commercial value generated by merchandise, licensing, and rights operations dwarfed the revenue from any individual product.

The box office was significant. The tankōbon sales were significant. Both were fractions of the total commercial picture that a properly operated IP at this scale could generate.

In his previous life, the commercial value that Demon Slayer produced across its six or seven years of peak activity exceeded the combined value of everything Hikaru no Go, Hunter x Hunter, One-Punch Man, and Arcane had generated.

That comparison held even setting aside the broader League of Legends IP that the Arcane anime had been designed to serve as a promotional vehicle for.

The IP operations company Rei had established specifically for Demon Slayer and his future works was already running cooperation negotiations with international partners from an office in central Tokyo.

But the same limitation applied here that applied everywhere.

Rei had a finite amount of attention. He was not going to abandon his role as a frontline creator. The difference between a work produced under his direct involvement and the same work handed off to another team with only his script as the foundation was not a theoretical concern.

His previous life had demonstrated it clearly enough. The two animated versions of Hunter x Hunter had produced measurably different audience experiences from the same source material. The long history of manga-to-live-action adaptations told the same story with even less ambiguity.

If Rei stepped back entirely and became only a script provider, the works from his previous life that he was trying to bring into this world would probably survive the process. But a reduction in quality was the more likely outcome than a faithful reproduction, and a reduction in quality for works he had specific reasons to value was not something he was willing to accept as the cost of operational convenience.

Which meant he was always going to be overworked. Since that was settled, what he needed was a trusted agent to manage the IP operations side on his behalf, handling the commercial expansion while he focused on the creative work.

He already had a specific person in mind.

It was not a question of finding a business prodigy. The IP operations role did not require one. Rei would produce the work. The agent’s function was to execute the standard commercial logic of anime IP expansion competently and honestly. Any reasonably capable person who understood the industry could do the substantive work.

What was not substitutable was trust.

The history of founders handing operational control to professional managers, only to watch those managers quietly redirect profits and resources toward arrangements that served themselves rather than the company, was common in Japan and everywhere else.

If Rei was spending his days on creative work and not watching the operational side closely, and the person he had entrusted with that side decided to exploit the arrangement, he would almost certainly not notice until the damage was done.

"I need to find a way to bring Misaki out of Hoshimori. Her ability is genuinely wasted in an editorial role at this point, and more importantly..." Rei paused.

Six years of working together. He trusted her completely. That was the more important thing.

He pulled open the drawer in his room.

Inside were a series of envelopes, each containing an item from his previous life’s watching history, recalled during the Demon Slayer production period and recorded in what he privately thought of as his material library.

He had watched a great deal of poor anime in his previous life. Isekai productions that became unwatchable within a few episodes. Power fantasy premises that mistook escalation for storytelling. He had no interest in reproducing any of that here regardless of whether he could recall it accurately.

The envelopes in this drawer contained something different. Works he had considered genuinely exceptional. Works he felt comfortable attaching the name Shirogane to.

Mushishi. Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End. Clannad. The Dangers in My Heart. No Game No Life.

The commercial potential of these works was not in the same category as Demon Slayer. Their subject matter placed structural limits on how large an audience they could reach. But they were works of real quality, and producing them in Japan would not embarrass his reputation.

The plan was to wait for Demon Slayer’s popularity to reach its peak and begin stabilising, then discuss with Himari the expansion of Illumination Production Company’s staff and the establishment of several parallel production teams. These works could be produced gradually alongside the main serialisations rather than competing with them for resources.

He currently held 49 percent of Illumination Production Company’s shares. His works had all been produced through the company. He did not intend to micromanage the production business, but staying entirely hands-off was equally not an option for someone whose creative reputation was the foundation of everything the company produced.

The production progress on the Demon Slayer anime was moving quickly. The Infinity Castle arc film was in its final stages. Despite the serialisation pause during the theatrical release period, the production schedule had not fallen behind. Completion was close.

Rei looked at the three envelopes sitting on top of the stack in the drawer.

Your Name.

Attack on Titan.

Jujutsu Kaisen.

He set the Jujutsu Kaisen envelope aside.

The ending of Jujutsu Kaisen was a genuine problem. Not simply weak or unsatisfying in the way that many long-running series struggled to close. It was bad enough to retroactively improve the reputations of other series that had been heavily criticised for their endings.

Bleach, Naruto, Attack on Titan: the complaints about those conclusions had been loud and sustained, but they were complaints about conclusions that were messy or illogical or that failed to honour what the series had built. They were not complete collapses.

After Jujutsu Kaisen arrived, fans of those earlier series had been given a new baseline for comparison and found their grievances considerably easier to live with.

Rei had not entirely given up on Jujutsu Kaisen. But he would only introduce it after he had worked out an original ending that matched the quality of the series’ early material. Releasing the work in its original form, with the original conclusion intact, was not something the name Shirogane could afford.

He looked at the Your Name envelope.

The first work he had created after arriving in this world had been Makoto Shinkai’s Five Centimeters Per Second. Six years later, he had finally recovered enough of his memories to recall Shinkai’s second major work in full.

The plan was clear in outline. When the Demon Slayer Infinity Castle arc film finished production, the staff would move directly to Your Name. When the Demon Slayer television anime was complete, that production team would transfer to Attack on Titan.

This was the reason Misaki had asked whether he already had a next work in mind. This was the reason he was moving through the Demon Slayer production at the pace he was keeping.

The rate at which his memories were returning was outpacing the rate at which he could produce the work those memories contained. The gap between what he could recall and what he could actually put into production was a constant source of low-level anxiety.

"Sigh."

He could feel the pressure of it but could not afford to let it become panic. The most important thing right now was to finish Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba properly. Everything else followed from that.

...

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