In the third week of the Natagumo Mountain arc, the discussion volume surrounding Demon Slayer began to rise in a way that was visibly different from the months before it.
The following day at noon, the viewership rating for episode seventeen was confirmed at 6.18 percent.
The media outlets that had spent three months treating the series as a case study in Rei's decline went quiet.
The comparison that had been repeated endlessly since January, that Arcane, Hunter x Hunter, and One-Punch Man could break seven percent and Demon Slayer could not, had always been a strange standard to apply.
Works that failed to match the three most successful anime of the past two years were not automatically failures. When the rating had been sitting around five percent, the argument had been that only Rei's most loyal fans were holding the floor up through sheer stubbornness.
When the numbers started moving upward three weeks ago, the response had been that this was a temporary fluctuation, a statistical adjustment, and that a return below six percent was imminent.
This week it rose again.
Four consecutive weeks of growth.
New viewers were entering the series. The online discourse, which had been loud enough to reach people who had not been watching, was now functioning as advertising in both directions simultaneously.
At the Yukishiro household, Misaki set down her tea and spoke quietly.
"This is only natural."
"Rei is not the kind of creator who became famous through one fortunate work and has been coasting on that reputation since. He built his position from a third-tier journal debut with Five Centimeters Per Second, seven works across five years, and a total volume of manga pages that exceeds what many veteran mangakas produce across entire careers lasting until their sixties.
There was never any realistic chance he would allow fans to walk away from one of his works feeling genuinely let down."
"However many Hunter x Hunter fans are currently insisting Demon Slayer is mediocre and demanding he finish it quickly so the Hunter serialization can resume, the moment the general sentiment toward this series shifts even slightly, those same fans will arrive in large numbers.
The people who read Hunter x Hunter from beginning to end are precisely the ones who understand his talent most clearly. They are hungry for anything with the potential to become a great work. They will not sit out a series that starts showing them what it is capable of."
"Though it should not take a single well-produced episode to turn the whole internet around," Miyu said, her tone carrying an edge that was only partially genuine. "The latest chapter of Touch of Glass was also well executed. I have not noticed my readers flooding the forums to praise it."
Misaki glanced at her with a slight smile.
"When you produce something at the level of Hunter x Hunter, the audience's tolerance for you reaches a different altitude entirely. A single strong chapter generates widespread discussion.
A weak chapter gets defended by fans who assume you are laying the groundwork for something larger. If you go on hiatus, readers check in to make sure you are not unwell and send messages telling you to rest as long as you need to."
She paused for a moment.
"What I just described is the actual content of the majority of fan correspondence that arrives at the editorial department addressed to Rei."
"At this stage, the relationship his audience has with his work and the relationship your audience has with yours are not comparable."
Miyu's expression shifted through several stages without settling.
"That cannot be real. When my manga went on hiatus for two weeks six months ago, I had readers sending messages calling me lazy and threatening to drop the series entirely."
"Exactly," Misaki said.
She continued in the same measured tone.
"The extraordinary scrutiny Rei operates under cuts in both directions. When a work of his falls short of brilliant the response is immediate and loud, and the narrative that he has exhausted his talent spreads quickly.
But that same level of attention becomes an extraordinary accelerant under different conditions. If the quality of this series begins to rise clearly and consistently, the reputation will spread through Japan at a speed that does not follow normal logic."
"Rei has been saying to wait until May since before the series started airing," Miyu said, her eyes moving slightly. "Do you think he already had this mapped out from the beginning? Before a single episode had aired?"
The timing was strange in a way that Miyu found genuinely unsettling the more she thought about it. It happened to be May. It happened to be the exact point when Demon Slayer's reputation had begun to move.
A creator having confidence in their own work was normal and expected. But market predictions landing with this kind of precision, called six months before a single episode had aired, was something else.
"It is hard to say," Misaki murmured, her brow creasing slightly.
"But if that really is the case, what is in this arc that made him confident enough to say, six months ago, that Demon Slayer's final achievements would surpass Hunter x Hunter? What is coming that justified that claim?"
Neither of them had an answer.
...
"Good work, everyone."
"Dinner is on me tonight for a company gathering. If you have nothing urgent at home, please try to come. No pressure either way."
In the screening room of Illumination Production Company, Rei addressed several dozen haggard-looking middle and senior managers. The group had just finished watching the edited cut of episode nineteen together.
They had all been involved in its production. They had each seen portions of it at various stages and had a general sense of what the finished product would look like. Watching it play through as a complete and uninterrupted episode had still done something to the room that none of them had entirely been prepared for.
For most of the people sitting in that screening room, this was the best single episode of anime they had ever been involved in producing.
The crimson colour palette. The fight choreography moving with a fluidity that had cost an extraordinary number of hours to achieve. The way the music and the visuals and the emotional material had aligned in the final sequence...
"I nearly cried watching it," someone near the back said. Their eyes were slightly red. "After this episode airs, those anti-fans will not have anything left to say."
"This is the masterpiece of Shirogane-sensei and everyone in this room. When the time comes, every person in this industry who laughed at us will have nothing to say for themselves."
The anger in the room was real and had been building for months.
Their previous production had been Arcane, a global phenomenon. And yet the Demon Slayer anime had spent four consecutive months being attacked by critics and dismissed by industry peers who were publicly predicting that the July theatrical release would struggle to clear three hundred million yen at the box office. With promotional costs factored in, the prediction was serious losses.
Everyone in the room had been sitting with that for months.
"Thank you, all of you," Rei said, his expression calm and unhurried. "The final edited version of episode nineteen is confirmed. Tomorrow the master tape goes to Ion TV for final review. We wait two weeks."
He looked around the room.
"When the time comes, we let the work answer for itself."
...
And soon the first half of May arrived.
Episode eighteen of Demon Slayer began its broadcast.