Having just set foot in the manga industry, Hirano had already crossed paths with the ultimate final boss of his future.
The most powerful manga artist in Japan of the new century, the perennial top-ranked title holder in Weekly Shonen Jump, beloved by countless readers, the creator of One Piece: Oda Eiichiro.
The man hadn't noticed Hirano's gaze, and ambled along after his editor into the reception room.
"One Piece was rejected at the serialization meeting..."
Hirano thought he'd caught those words from Oda's editor, and it genuinely surprised him. He hadn't expected that the legendary One Piece would have such a rocky start, turned away right out of the gate.
"So what does that mean for Death Note? Is it in a similar position? After all, it's an unconventional work, a manga where the protagonist is the villain. Something like that doesn't seem to have existed before."
"Will a Yagami Light who is antisocial and anti-human be accepted by Shonen Jump in this era?"
"Interesting."
Plagiarizing Death Note wasn't exactly an easy choice. It was packed with headache-inducing schemes and reversals, and being a mystery work, the fine details were endless. As an ordinary reader, Hirano couldn't be expected to remember every plot point clearly; he'd have to think hard as he drew.
Copying One Punch Man would have been a whole lot easier.
And yet Hirano had gone with Death Note anyway.
The numbers didn't lie. Death Note was in a league of its own. Few manga could touch it, not even One Punch Man, which fell well short by comparison.
The manga volume to break one million copies in the shortest amount of time was Death Note. Among countless classics, it held that almost unimaginable record to this day.
"Phew..."
Hirano tilted his head back, watching cherry blossom petals drift down, and let out a long, slow breath.
Ever since he'd committed to becoming a manga artist, he had been drawing while working his part-time job without a moment's slacking. He had given it everything he had, and there was nothing left to reproach himself for. Now all he had to do was wait calmly for the results.
The scent of cherry blossoms washed over him, leaving his head clear and his spirits up.
"Ah... ah... achoo!"
It would be even better if the pollen weren't absolutely brutal.
...
After dropping off his manga at Shueisha in Chiyoda that morning, Hirano still had to cover the afternoon shift at a restaurant in Shibuya.
Because working was a necessity. Nobody was going to make it in Tokyo by scrounging around for loose change.
The original Hirano was from Aomori. His parents were farmers working thin, ungenerous land. Calling them well-off would've been a joke. They'd spent their whole lives grinding away for very little, and what meager savings they'd managed to put together had been swallowed whole by a failed regional bank.
The family was broke. Hirano had no one to fall back on but himself.
He couldn't just pack up and go home to a countryside that felt like it belonged to a different era entirely. That would mean letting this world leave him behind completely.
Having crossed from 2024 into Japan in 1997, Hirano hadn't come here to fade into the background.
So he carried within him a drive and a toughness that most people would struggle to understand.
...
By the time Hirano got back to the restaurant, it was already two in the afternoon.
No customers were inside. The floor had just been mopped, gleaming cleanly under the lights, the place quiet and unhurried.
"Welcome..." someone called out from near the door, then immediately went limp and slouched against the wall the moment they saw who it was. "Oh, it's just you, Hirano. I thought it was one of the reservation customers."
"Good afternoon, Nozaki-senpai." Hirano gave a brief nod and walked straight toward the break room.
"Afternoon." Nozaki waved a hand, casual.
He was a veteran at the restaurant, long past the point of caring about kitchen prep and customer service as anything other than something to get through. The daily grind had worn down whatever ambition he'd once had.
With no path forward and no real prospects, he'd settled into a simple philosophy: once the shift was over, do whatever felt comfortable.
People who were hungry for something made him uneasy.
Hirano, for instance. The guy had just come off a long morning, barely had time to change into his work clothes and sit down in the break room before he was already hunched over his notebook, pencil moving, sketching away with the kind of focus you'd expect from someone writing a novel. Not a second's rest.
The scratch of pencil on paper filled the room. Watching Hirano furrow his brow, stare into space, then suddenly look up like something had clicked into place was genuinely unsettling.
Nozaki couldn't help himself. "What were you up to today?"
The eraser end of the pencil resting against his cheek, Hirano sat completely still, lost somewhere in his own head.
"Hey. Hirano." Nozaki raised his voice.
"Hm... hm?" Hirano looked up, meeting his eyes with a mildly confused expression. "Did you need something, Nozaki-senpai?"
"What were you doing on your day off?" Nozaki asked.
It was something he'd genuinely been wondering about. Hirano almost never seemed to rest. No social life, no real hobbies, just manga. What kind of unavoidable thing could have possibly come up?
"Oh, that." Hirano glanced back down at the sketch of Ryuk he'd just finished and answered without much thought. "I went to Shueisha."
"What?!" Nozaki's eyes went wide. He leaned in immediately. "And then what?!"
Hirano, already half-focused on figuring out where to find a good reference for Ryuk, answered absently, "I submitted a manga to Weekly Shonen Jump."
Nozaki stared. "Seriously?"
"Yeah." Hirano nodded.
"And? What happened?" Nozaki found himself sitting up straight without realizing it, leaning forward like the answer might escape him if he wasn't close enough.
Hirano's tone was perfectly level, as unbothered as if someone had just complimented his table service. "The editor seemed pretty impressed. Not that that's a surprise."
He was presenting Death Note, after all.
The moment Hirano finished speaking, Nozaki was on his feet, crossing the room in a few quick steps, his words tumbling out. "You might actually become a manga artist!"
"Probably, yeah." Hirano answered with complete sincerity. "It's still a long way from serialization, but maybe."
"How is that even possible?"
Nozaki genuinely couldn't wrap his head around it.
Same level of education, both having stopped at high school. Both working part-time at the same restaurant. How had the other person suddenly cleared the gap and turned a dream into something real?
It was like two guys writing web novels together, both getting zero traction, joking around and commiserating, and then one of them out of nowhere drops a legendary debut while the other, after grinding away for a month, has nothing to show for it but a fifteen-hundred-yen attendance bonus.
It felt surreal.
"You're messing with me, right?"
Nozaki obviously knew Weekly Shonen Jump, that nationally beloved shonen manga magazine. Slam Dunk was his all-time favorite.
A Jump full of legends, and there'd be room in it for Hirano?
"There's no way..."
As he said it, his eyes drifted without thinking to the notebook in Hirano's hands, and the words died in his throat.
"When did you get this good?"
The last time he'd looked at Hirano's drawings, the figures had been squat little blobs, the backgrounds barely there, the whole thing no better than something a kid scrawled in the margins of a notebook.
Now what he saw was dimensional and vivid, the kind of work you'd expect to find printed inside an actual manga volume.
A total amateur had become a professional-level artist, and he'd somehow missed it happening.
"It wasn't overnight," Hirano said.
"Right, not overnight." Nozaki caught himself. He remembered now. During the slow stretches at the restaurant, Hirano had always been sitting with that notebook, drawing. He almost never stopped.