[A heads-up: This has a light-novel feel]
[Features: Original Japanese manga, hot-blooded youth, school-based supernatural powers, manga characters awakening, System, manga forum]
After dying, ordinary high school student Hoshikawa Shun is bound to a System and learns that the world he lives in is actually a manga. More specifically, it’s a painfully formulaic school-based supernatural action series where the protagonist’s group saves the world.
The protagonist is his childhood friend, who goes to and from school with him every day and lives next door.
And Hoshikawa Shun? From the start, he’s a disposable extra whose corpse the protagonist finds in an abandoned warehouse, triggering the protagonist’s awakening of supernatural powers.
A true “dead from the start” role.
However, the manga’s ending, where the protagonist’s group and the villainous Boss die together, was so tragic that the manga is getting a reboot.
Now, the System has chosen him to direct the reboot’s story. His tasks are:
First, change the ending where the protagonist’s group and the villainous Boss die together.
Second, collect points from readers who are amazed by the reboot.
Third, repay his debt.
Yes, he’s already dead. To complete missions, he needs to come back to life. Reviving costs points, and earning points requires completing missions...
To avoid this vicious cycle, Hoshikawa Shun revives on credit.
So before his tasks have even begun, he’s already saddled with a huge debt.
If he can’t repay it by the finale, he’ll die again. So, to stay alive, Hoshikawa Shun decides to make himself impossible to ignore in the story.
After all, what’s more attention-grabbing than a character who refuses to follow the rules?
Then let’s start with “his own death.”
Spirit Chronicles is a new hot-blooded school supernatural manga from Japan. At first, it was a run-of-the-mill series that barely made a splash, but the author chose to have the protagonist’s group die alongside the Boss instead of defeating him or becoming him. Readers on the manga forum were left asking what on earth humanity was doing.
After all, if you’re reading a hot-blooded shonen manga, who wants the whole cast to die in a happy ending?
As the controversy grew, the author finally announced a reboot, and the forum erupted in cheers.
Only... is there something off about this reboot?
The original cast is back, but why has the protagonist’s childhood friend, who was dead from the start, come back to life?!
Just like that! Out of nowhere! He’s alive again!
Readers were shocked, confused, and utterly stunned.
Everyone knew this was bizarre, so it had to be foreshadowing something! And then the forum users saw this:
While everyone was taking sides and declaring Hoshikawa Shun the villain, he was getting along wonderfully with the protagonist’s group and helping them out.
Then, just when everyone thought he was a textbook hero, he took on the villain role and launched into a dramatic love-hate rivalry with the protagonist’s group.
Forum users: ...?
Then, while the protagonist’s group and the Boss were trading blows, he went and took the Boss’s place.
Forum users: ?
Just when everyone thought Hoshikawa Shun had finally gone too far, he pulled his punches and made it all look like nothing had happened.
Forum users: ???
And the best part! He still managed to give the story a happy ending!
A happy ending with no casualties, at that!
The forum users were stunned.
Author, if you’d drawn it like this from the beginning, why would we need to read all those monster-fighting, level-up manga?
*Heads-up: No romance! No romance! No romance!
*It really is an original Japanese manga setting. The whole world is Japanese-style, but the modern-day forum is written in our style.
*The setting is extremely light-novel-like, but I won’t write in an overly light-novel style, just moderately light-novel-like. (I’m sure of it.)
*No Lovecraftian elements.
*This is not a secret identity story.
[So happy to meet everyone on lovely Jinjiang, and not some weird little website QAQ]
Theme: Embrace the sea’s hope and accept the sea’s despair
