Her name is Zhou Yihua. She's 23, and her artist ID is Katsushika Shisai. She's famous for her low prices and fast turnaround. As a child, she dreamed of becoming a student at Humei University. When she grew up, she did indeed become an art student at a no-name school.
At first, you could say she was pretty lucky: after graduating, she found a job doing character concept art for a game company. But dealing with clients turned her into a short-tempered yet obedient corporate drone, so she started a side hustle to prepare for her escape. Despite being quite skilled, she kept failing the artist platform's review. In a fit of anger, she changed her profile to "Approve me or I'll invade Poland," and finally got accepted.
She hadn't expected that this was how work would change a person: one day, she saw a client looking for an artist for an annual contract. The job required just one illustration a month. It sounded like a pretty good deal, and the client's neon-detective setting was interesting, so she accepted.
...Once she confirmed the job, she was transported, in the form of her original character, into the detective world for the annual project. The Japanese name on her driver's license was unmistakably her artist ID, a Chinese pun on Katsushika Hokusai: Katsushika Shisai. The photo was the one-inch ID portrait she'd drawn of her character, with two braided buns on her head, three layers of tie-dye, and five or six piercings in each ear. She forced a desperate grin, showing off her monstrous forked tongue. To make matters worse, the case she was carrying was something she'd drawn for fun because she thought it looked cool. Now she could hear terrifying noises coming from inside it, and she didn't dare open it...
This was only her first day in the detective world. On the second day, she discovered that this place had over six hundred months in a year, her salary was fifty times lower, and she had to draw illustrations every day. So what if her illustrations could change the world? Just thinking about her pay made her furious!
And what about the third day, you ask? On the third day, she stopped complaining. Because she met her.
-
Chihaya Hagiwara, the wind goddess of the Hagiwara family, is an outstanding traffic police officer. Every word in that sentence matters.
Her sense of responsibility as a police officer kept her from ignoring the girl's helplessness. Her professional skills as a traffic cop let her catch that fearless girl. Her empathy as a woman allowed her to be patient with the girl's ignorance. And as the big sister of the Hagiwara family, she was grateful to the girl for rewriting the capriciousness of fate.
And as herself, as a gust of wind, as the goddess of wind...
She is the muse before her drawing board, receiving the complete love she offers from within her incomplete life. She is the wind on her canvas, a presence her brush can only imitate, never truly depict. In a world that can be captured and frozen in one illustration after another, she is the only thing that will always flow.
-
* GL romance with Chihaya Hagiwara as the pairing
* Red faction, the purest red imaginable: R=255 G=0 B=0
* A devoted-love warrior through and through, strictly 1v1
* Give the world to the drawing tablet, the drawing tablet to Yihua, and Yihua to her
Theme: Love can reshape the world
