"You are the author Fuyuno Yui."
That was what the Ice Princess said in the rainy park. It was a statement. Not a question.
I couldn't breathe properly.
"...You've got the wrong person. I'm just—"
"The first chapter was posted three years ago, on April ninth. The title, A Star in the Mud. The opening line, The man woke up in the mud."
Kisaragi's voice flowed out without a single hitch.
"In Chapter Fifty-Two, you corrected a typo in the protagonist's name once. The update of June third. Just once, one character of the name had turned into an entirely different one. The next day, you quietly fixed it."
A chill ran down my spine.
Only I should have known that. No—even I didn't remember it anymore. I had thought no one was reading, so any record of corrections had long since slipped out of my head.
A typo I had fixed in secret. In the middle of the night, thinking no one would notice. She had seen it. Seen it, remembered it, and written it down.
A single wrong character, made only once.
"In Chapter One Hundred Seventeen, the update was one day late. That was the day you had a fever, was it not? The next day, a single line in the author's note: Sorry I couldn't post yesterday. ...Even now, I can recite that line from memory."
With every word, my heart jumped.
All of it was true. My three trivial years, which no one had noticed, which no one remembered, which were mine alone. One after another, they spilled precisely from her lips.
Under the umbrella, Kisaragi gently opened the leather-bound journal she had been holding. Careful not to let it get wet, she turned the pages with her fingertips.
When I saw what was written there under the streetlight, I lost my words.
Dates. Times. Chapter numbers. Every chapter I had written, recorded in dense, meticulous handwriting. Volume after volume. All the words that had never once been written in the comments section were there, inside those notebooks. My three years had been preserved here, exactly as they were.
The margins were filled with small notes. I love this sentence. I cried at this scene. This foreshadowing must connect to that chapter. Every last thing I had planted, thinking no one would ever notice, had been picked up.
The weight of a single volume was, just as it was, the weight of the time she had spent reading me.
"This is..."
"Your record."
Kisaragi laid her hand on the page as if touching a treasure.
"Every chapter. Every update time. Down to each typo you corrected. ...I know every part of you."
The Ice Princess's eyes were brimming.
That cold, blank expression I saw at school was nowhere to be found. Before me was a single girl with a desperate look on her face—as though she had finally been able to show the most precious thing she had to the very person it belonged to.
For three years, I had believed no one was reading me.
Single-digit PVs. Zero comments. I had thought it was self-indulgence that deserved to be laughed at as cringe. Like I had been dropping my voice, again and again, down to the bottom of a dark well.
But I was wrong.
Someone had been here. Someone at the bottom of the well, catching every last word of my voice.
Someone who had noticed even a single-character typo of mine, remembered that I had fixed it, and bound it into a notebook like a treasure—one such person had existed in this world.
Not numbers. Not a book deal, not fame. I had never once had any of those.
Just that someone had read my story this deeply. That fact alone made the depths of my chest burn hot.
I was about to cry, and hurriedly clenched my back teeth. If I cried here, I would truly be acknowledging my own three years. I didn't have that kind of courage yet.
"Why go that far..."
That was all I finally managed to say.
Kisaragi gently closed the journal and held it to her chest. She lowered her rain-wet lashes and spoke, a little hesitantly, but in a steady voice.
"That is... something I cannot tell you here."
She took a step closer to me. The umbrella enclosed her and me together, as one, away from the rain.
"Would you come to my home?"
I shouldn't go. In a corner of my mind, I knew that. The Ice Princess's home. The world a conglomerate heiress lived in. Not a place someone like me should set foot.
But I couldn't refuse.
It felt like I had finally met the one who had read me, even if it was only one person, for three years. And that person treasured my story this much. My loneliness had gone on far too long for me to shake her off.
And then, in a trembling voice, she added,
"...My god."