The day the book deal became official, I cried.
But—that wasn't what I cried about.
The news came from Kisaragi a little after noon. The first print run, the projected royalties—they were sums I'd never even imagined. She was quietly happy, as if it had happened to her.
"Congratulations, my god. Your work is going to become a book."
"...Yeah. Thank you."
Honestly, it still didn't feel real. It was going to be a book. That should have been amazing. But my chest didn't move all that much.
I think there's probably something broken in me, somewhere. I can't quite be happy in the places where people are happy.
Normally, I suppose this is where you'd leap into the air. A book by a guy who'd gone nowhere for three years, lined up in bookstores. It was like a dream. Me, the one Yuna sneered at and called cringe—it would have been fine to feel like showing her.
And yet the very center of my chest stayed hushed and still. As if I were watching someone else's happy news from far away.
It was that night.
At midnight, out of my usual habit, I posted an episode of the new work. There was no longer any point in counting the digits of the view count.
After posting, on a whim, I opened my oldest serial. A Star in the Mud. My very first work, which had sat sunk at single-digit PVs a day for three years, and which the conglomerate had never once advertised.
Its view count—had quietly begun to grow. Apparently there were people who'd followed my name from the new work and come all the way down to the bottom of an old story like this one, as murky as mud.
I looked at that number for a while.
In the ads scattered all over this country since last night, not one letter of this story's name appeared. The conglomerate's money only reached the new work. This was outside the reach of the Kisaragi family's power.
And yet these people had gone out of their way to follow the author's name and come down, on their own feet, to a story from three years ago that no one had advertised.
Nobody had brought them here. They'd read, thought they wanted to read more of what this guy wrote, searched, and come.
—If that was the case.
Then at least what I was writing might not have been wrong.
In three years, I'd never once been able to think that.
My fingertip slid to the next field. The comments section. That place, empty the whole three years.
Comments: 3
I froze.
Comments, which hadn't come even once in three years. There were three.
With trembling fingers, I opened the first.
I happened to find this story on a rough night. Live, even if you have to crawl—because of your words, I'm alive today too.
I opened the second.
I keep rereading how you can still breathe even in the mud. I'm glad you wrote this.
I opened the third.
It was a long, long comment. Someone whose name I didn't know was quietly confiding in my story about their own night. On a night when nothing was going right, not work, not family, when they wanted to throw everything away, they'd happened to come across this story. That one line, live, even if you have to crawl, had felt like a kick in the back.
I still can't live very well. But today, I'll try living. So please keep writing.
That was how it ended.
Before I knew it, I was crying.
In great, shameless drops. Tears fell onto the cracked lid of my laptop.
A heart that hadn't moved a single drop at six-digit PVs broke open at just three comments.
Numbers don't have faces. But these three had faces. They had nights. They had body heat.
For three years, I'd written for just one person at 12:02 a.m. What I'd wanted to reach wasn't numbers. It was someone's night, like these three.
Becoming a book wasn't what was amazing. Being read by tens of thousands wasn't what was amazing.
A line I'd written had, by chance, made it in time for someone's darkest night. Just that one thing weighed more to me than any number in this world.
"...I'm glad."
I murmured it through my sobs.
"I'm glad I kept writing."
Tear ducts that hadn't moved even when the book deal was decided broke so easily at the words of three strangers.
That was the kind of guy I was, enough to make even me laugh.
When I looked up, Kisaragi was standing in the doorway of the room.
How long had she been there? She was looking straight at me as I sobbed.
And—she was crying too.
The Ice Princess was silently, quietly spilling tears from her gray eyes.
"...Kisaragi."
I tried to call her in a hoarse voice.
And for some reason, the surname didn't sit right in my mouth.
The one woman who understood all of it—three years of records, these six mats' worth of prayers, the meaning of my tears. A woman who knew, not the "greatness" decided by numbers, but the place where I truly cried.
Calling that person by her surname, like a stranger, didn't feel right anymore.
"...Koyomi."
It was the first time I'd called her that.
Her shoulders gave a start and trembled.
I couldn't really explain, even to myself, why I'd called her that. It just felt like the most right thing to call her.
Koyomi pressed a hand to her mouth. Unable to hold back the tears spilling over.
I didn't yet know even half of what those tears meant.