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HELIO SCANS
[Translator - Hestia]
[Proofreader - Kaya]
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Chapter 2: Bright White Room
I’m dead.
Probably got hit by a car and died.
So then, what’s this in front of me? Heaven? Hell?
After the usual big questions, I looked around this pure white space and, being the otaku I am, I came up with another answer.
“The Room of Spirit and Time…?”
With a manga room on the side.
＊ ＊ ＊
Whether I was dead, alive, or maybe just kidnapped, I could move freely in this space without any resistance.
My last clear memory was when I completely flatlined from that traffic accident.
The very first thing I did after that was—
“What the…? This is… the art’s great, and the story’s good too… So why have I never seen any of this before?”
One by one, I pulled comics off the massive bookshelf and started reading.
Some might say I was being carefree, but what else could I do?
I probably died in that accident already.
Out of curiosity, I wandered around this place for a while, shouted for help even, but nothing changed.
I had no clue what this room was, but maybe it was some kind of special gift for someone who’d lived their life working hard like me.
So, accepting that, I decided to just read the comics in front of me.
I wasn’t hungry or sleepy, so I kept reading through the piles of manga on the shelves—and the more I read, the more questions piled up.
“What is this… why this one… and this one too…”
The comics were insanely good. Too good, actually.
If anyone heard me say that, they’d probably go, ‘So what? That’s not a problem, you nerd.’ But the problem came right after.
There’s no way I wouldn’t know these manga that are this good and commercially viable.
Sure, I haven’t read every manga out there, but I made it all the way up to deputy editor at Jump—the big three manga magazines in Japan.
From classics to works by the legends who shaped manga history, I’ve read pretty much everything worth reading.
Yet none of these manga I was reading now—they had titles I’d never heard of, authors whose names were completely unfamiliar.
“Hahaha!”
I used to dream of becoming a manga artist. Anyone who dreams of being a manga artist obviously loves manga.
Every creator starts as a reader.
For me, this place was paradise. A treasure trove of amazing manga I’d never seen before—if that doesn’t make an otaku’s eyes go wild, what would?
In this place where I didn’t need food, drink, or sleep, I spent whole days reading, reading, and analyzing—because even here, my professional instincts kicked in.
By the time I lost track of how much time had passed—
“Huh? What’s that… why’s that there?”
I jumped at the sudden sight of a laptop that had somehow been left right there in front of me.
A laptop that looked completely ordinary. Yet, in this suspicious place, the very presence of a laptop felt off.
Carefully approaching it, half-expecting it to explode or something, I pressed the power button, still wrapped in curiosity.
The laptop booted up, but there was nothing installed—only internet access.
And even that was malfunctioning.
I typed some random keywords into the search bar and hit enter.
A message popped up—
[This is not a searchable keyword.]
The screen refused to move past that.
If that’s the case, then why the hell did they even give me this thing? I thought.
At that moment, my eyes caught the stacked manga beyond the laptop.
The very first manga I’d read since arriving here.
Almost hypnotized, I typed the title of that manga into the search bar and hit enter.
“—!!”
A window flooded with related internet articles, a Wiki page, and the manga’s cover images appeared.
Clicking on the Wiki-like page revealed information just like any other wiki I knew—detailed info about the manga popped up.
“Serialized from 2002 to 2008. Serialized where...? At our company? And I didn’t know about it?”
As I read through the listed info, I couldn’t hide my astonishment.
Though it varies by publisher, a manga that sells over 10 million copies in Japan is considered a mega-hit and hailed as a flagship work of its era.
With sales like that, it’s natural for the title to spawn anime, movies, and other media mixes, spreading its name even overseas.
Even in a time before smartphones and digital distribution, there was no way a manga selling over 10 million copies in Japan wouldn’t be known in neighboring South Korea.
Even if I considered the era’s strong anti-Japanese sentiment and assumed it somehow kept the name from being heard—
“There’s no way I wouldn’t have heard of a work that sold over 10 million copies.”
A manga editor’s job is to maximize the creator’s unique style while ensuring the manga’s commercial appeal and marketability.
Naturally, this requires deep knowledge of manga, and the best place to gain that knowledge is from the manga books themselves.
As someone who already loved manga, I had devoured not only current hits but also past blockbusters.
There’s no way I missed reading a mega-hit work, especially one from my own company.
“What the hell is this…”
I read through the Wiki page for the work in front of me.
There wasn’t much—just serialization dates, media mix details, and a brief plot summary.
Strangely, sections for reviews or criticism were left blank.
“If these are the only manga searchable here…”
I didn’t know how much time had passed since arriving, but the number of manga I’d read was now in double digits.
I searched for a few that looked especially commercially successful, and information about them flooded the screen.
“These also sold over 10 million copies… and they were serialized while I was still working in the industry.”
One could call it coincidence, but two, then three? That’s fate.
Meaning, all the manga here…
“...Are manga I’ve never seen or been able to see before?”
Of course, what good does it do me now, stuck in some kind of afterlife?
“But I’m curious.”
By this point, my editor’s instincts had kicked in full force.
＊ ＊ ＊
Quite some time had passed since the laptop appeared. My sense of time had long since disappeared, so I had no idea how much time had actually gone by.
After trying out various things, I was able to confirm a few facts.
First, the laptop wouldn’t search for anything unrelated to the manga here.
Second, even for manga in this place, I couldn’t search for information about any titles I hadn’t finished reading.
Third, the more manga volumes I completed, the more manga-related information got unlocked.
When I had read around 500 volumes, I discovered another fact.
“As I thought… the history here is slightly different from where I came from.”
As the number of completed manga grew, I was able to access some manga-related news. And in a few major news stories, I found discrepancies from what I knew.
For example, the coronavirus here.
The name was different from what I knew. The globally infamous virus was known as COVID-20 here, having started in the 2020s.
Besides that, the names and dates of other events were slightly off too, even if the overall outcomes weren’t that different. From this, I formed a hypothesis—
Maybe the manga here belongs to a parallel world.
A small chuckle escaped me at the thought.
Maybe it was from reading nothing but manga all this time, but my mind had naturally gone in that direction.
Above all, this theory only works if I accept the info on this suspicious laptop as true.
Besides…
“Even if it’s true, what does it matter? I’m already dead anyway.”
Adults always say that health is the most important thing—and I only realized that after dying.
But whatever. Dead is dead, one way or another. Might as well indulge a little.
With that thought, I turned my eyes back to the manga on the shelf.
＊ ＊ ＊
“Hmm…”
Around the time I’d finished reading about a thousand manga volumes, another change happened.
“Hmm. This is pretty good too.”
A smartphone appeared. With a webtoon app installed.
Naturally—just like the laptop—the phone’s battery was unlimited. I could read webtoons all day long.
The webtoon app’s format was similar to what I knew but slightly different. Maybe this, too, was from another world.
Even though I was the assistant editor for Japanese published manga, that didn’t mean I wasn’t interested in webtoons. In fact, I was quite into them.
Japan still leaned heavily on printed manga, but they couldn’t ignore the growing e-book convenience and expanding webtoon market.
Putting aside market reasons…
“Webtoons aren’t bad either.”
I liked webtoons. Ever since they started trending back in middle school, I kept reading them whenever I had spare time.
Just like with manga, these webtoons balanced commercial appeal and artistic quality. Reading webtoons I’d never seen before, I jotted down short reviews and my own feedback—how they could become even better works.
While printed manga were written in Japanese and set in Japan, these webtoons had Korean settings and Korean text.
Even in this surreal place, the attention to distinguishing languages was stubbornly precise.
Luckily, I could read both, so it wasn’t much of an inconvenience.
＊ ＊ ＊
No matter how much I read, the pile never shrinks.
It’s not that there were already so many—it’s that the number keeps growing.
The more works I finish, the more new ones keep updating for me to read.
“This is a light novel, this one’s a web novel, and that’s an animation...?”
New web novel apps and animation streaming apps appeared on the smartphone, and a few more shelves were added—stacked alongside the manga were the original light novels.
“Heh…”
Light novels.
Literally, “light” novels from Japan. You could think of them as similar to web novels in Korea.
With a much longer history than Korean web novels, media mix activities were vibrant—comic adaptations, anime adaptations—light novels are one of the major genres to go through this process repeatedly.
Since I worked in the industry, this genre was not unfamiliar to me.
Both professionally and for personal enjoyment, I’d read quite a few.
“No matter how you look at it…”
Having more good works to read was a blessing, but at this point, it felt like someone was forcing me to read.
In this pure white space, with nothing but me and the books.
I even wondered if reading everything here would somehow bring me back to the real world I came from.
But looking at the ever-growing number of new works arriving, that didn’t seem likely.
“Well, what can I do?”
Since I had no sharp way to escape this space even if I wanted to, there was only one thing I could do.
“Just keep reading.”
Indulging in the comfort of reading, it didn’t feel like torture at all.
Web novels turned into webtoons, light novels adapted into manga—it was actually fun comparing the different versions.
So, as I piled up one book after another, I wrote my own analysis in the laptop’s notepad.
＊ ＊ ＊
At some point, paper and pen started appearing.
I used to be an artist, after all, so as soon as I got them, I began drawing comics wildly, following the flow of my thoughts.
What I drew were my original ideas—things I found really fun but felt had flaws, so I remade them in my own way.
The paper kept coming endlessly. Thanks to that, I kept drawing without stopping.
Draw, read, draw, read.
I spent so much time in this room that I completely lost track of it.
Usually, people say being locked alone in a white room for a long time drives you crazy, but since I was already dead, I guess I didn’t really get mentally stressed.
The more I drew, the faster I got at it.
For some reason, my drawing tools also increased, letting me create all sorts of things, making it much easier than before.
How much time passed?
“Hm… I’ve finished reading everything.”
At some point, the flow of new works stopped.
I knocked down the mountain of unread books—manga, novels—that had slowly been building up, and finally, I finished reading every single book here.
I’d aimed to finish them all, but now that I had, I felt both relieved and empty.
Lying flat on the floor, staring at the endless ceiling, a sudden worry hit me.
“What do I do now?”
Looking back, I’d surprisingly managed to survive all this time in this strange space all alone.
In front of me was the huge pile of manga I had read completely.
What’s going to happen to me now? Having enjoyed the final gift the world gave me, was I about to move on to the afterlife?
But my question didn’t last long.
“Huh...?”
The space around me, which had been pure white except for the manga, laptop, and bookshelves, suddenly turned pitch black.
Wait, am I going to hell? Was everything I saw so far just the last pleasure before going to hell? I don’t think I did anything that bad…
All kinds of thoughts swirled inside me—fear, confusion, anxiety—as I got up.
Then—
Whoosh—
The darkness swallowed me whole.
And then—
“Hey! Hey! Gong! Gong!”
With a flash of bright light, I saw green grass and heard the voice of a young boy.
“Huh?”
It felt like the first time in forever I’d heard a voice, so I instinctively turned my head toward the sound.
Wham! Thud!
Something flew straight at me and hit me in the head, and I surrendered myself back to the darkness.
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HELIO SCANS
[Translator - Hestia]
[Proofreader - Kaya]
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