Chapter 28: The Price of Attention

Chapter 28: Chapter 28: The Price of Attention

The controversy should have disappeared. It didn’t. Three days later, readers were still arguing, and Haruki discovered this while eating breakfast — a mistake, since food and forum discussions should never mix.

The thread had passed one thousand replies. One thousand. The number felt absurd; his story didn’t even have that many readers, and yet somehow the argument kept growing anyway. The original topic had long since disappeared. Some readers debated morality. Others debated character writing. A few seemed determined to debate society itself. The internet remained undefeated.

He closed the browser, then immediately reopened it — a habit he was starting to genuinely hate about himself.

A blue notification appeared.

[Behavior Pattern Detected: Forum Monitoring Frequency — Excessive]

Recommendation: Create more. Refresh less.

Haruki frowned. The system was becoming annoyingly wise.

His phone rang. Mizuno. That alone was unusual — they usually communicated through messages, and calls meant something had actually happened.

"Hello?"

"Good morning." Her tone sounded neutral. Professional. Dangerously neutral — editors only sounded that calm when something important was on the table. He sat up straighter. "What happened?"

A brief pause. "You’ve been invited."

The statement confused him immediately. "Invited where?"

"Creator Roundtable."

He blinked, then blinked again. The words sounded familiar — small online meetings organized by the platform, editors and creators discussing the industry, networking opportunities. Professional territory. His pulse quickened.

"Mizuno-san..."

"Yes."

"I have six hundred readers."

"Five hundred ninety-two." The correction arrived instantly, which meant she was actually monitoring the numbers — a slightly terrifying realization on its own. "And yes, I know."

He stayed silent, listening.

"The invitation isn’t because you’re successful," she said. Fair. Reasonable. Expected. "It’s because people are noticing you."

That landed differently. The controversy thread came to mind immediately, and she seemed to read the thought right off him. "Attention isn’t always positive."

"No."

"But attention is still attention."

The line stuck with him after the call ended, because it was true — uncomfortable, but true.

He sat staring at the blank page of Chapter Seven for a while after that. The Chapter itself was actually going well — Ren finally tracking the captured anomaly, the Bureau tightening security around it, Shiori beginning to question her own orders for the first time. Conflict expanding naturally, the way it was supposed to. For the first time in several Chapters, the story felt confident again, and that helped. A little.

Around noon, another notification appeared — not the platform, not the forum. The bank. He opened it automatically, then frowned. His account balance looked smaller than expected. Not dramatically. Noticeably. The spreadsheet from a few days earlier came back to mind — rent, food, utilities, software, equipment. Everything cost money. The dream cost money too, a fact he was becoming increasingly, uncomfortably familiar with.

His reader count kept climbing. His savings kept declining. The two graphs moved in opposite directions, and the contrast between them bothered him a lot more than either number did on its own.

That evening, Takeda showed up without warning, without permission, without shame — some traditions remained eternal. The first thing he noticed was the spreadsheet still open on the monitor. The second was Haruki’s expression.

"The money thing?"

Haruki sighed. "The money thing."

Takeda sat down, and for once didn’t joke immediately — a rare event, possibly a historic one. "You know most creators have jobs, right?"

Haruki looked up. The statement sounded simple, but the implication landed immediately. A job meant income. Income meant stability. Stability meant more time, eventually. The obvious problem was that a job also meant less time for the manga right now, when it needed him most, and the balance felt impossible from where he was sitting.

"You don’t have to decide today," Takeda said.

"Feels like I do."

The honesty surprised both of them. Silence followed, and then Takeda nodded — not dismissively, seriously, which was somehow more unsettling than if he’d made a joke about it. The conversation shifted after that toward money, publishing, future plans. Real problems. Adult problems, the kind nobody mentioned in the inspirational version of a success story.

After Takeda left, Haruki went back to work. Hours passed, page after page emerging, the Chapter improving steadily as he went. Then another notification appeared — a direct message from a reader this time. Normally he ignored those. This one caught his attention.

The controversy made me start reading the series.

He stared at it, then reread it twice. The sentence felt ridiculous and completely believable at the same time — someone had found the story because strangers were arguing about it online. His perspective shifted a little. Not entirely. A little. Attention created opportunities, even messy attention, even attention he hadn’t wanted in the first place.

A system window appeared — rare, and different from the usual ones. No reward attached. No mission, no points. Just information.

[Industry Principle]

Visibility creates opportunity. Quality determines survival. Both are necessary.

The screen disappeared. Haruki sat with it for a while. Simple statement, difficult to actually live by. Visibility had arrived through controversy, whether he’d asked for it or not. Survival would depend entirely on the Chapters that came after it, and there was no shortcut past that, no trick that skipped the part where he still had to sit down and draw. Only the work, same as always, regardless of how he’d gotten people’s attention in the first place.

He thought about the roundtable invitation sitting open on his desktop, and the bank statement sitting open right beside it — opportunity and risk arriving in the same afternoon, which felt like an oddly fitting introduction to an industry he was still only a few weeks into. Nobody had warned him the two would show up together this often, or this early.

Outside, Tokyo shimmered beneath the evening lights, indifferent as ever to an eighteen-year-old balancing growing visibility against shrinking savings in a small apartment somewhere below it. Neither problem had an immediate solution. Neither was going to resolve itself tonight.

Haruki closed both windows. Opened Chapter Seven. And kept drawing — because regardless of controversy, invitations, or financial pressure, one thing hadn’t changed.

Readers would judge the next Chapter. Not the forum thread. Not the rankings. Not the arguments still running past a thousand replies somewhere he wasn’t looking anymore.

The Chapter.

And right now, that mattered most.