After saying goodbye to Furuta, Hirano waited for the editor in the reception room.
He didn't have to wait long before Heishi Yoshihisa walked in.
Heishi was tall and lean, wore glasses, and carried himself with a flat, unreadable expression that gave away nothing. The look he aimed down at Hirano carried real weight.
If Heishi ever quit editing and took a job as a security guard, he'd be twice as intimidating as Furuta.
Hirano thought to himself, quietly amused.
"Let me see your manuscript."
The moment he sat down, Heishi held out his hand and got straight to it.
Even after Slam Dunk and Yu Yu Hakusho had both wrapped up, leaving Weekly Shonen Jump in a slump with circulation sliding behind Weekly Shonen Magazine, the magazine still had serious talent in reserve.
Manga artists hoping to land a serialization in Shonen Jump were everywhere, too many to count.
Heishi was already up to his neck overseeing the Yu-Gi-Oh! serialization, and on top of that, he had to wade through wave after wave of new submissions, hunting for the rare ones worth taking seriously.
His schedule left no room for days off, let alone the energy to make small talk with newcomers.
The work was all that mattered.
He took the kraft paper envelope Hirano handed over and pulled out the short-form manga titled Death Note.
Heishi hadn't been reading long when he suddenly adjusted his glasses and leaned in closer. Even the permanent crease between his brows began to ease, his face settling into the look of someone who had just found something genuinely valuable.
He was locked in. Hirano watched him.
Editors sized up newcomers, but newcomers sized up editors too.
Hirano had had his eye on Heishi through the pages of Jump, this man who would one day become the tenth Editor-in-Chief of Weekly Shonen Jump.
The guy had a real future ahead of him. Getting serialized under his watch would be the best possible situation.
Heishi's read on the market and his ability to hold up under pressure were probably sharper than anyone else's. There was nothing to worry about on that front.
A rookie editor in that seat might have folded under the pressure and pushed him to sand down Death Note's harder edges, and that would have been a real problem.
Besides, Heishi, who the people around him had sarcastically nicknamed Demon Bin, had shepherded the endings of Naruto, Bleach, KochiKame: Tokyo Beat Cops, and a string of other long-running series through to the finish. He had to be someone reasonable to work with... right?
Hirano studied Heishi's stone-cold expression and found himself suddenly less sure about that.
...
"Death Note."
Heishi pinched his chin and murmured the title.
"What a concept."
Thirteen-year-old Kyōtarō picks up a notebook. Its black cover reads: "DEATH NOTE."
Back home, he writes down what happened that day, mostly the bullying he took from Suzuki A-taro and Tanaka B-ro.
The next day at school, the teacher addresses the class with a look of grief, telling them that Suzuki and Tanaka both died the day before from cardiac arrest.
After school, Kyōtarō writes down the names of three more students who had been making his life miserable.
Those three die of cardiac arrest as well.
Only then does he truly believe the notebook is real.
He heads home to put it somewhere safe, but on the way he runs into his classmate Miura, who is being questioned by police. Miura, like Kyōtarō, had been a target of those same five students.
The police don't think five deaths is a coincidence. Something is off, and following the trail of clues, they've tracked down Miura. Kyōtarō wouldn't be far behind.
That shakes him. He rushes home and goes straight for the notebook.
Without warning, something appears behind him: massive, fully limbed, with jet-black feathers spread across its broad shoulders.
Its face is monstrous, something between a beast and a nightmare, locked in a wide, unsettling grin with a hint of amusement always pulling at the corners of its mouth.
It introduces itself as the Shinigami Ryuk. The Death Note, it explains, was something it had dropped into the human world for its own entertainment.
Ryuk tells Kyōtarō that anyone whose name is written in the Death Note will die.
If a cause of death is written, such as "accidental death," the person will die that way. If no cause is specified, they die of cardiac arrest.
Two detectives come to question Kyōtarō, an older one and a younger one. They leave without getting anything useful, but they let their names slip in the process.
Five children dead of cardiac arrest in their own homes. The older detective won't accept it as coincidence. Something unknown is at work here.
A similar case had come up twenty years ago, and that history convinces him that something genuinely supernatural is in play.
No direct action required. Just think it, and the person dies.
The young detective looks unsettled by the idea.
If something like that actually existed...
"Anyone I judged to be someone the world would be better off without, I'd take them out. That's how you build a world where people are actually decent."
The young detective says it plainly, without hesitation.
The older detective responds: "At that rate, more than half the population disappears."
Heishi paused on that line.
If the manga ran with that thread, it could turn into something a lot more interesting.
He glanced up at Hirano, who sat waiting without any visible tension, and filed the thought away.
Kyōtarō wants to hold onto the Death Note and find a use for it, but that night the dreams turn dark. Erasing five people from the world doesn't sit right with him.
Ryuk produces an eraser. If the Death Eraser is used to rub out a name, that person comes back.
Five students die under strange circumstances, then all five come back to life at the same moment. The police, completely thrown, rush to the school.
While they're questioning the students about what they experienced, all five students and the officers present die at once.
At the same time, violent criminals around the world start dropping dead.
There's another Death Note.
Ryuk claims he carelessly lost a second notebook. The places he goes are limited to Kyōtarō's home and school.
A student at that school has already died of cardiac arrest. That means whoever has the other notebook is almost certainly another student.
Why would a student kill another student? It could easily come back to bullying.
Whoever killed those five and then the police must have done it to keep the truth from getting out.
Something clicks. Kyōtarō figures it out.
The one who found the other Death Note is Miura, the classmate who had been tormented by those same five students.
Die. Die. Just die, all of you.
When Kyōtarō finds him, Miura is scrawling names into the notebook in a frenzy. The last name, almost finished, is "Kyōtarō."
He lunges forward and stops him in time.
Miura has completely fallen apart. He's about to write his own name and end it.
Kyōtarō pulls out the Death Eraser and brings everyone back.
Once everything settles, he takes Miura to the police station and tells them everything about the Death Note, though he leaves out any mention of his own notebook.
He tells them he had thrown the notebook away, and that Miura found it, and that's what started everything.
The young detective doesn't buy it. The whole thing sounds insane to him.
Kyōtarō asks Miura to write his name in the notebook.
Right in front of the police, he drops dead, no pulse.
When the name "Kyōtarō" is erased, he comes back.
The police accept it.
The notebook's existence stays between the four of them. The notebook itself is burned to ash, and that's the end of it.
Seven years later, people still swap stories about the legend of the "Death Note."
But it's just a legend. Nobody actually believes a real Death Note exists.
The grown-up Kyōtarō lets out a breath of relief.
End.
...
Having read through the whole thing, Heishi cracked a smile without meaning to.
This was the first time he had looked this closely at someone submitting work.
The young man named Hirano was lean, with a quietly athletic build. His clothes had been washed enough times to fade. It was clear he hadn't had things easy and was getting by on very little.
But under Heishi's scrutiny, there was no nervousness in him. He held the gaze without flinching, steady and calm, like someone who already knew the answer was yes.
That was something.
From the next reception room, voices bled through the wall.
"You have no sense of what readers actually want. Every page of this is something you drew for yourself. I'm going to pretend I never looked at this. Go back to the drawing board."
"Th... thank you."
An editor and an artist. The submission had been written off as a complete waste.
In that same space, Heishi looked at Hirano with the same flat expression as always.
Hirano didn't so much as blink.
How could anyone pass on Death Note?
"Take this and enter it in the Tezuka Award."
Heishi set the manuscript down and said it like it was nothing.