...is where I'd usually end this afterword, but allow me to advertise a bit, just this once. KADOKAWA's digital comics program "Dra-Dra Sharp#" has published a one-shot manga "Caretaker of Old Humanity" drawn by me. It's my first ever love comedy (probably)!! You can read it on both Kadokomi (former Comic Walker) and Nico Nico Seiga (Nico Nico Douga). The QR codes on the right will send you straight there, so I hope you'll give it a look. Thank you very much!

Afterword

Next up for Winter Comiket, I wanna draw the other FW characters too, as well as the relationship between Ariya and Yuiman I didn't really get to show here...! But I don't really have anything concrete as of yet. I kinda emptied my mind into this one... But, well then. I hope we can meet again.

This is my 64th book. Zounose here. The latest official game Fossilized Wonders gave us Yuiman, a character connected to the Moriya Shrine. I never even imagined that we'd get someone with such a direct connection, so you better believe that my cries of joy echoed out like thunder...! In Reimu's ending with the "Wind" stone, Kanako seemed to take the matter very seriously in a way quite unusual for Touhou (?), which made me start picturing what kind of rescue drama would unfold between her and Yuiman. But then by the time of the Extra stage, it's already been resolved. Now that's more like it! That's more like ZUN! —I laughed, slapping my knee. But it still left me with a certain indigestion, so I whipped up a bunch of delusions into the form of this book here. There was an implication that there was something wrong with Yuiman's memories other than just her Lunarian brainwashing, so building on Nina's themes of the conflict between "the truth you want to believe" and "reality as you experience it" got me quite a bit of material.

In addition, I found that Ariya made for a very tasty foil to Suwako in several ways, so I decided to include Suwako in the rescue drama as well. However, Ariya... that is to say, Iwanagahime is also a mountain god, so I was left wondering if I couldn't have had an even clearer theme for the book by forefronting that aspect a bit more. Well, I just wanted to draw her with Suwako, so no way around it! It's a doujinshi, after all! The title is, of course, a quote from the classic poem Iroha nio he to. It's a very Buddhist poem, so I felt a little uneasy about using it for a story all about Shinto gods, but even the poem's contents are such a perfect fit for this book's themes that I just went with it.