Hello, it’s been a while. I’m Tadashi Kubou. Thank you for picking up volume six of The Water Magician’s first arc.
This work was originally published on the website “Shosetsuka ni Narou” and has now been released in book form. For the print version, I added extra content so that readers who had already read the web version could still enjoy it. This volume has over 120,000 characters of new content, probably the most I’ve ever added...
You might be wondering why. Please take another look at the cover, or the spine, or the title. It says, The Water Magician: Arc 1, right? Well, the next seventh volume will conclude this first arc. To keep things balanced, this volume only includes the Twilightland saga, approximately 100,000 characters long, from the web version.
Not to brag, but each Water Magician volume usually contains over 220,000 characters, so 100,000 simply isn’t enough for one book. Even if my editor had allowed it, I wouldn’t have! Of course, this time my editor did say, “This isn’t enough, so you’ll need to add quite a bit more...”
And now you know why the extra 120,000 characters are there. It comes in the form of a new chapter called “Prelude,” which serves as an introduction to the episodes of volume seven—and that also means a lot of intense action. The characters from the Empire who appeared in “The Fire Magician” side stories, serialized up to the fifth volume, finally make their debut in the main story in this volume. I hope you enjoy reading their scenes as well.
While I had fun writing the new chapter, the Twilightland section has been so heavily revised that it’s almost unrecognizable. Regardless, I’m satisfied, as it should be even more interesting than before. There won’t be any problems...probably.
Volume six was published thanks to the support of many people: everyone at TO Books, including the editorial department; the artist, Mebaru-sensei; Bay Bridge Studio for the book design; and everyone at the printing company. I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to you all. And to the readers, your support is my greatest source of encouragement. I hope you’ll continue to support me in the future.