Cinderella
Cinderella
"Baron, this is not as simple as it sounds. Even if I figure out how to make them, I can't very well give them only to you."
I was already busy running the family-finance rescue project, but recently other nobles had started showing up one after another asking me to draw Cinderella for them.
"Rupert, if I go back empty-handed, my daughter may starve to death! I beg of you."
Baron Sleepy grabbed my shoulders with a desperate expression.
According to my father, the man owned a wealthy territory and had a notoriously proud, arrogant personality.
'Starve to death? This gentleman does love his exaggerations.'
I managed to pry the baron's hands off me and calmed him down.
Thinking I ought to decline with a bit more sincerity, I explained the reasons one by one.
"First of all, making a book requires far more tools than you might think."
"I shall supply all of those tools myself!"
"On top of that, it takes considerable time, since each page has to be drawn by hand."
"No, if you have the original of the book you drew, could we not simply copy it at the Magic Tower printing house? I shall arrange it with the Magic Tower personally!"
What the—this man really was desperate.
And the Magic Tower could do something like that?
I obviously knew this was a world with magic, but I had never imagined there would be magical tools for printing books.
Then the work would certainly be reduced a great deal.
The Cinderella I had made was for Ada, so the protagonist's name was Cinderella Ada, and her appearance was based on Ada as well. I would only need to fix those parts.
But I didn't have the spare time to pour into something like that right now...
"Of course, I am not asking you to do this for free. I shall reward you amply!"
"Very well! Let's give it a try."
***
After the baron left, I received through my father a full list of the noble houses that wanted the Cinderella picture book.
Then I sent requests to the noble households on the list asking them to send the names and photographs of their young ladies. Perhaps because everyone was in a hurry, they sent what I asked for in no time.
They even sent gratuities in advance as a token of their sincerity, though the amounts all varied.
The most generous sender was Baron Sleepy, who had seemed the most desperate—he sent a full 5 gold.
'A normal household's monthly living expenses were 20 silver, and 100 silver made 1 gold, so... This is insane. For one book?'
I clicked my tongue, unable to hide my surprise.
From what I had checked so far, our family's living expenses ran about 3 gold a month.
Our income was far higher than that, but it all drained away on operating costs for the mansion and territory and on repaying money borrowed after being swindled, leaving us to get by on the remaining 3 gold.
And now I was earning more than a month's living expenses from a single book.
The other nobles had sent at least 1 gold each as well, so even just adding those together, the total already exceeded 10 gold.
"I've taken the money, so I'd better start right away."
A professional manga artist keeps promises to clients even in another world.
First, I sat at my desk and checked the tools Baron Sleepy had sent along with his gratuity.
The first things I noticed were an expensive-looking quill with a delicate metal nib and a fairly viscous black ink.
In this world, people drew only with brushes rather than pens, so this was not a pen optimized for drawing.
But since what I was drawing this time was a picture book, this feather pen would be more than sufficient.
'A fine spoon nib would be nice, but I should be grateful for this.'
There were no metal pens, but I was fortunate to have a feather pen that served a similar role.
Unlike feather pens on Earth, this world's feather pens released ink at a steady rate without overflowing.
Because of that, controlling line weight or softness was out of the question, but the drawing itself was possible.
Color had to be applied with brushes and paint, but since this world naturally had pictures too, those tools boasted excellent quality.
They actually seemed better than Earth's brushes and paints.
"Still, I didn't know people would go this crazy over a picture book."
When I looked at the original Cinderella, which had somehow become Ada's number-one treasure and which I had brought for reference, memories of the hell I went through to make it came flooding back.
***
The world of the romance fantasy The Imperial Family's Youngest Son had a setting not so different from our own medieval era.
Novels naturally existed, but unlike Earth, there were no picture books for children.
To be precise, there were storybooks written only in text, but modern picture books with illustrations did not exist.
The only illustrated books here were reference works like plant encyclopedias, monster encyclopedias, or weapon encyclopedias, while storybooks were filled with nothing but dense lines of text.
'This is boring! Ada's not reading it.'
When I had tried to read a storybook to Ada while playing with her before, she quickly grew bored and grumbled—and what came to mind then was a picture book.
Because young children who didn't read books well would still readily read picture books with illustrations.
So I resolved to make a picture book with pretty illustrations for Ada.
'So the day has come when I put the book arts I learned in a middle school club to use.'
In middle school, I had applied to the computer club, the most popular club at the time, but lost at rock-paper-scissors and had no choice but to join the under-enrolled book arts club—and that turned out to be helpful.
Drawing on my memories of making simple books like notebooks and picture books in the book arts club, I confidently set out to produce one myself.
But making a book was no easy process.
'Master Rupert, we've sold off all the leather in the house, so this is all we have....'
When I asked the butler for leather to use as a book cover, what came back was some stiff, unidentifiable hide with the fur still attached.
I later learned it was the hide of a monster called a gnoll, and that it was normally thrown away because it was so useless.
It was fine. The cover was only the outside, after all. What mattered was what was inside. Rationalizing it that way, I asked him to get me some paper too.
'We do have paper. It's just that it's a bit....'
Good lord, I had never expected the quality of modern white paper on Earth—the kind used for high-end books and quality printing—or cream book paper, the kind mostly used for books.
But even so, I couldn't hide my shock at paper that was worse than newsprint, too poor even for scrap paper.
If I drew on this, it would all surely tear apart.
'But I can't ask Father for money either....'
At this rate, both the cover and the contents would turn out a complete mess.
If I was going to make something like that, I'd rather not make it at all. After mulling it over for a long while, the conclusion I reached was to sell off every book I didn't read.
I was past the age of reading storybooks anyway, and Ada found them boring and had no intention of reading them. Selling just those would bring in enough to cover the cost of materials.
The storybooks in the house had been purchased back when our family still resembled nobility, so they were high-quality and fetched a decent price even secondhand.
'With that money, this month's food budget....'
Seeing the butler and head maid drooling over the money I got from selling the books to a merchant, I felt a slight pang of conscience, but I still resolved to use it for Ada.
Whenever Ada saw the fancy jeweled accessories and dolls brought by the young ladies from the neighboring territory who sometimes came to play, she looked envious, and it broke my heart every time.
Father and I were adults, so we could endure poverty, but Ada was still a child. That sense of deprivation was something she didn't need to experience—at least not yet.
Afterward, I bought leather for the cover and paper for the inside from the merchant, then carefully wrote out the story of Cinderella as I remembered it, letter by letter,
and on the facing pages, I drew illustrations to match the content.
Cinderella in a splendid dress wearing glass slippers, the fairy and the pumpkin carriage, the ballroom of a beautiful palace and a handsome prince, and so on.
The pictures were so delicate and fantastical that I could hardly believe I had drawn them.
'This Rupert bastard had talent like this, and the best he could do with it was paint portraits of the female lead and hand them over to her.'
I had drawn webtoons before, so I had some confidence in my art, but the skill of Rupert, this body's original owner, was honestly astonishing.
The portrait of a lovely middle-aged woman hanging in the center of the foyer as soon as I first entered the house.
The person who had painted that portrait—so lifelike, realistic, and beautifully colored that it looked like the work of a famous Renaissance painter—was none other than Rupert.
The Countess of Somerset, wife of Count Bradley and mother of Rupert and Ada, had died of illness, and Rupert had painted it himself in her memory.
The novel had described him as good at drawing, but since the only thing he ever did with it was paint pictures of the female lead and present them to her, I hadn't expected this level of talent.
It was only after I possessed Rupert's body that I realized.
If this guy had seriously devoted himself to art, he would have become a truly great painter.
But in this world, painting wasn't a particularly respected profession.
Since magical cameras had replaced much of painters' work, the typical painter scraped by painting portraits for wealthy nobles or the occasional mural.
So I could understand why Rupert, despite having this talent, had not pursued the path of a painter.
"Since I've possessed you anyway, I'll put your talent to good use too."
Fortunately, possession didn't seem to erase the original body's talents, and my drawing ability had improved by leaps and bounds compared to my previous life.
If I returned to Earth in this state, I felt like I could conquer not just the webtoon industry, but comics—no, the entire art world.
And so, combining my experience with Rupert's talent, the first picture book, <Cinderella Ada>, was born.