The Copycat's Debut
After the festivities for Lapis's birthday concluded and I returned to the Capital, I settled back into my usual routine, devoting whatever spare hours I could scrape together to the world of literature.
As anyone could see, the era left little in the way of cultural entertainment to enjoy, so tapping into this market was the most reasonable way to lay the groundwork for raising funds.
My previous life had been a comfortable one, and while I'd studied a great many things, I'd never had any particular gift for writing. Fortunately, being a jack-of-all-trades had more than covered that shortfall, so I wasn't worried.
Which was why, after some deliberation, I had narrowed my candidates down to Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet.
If all went well, Cinderella would generate a nice synergy with the glass slippers I'd gifted to Lapis.
Truthfully, that was the plan from the start.
'I need to expose just enough of the childish parts...'
Everything had to be tailored to fit the sensibilities of the age. Bringing artifacts of my past life into this world was no guarantee of success.
The people here weren't so unsophisticated as to cheer for Cinderella as-is, an unvarnished children's fairy tale.
'Rather than a Cinderella under a stepmother... I'll make her the daughter of a fallen noble house, sent to serve as a maidservant in another family's estate. That'll cut off any familiar comparisons at the pass.'
And that family would be the very ones who had ruined Cinderella's house. Even better, I'd add the backstory that its head had schemed to get his hands on her.
Originally it was the stepmother and her daughters who tormented Cinderella, but this version would work better.
Cinderella, gaslighted all this while, would gradually uncover the truth, exact her revenge with the prince's help, and only then would the two be united. Clean and tidy.
The narrative beats in between did bear an uncanny resemblance to the trashy dramas of my past life, but there was nothing to be done about it. Thinking about it, weren't those trashy dramas themselves just remakes of the Cinderella structure anyway?
Especially here, given the era, any work portraying women as proactive tended to be poorly received, so this approach was the rational choice.
'As for Romeo and Juliet...'
There wouldn't be much need for adaptation there.
'Is this enough of a framework?'
I looked down at the paper densely covered in writing and let out a soft sigh. If it caught on and started a trend, it would earn no small sum of money.
It went without saying that books were considerable luxuries in this world. Artifacts existed, sure, but papermaking and printing technology had hard limits in an era like this.
No wonder the royal library remained the sole property of the imperial family.
'Well... for the time being, the smell of ink on this pen nib isn't going to dry.'
'Haa...'
After a full month of labor, I rose from my seat dripping with sweat, then exhaled a quiet sigh as I regarded the two completed volumes.
Sitting in one place and writing everything out by hand was punishing work for the body, and it devoured mental stamina above all. If I hadn't steadied my flagging concentration with techniques like Focus and Clear Mind, honestly, even a month wouldn't have been enough.
Hardest of all hadn't been adapting Cinderella — it had been Romeo and Juliet. It was a famously well-known story, sure, but I'd never engaged with it deeply enough to have its entire structure engraved in memory, and filling in the missing links of the story's arc myself drained me to the bone.
On top of that, my own greed got the better of me: I split the work into the original's tragic ending and my own arranged hopeful ending, and writing both left me, for the first time since tempering this body, bleeding from the nose.
'The problem is, this isn't the end of it...'
Just as authors in my past life sold their work through publishers or novel platforms, anything that wasn't a history text or educational manual had to go through a merchant guild. The imperial family's movable type presses were booked solid with official business.
I could have pushed the issue if I'd wanted to, but that would mean tearing down all their existing typesetting and re-arranging every block of type to fit my books' specifications. From the workers' perspective, it would be a royal pain in the ass of the highest order.
Hence why I was reaching out to a large guild that owned its own presses — expensive, labor-intensive things. And in that regard, the Prime Minister was the perfect candidate. But to secure his help, these works would ultimately have to pass the subjective judgment of one man's eye.
'If it doesn't work out, so be it. If a work can't catch the eye of the Prime Minister — a man who weighs money above all — then it simply lacks that much commercial appeal.'
Having settled the matter in my mind, I arranged a private meeting with the Prime Minister for the first time in a long while.
'Hmm.'
After meeting with Prince Rohen and wrapping up his business, the Prime Minister returned to his estate and settled comfortably into his study, drawing out the books he had received.
The prince had long since shed any trace of childhood, now bearing the appearance of a youth in which his masculinity was beginning to show — and these were the books he had handed over. Recalling how the prince had abruptly demanded a contract and asked for mass production and sale using the presses held by the Lander Merchant Guild, the Prime Minister stroked his chin.
It went without saying that, from a merchant's standpoint, producing "books" was among the riskiest of all luxury goods. Setting aside the presses, which he already possessed.
Then there was the manpower required, the paper consumed, and the near-impossibility of disposing of stock if the books failed to sell and turned into dead inventory. That threefold harmony made books the guild's most avoided commodity.
'Still, it is the prince's request. There's no harm in reading them through before passing judgment.'
It hadn't been a demand — the prince was merely seeking the judgment of his eye as a merchant. With that thought, the Prime Minister opened the first book.
"..."
Morning had come.
The Prime Minister — who had opened the book at night — registered that fact only around the time he finished the final pages of Cinderella.
Creak.
Rising carefully, rubbing his tired, bleary eyes, he switched off the artifact light and opened the window. As the morning air washed over him, the fatigue of the sleepless night seemed to crash down all at once.
Working through the night beneath mountains of paperwork was nothing unusual for him. But losing himself so completely in a book, time dissolving into self-oblivion — that was a first.
Literary merit, you ask?
There was none to speak of.
He couldn't say for the other two volumes, but the Cinderella he had just read was a work focused purely on cheap, stimulating thrills.
And honestly, from a merchant's standpoint, that was all the better. Literary merit and commercial appeal tended to run in inverse proportion. The two only rose together when the author was already a writer of great renown.
Yet even a work chasing pure commercialism had its line. Because at its core, a "book" was an expensive luxury good.
And luxury goods were, as a rule, the province of the upper classes. In other words, a book had to be good enough for nobles to read and bandy about as gossip at gatherings.
Titillation-only works — the lewd novels that circulated underground — were certainly bought up by plenty of nobles. But they were never mentioned at banquets, tea parties, or salons. They served only as private amusement for one's personal hours.
By that measure, the Cinderella he had stayed up all night reading walked that tightrope perfectly.
The love triangle woven around the heroine Cinderella was well done, and her charm — an unwitting, almost airheaded brand of foxery she wasn't even aware of — was thoroughly refreshing.
Above all, it invited no censure, because Cinderella was never the proactive party.
Having clawed his way up from the streets himself, the Prime Minister held few such prejudices, but still — the exceptional woman, the proactive woman, the woman whose public performances swayed the influence of her husband the house lord — such figures rarely found favor when reflected in cultural works.
No, "rarely found favor" was putting it kindly. They drew open criticism.
And in truth, that was precisely why high society — a world permitted to women alone — might well be so harsh, so merciless.
So while the beginning of Cinderella's journey to uncover the true culprit behind her family's ruin may have been proactive, every means she employed to resolve it amounted to "receiving help," which let the story land neatly without offense.
'As I understand it, she hasn't yet made her society debut...'
That the psychology was reflected so keenly, better than he'd expected, wrung an involuntary murmur of admiration from the Prime Minister. Of course, if the process of resolving events were passive, Cinderella's appeal as a protagonist would have been halved — but that gap seemed to have been filled with pure character charm.
Deliberate, calculated foxery reads as unseemly on the page, but foxery performed without any awareness of it was, paradoxically, a fresh and winning charm.
Moreover, there was the prince, and the villain — a man of sinister allure who had brought Cinderella's house to ruin — both rendered exceptionally capable.
Readers could even spin gossip about who in real life they resembled, who might have inspired them. Men, as a rule, cheerfully devoured such harmless gossip — they pricked up their ears for it, if anything.
'And this symbolic pair of shoes that crowns the final chapter... there's even a note suggesting a tie-in with made-to-order pieces from the Polaris Workshop.'
Certainly, if it caught on, that was worth pushing.
'In that case...'
The two remaining volumes. Clutching the tragedy and the hopeful versions of Romeo and Juliet, the Prime Minister set out for work.
All-nighters were already as routine as meals to him. He wasn't so frail as to break down over this much.
'I should have read this one first...'
Turning his back on the mountains of paperwork, the Prime Minister read through the tragic version of Romeo and Juliet. The work would pile up whether he tended it or not. What was one day of shirking?
'The construction is solid, but...'
Perhaps because Cinderella's pacing had been so electrifying, the comparatively more literary Romeo and Juliet fell flat. If even the tragic version — with its sorrowful ending and lingering aftertaste — was only this much, the hopeful version needed no guessing.
'If this one goes out at all, it would be better adapted for the stage.'
A man and a woman whose pure love is thwarted by their families' opposition — that element alone would offend no one.
'If we release anything, it should be this one first, with Cinderella held back.'
When he closed the book and turned his gaze to the window, a beautiful sunset met his eyes. Thinking he should arrange to meet Prince Rohen before the evening meal, the Prime Minister headed home for the day.
"So what you're saying is... we should adjust the release intervals."
"Precisely, Your Highness."
Before the evening meal, I read through the Prime Minister's proposal, handed over by the man who had appeared without any warning. And judging from his tone and the proposal itself, I got the strong sense that Romeo and Juliet was being bundled in as filler — which left me scribbling away on paper with great diligence.
"So Romeo and Juliet turned out worse than you expected, then."
"...To speak frankly, it was not a bad work. But it would be buried quickly, and wither just as fast. To put it bluntly, it was ordinary. Unless it launched under a famous author's name from the start, it would end without even becoming gossip. Novels carrying that level of composition, construction, and moral are far more common than one might think."
That much I had anticipated. There was no guarantee a work from my past life would follow its old trajectory and become a smash hit in this era of this world.
'Besides...'
The original was so famous that even ordinary people carried fragmentary memories of it. Building on that, stitching the gaps together as I went — in the end, it was nothing more than a play, born as a script, transplanted into novel form. No matter how much my jack-of-all-trades versatility patched over my lack of talent, a replica had its limits.
"Curious, though. If it's plainly going to become dead stock... you could have simply passed on it. Are you going through with it out of consideration for how I might take it?"
"A position such as Prime Minister is not so useless that I would need to read the mood of a Highness not yet even of age."
"..."
"The reason I insisted on releasing Romeo and Juliet as well is that Cinderella carries a sure guarantee of success."
Even at that answer, my doubts wouldn't clear. Did he mean Cinderella's profits would cover Romeo and Juliet's losses? Or was there some other intention?
"Books — novels above all — have a peculiar commercial property. When a single work becomes popular, the same author's other works immediately begin selling at a rapid clip as well. I am convinced that even if we run a deficit for a time, it will naturally be made up in the end, which is why I am pushing for it. And by then, we can attach a suitable premium to the price — so in truth, it's not a bad arrangement at all."
'Ah...'
Well, that much was true. Enjoy one work by a given author, and it's only natural to go looking for their others.
"That aside — is there a reason you intend to act with your name completely hidden?"
"No particular reason."
I brushed the question off vaguely and moved the topic along. Publishing under a hidden name.
You could call it the bare minimum of a conscience. I had brought works from my past life over for pure profit — there was no need to covet fame on top of that.
Besides, I had no intention of releasing works on a regular schedule. This would be a one-time affair. No — I planned to wind things down after a clean tie-in with the glass slipper sales. By then I'd be an adult myself, with no leisure to be hoarding money this way.
"Very well. Then... we shall work under a pen name. Do you have one in mind?"
At the Prime Minister's question, I wrote on the paper without a moment's hesitation and showed it to him.
"Copycat."
Translated from the old tongue, it meant imitator. Since these were not original works but merely imitations stitched together, nothing could suit better.
With the contract with the Prime Minister concluded, and around the time those memories had begun to fade, some eight months passed before I received word and made my way into the Lander Merchant Guild in the city — the place selling the books.
Even in an era with printing technology of a sort, mass production in a short span was impossible for anything that wasn't a newspaper. The eight months consumed could be called the Prime Minister showing a degree of good faith.
"..."
Given the steep price of books and the era's high illiteracy, the shop wasn't especially crowded. The only patrons were valets and attendants serving as proxies for nobles.
And there, in that vicinity, I gazed quietly at the newly released Romeo and Juliet, a faint, wry smile playing on my lips.
I hadn't invoked my authority as a prince at all, so I was being treated as a purely unknown author. Which meant I was now standing here looking at a work shelved in a truly inconspicuous spot — and even if it was a fabricated piece, the bitterness was unavoidable.
'But with Cinderella's follow-up release, the Prime Minister's success is all but certain...'
Forcing that bitterness down the back of my throat, I turned away.