We heard there was a Chinese theme going on and came at once! We've brought you manjū as a present! Manjū are the steamed meat buns from the beginning of the story. The story goes they were invented by Zhuge Liang when he needed to cross a river that was said to demand sacrifices of heads to be safe to cross. He named them "manjū", which meant "barbarian head" and threw the food in instead and was able to cross. Eventually the meaning of the word changed to be "bean-jam head" with the same pronunciation. In this case, of course, a very literal head has been presented.

*gnaw gnaw*

Please leave. This is going to stop being a story about a drake...

Afterword

Zounose here; this is my 18th manga.

Originally I didn't have the drake appearing immediately; the heroines traveled to various places following the distrubance and saw its handiwork. But I figured for a shōnen manga it would be better for the enemy to appear sooner rather than later, and so the story ended up the way it did.

This time I aimed for a more shōnen manga style (for me, anyway). That pretty much just means having a lot of battle scenes... But battle scenes take a up a lot of pages, so I had to cram dialogue in there a lot.

I chose to have the characters with Chinese-theme clothes appear. When I picked Meiling as the lead, I was thinking of drawing her like her original design, but I ended up drawing her with the usual qípáo-like dress. It's a little unfortunate I didn't get to draw more cool scenes with characters other than Meiling. I feel like Ran and Kasen ended up more like expository devices. Maybe that is actually one of the most defining features of shōnen manga? (I mean that in the sense of "Shitte iru no ka, Raiden!?") I wanted to draw more of Chen when she was cheeky and spirited... Guessed based on information from pixiv: "Shitte iru no ka, Raiden!?" (知ってるのか雷電！, "You knew/understand what's going on, Raiden!?") is a meme where something strange is introduced, people act surprised about it and guess what is going on, then Raiden explains what's really happening.

Anyway, next I plan to prepare for winter Comiket. I'm thinking of doing something with Youmu but I'm not sure yet... In any case, I hope we meet again! The story about Youmu became "Shirogane/Silver Edge"