Afterword Hello! Satou Kibi here! Thank you very much for picking up this book! I ended up leaving out the afterword page in my last book, but in the end it felt somehow empty without it, so I decided to try bringing it back. Just as always, I'm racking my brains and doing this right before the deadline, but I'll do my best to suppress any whining and idle grumbling. Be Positive!!

Well then, how did you like this time's book? Truth be told, I kept double and triple-guessing myself while drawing it, which led to the main theme being pretty faint in the end, but the point is, it really would be if Patchouli-san were the type to have conversations with pets.

I also finally tried having my much-beloved Palace of the Earth Spirits characters in a book! They're so... costly to draw...? Too many parts...? It feels like I skipped a lot by just leaving out any hard-to-draw custom costumes, but... they still took longer to draw than the equally complicated SDM characters. But it was fun. I was planning to do a bunch with Orin-chan's cat connection, too, but I had to make some painful, painful cuts for the sake of the story. In the end, it looks more like she's just there to chaperone Satori-sama on her "offline meeting" because she's bad at communicating. I've wanted to draw them for a long time, so I'll definitely try to do it more frequently from now on.

This is also crossed my mind when I was drawing the story of the giant Shanghai Doll or Koakuma's backstory for instance, but I always get a bit nervous when doing something with strong original story elements... but I wanted to... and I also wanted to draw a bunch of people surrounding a cat... My schedule ended up cutting it really tight as usual, and I can't help but feel like that panic shines through in the writing and art. Next time! Next time!!

Well then, thank you for reading this far! I hope we can meet again over my next manga! Artist: Satou Kibi