As a result of being chopped down to 100 pages, "Heaven and Earth" ended up being very focused on Momoyo's side of things, so I couldn't but help want to draw another backstory comic more about Megumu... and it turned into another 100-pager. I picked the "dragon's pupils" expression for the title with confidence, since it came to mind easily. The legends surrounding Iizuna-daigongen are really great. He was quite well-known from the middle ages up until very recently, meaning there's relatively many sources to draw from, which I'm very thankful for. Being so popular as a weapon led to being scorned in times of peace... how transient is glory. It's not like you can have the same humans worship you for centuries on end, after all... Yet despite this background, Megumu can still let it slip in front of some unknown humans how much she trusts Momoyo... Okay, I could talk about this for ages, so I'll just stop myself here. Tsukasa also has her own harsh experiences caused by being an only indirect target of faith... or so I'd love to think, anyway, but I do wonder what it'd be like if her personality had always been the same it is today? She still seems to proudly call herself a white fox, which is at least food for thought. Whether you think of it in terms of physics or astrology, manipulating the night sky seems like an awfully powerful ability, but I wonder what it actually means. BAiJR gave us Flan-chan destroying a meteor, so I chose to believe that making one fall isn't too unreasonable either. And it's romantic, right?

A new story, drawn for this compilation. I have the image that outside comedic contexts, Tsukasa's facade rarely cracks, and in a serious story it would be all kinds of bad for her if she actually let her true feelings show. The fact you can't tell what she's thinking is part of her charm, but also what makes her hard to use as a character. At least be honest with Momoyo if no one else, dammit! I also wanted a chance to draw Chimata-san in a manga, but she doesn't really have any role in the others' backstories, so she didn't get to show up there. Now I finally got that out of my system. I was struggling to figure out the sense of distance between her and Megumu's crew, so it helped to see them talking in Lotus Eaters. They seemed to get along better than I thought, but not too well or anything, which is pretty good for me. Since this was for the compilation and all, I wanted to try including some backstory elements as well. It's fun being totally self-indulgent. The idea was to draw Tsukasa's own, personal backstory, but her fate seems very closely linked with Megumu's, so it threatened to become just more of the same already seen in the other stories. Instead, I ended up focusing on the developments after she turned from a white fox into a tube fox. Even though changes in faith have caused her a lot of trouble, I'd like Tsukasa to put on a more positive attitude than Megumu. They're really just changes in people's view of Iizuna-daigongen, after all, so in a sense they ought to be someone else's problem, not hers. But seriously, Megumu, whether you realize this or not, feel a little guilty, would you? I like the idea that while Megumu wouldn't be surprised to see Momoyo go off somewhere someday, she takes it 100% for granted that Tsukasa will never leave her side.