How a Realist Hero Rebuilt The Kingdom

Afterword

Thank you for buying Volume 17 of Realist Hero. It’s Dojyomaru.

This volume is about the Demon Lord’s Domain and how this world came to be.

When I first started writing this story, I thought about how to come up with a reason for all the elements of the world that I was glossing over with “it’s a gamelike world.” If it’s a world of swords and sorcery, with a variety of races, existing in reality outside the game...what situation could result in that? What I came up with was an abandoned test site. A world where nanomachines would allow the creation of magic-like effects, and various races were created, abandoned, and their purpose forgotten. My ideas about this were influenced by Fujiko F. Fujio’s short story Rounenki no Owari (Old Age’s End).

I thought a situation like the one I’ve described in the main story of Realist might result in a gamelike world. But to think it would take seventeen volumes of buildup to get there... You can see how important the ability to gloss over important information is because of a shared understanding of how things work in the default setting. In our current society, where we’re expected to interface with a lot of entertainment quickly, those sorts of default settings have reached their peak.

Now, I’d like to thank my readers, and everyone involved with this book.