“Rebuild World”: My Secret Project

Hey everyone! So, your cat friend has been ultra-quiet lately. But that’s not to say I’ve not been doing anything. Still waters run deep. And I’m finally free to talk about what has been a secret project for a few months: editing the English translation of the light novel series Rebuild World.

Long-time followers of Curiously Dead Cat know that my background is in editing. I’m self-employed as a private tutor now, but thought I’d do some editing for fun on the side. And what better place to start with than J-Novel Club, one of the publishers and distributors of English-language stories that often get translated into our beloved anime medium? So I took JNC’s (quite grueling, tbh) editing test.

Once accepted, I began to receive JNC’s notices of new series they were looking for editors for. I really didn’t expect, as a newbie, to get the first one I bid on, but Rebuild World looked intriguing and I wanted to give it a shot. It was my first choice and first request.

I got it.

The more I’ve read through and edited the translated text, the more exciting I’ve found it. I don’t have any inside scoop on whether it will be made an anime eventually, but I’d love to see that happen and I think it’s got a fair chance.

So what’s Rebuild World all about?

RW follows the story of a teen-ish guy named Akira. (We haven’t gotten an exact age yet, but I get the impression he’s in his mid-teens. He’s usually called a “boy” but occasionally a “man”.) Akira is a street orphan in the poorest part of town, and life is always a struggle to survive. His poor luck is kind of a dark running joke in the story.

To turn things around, Akira decides to become a relic hunter. Relics are the leftover technology and artifacts of a bygone technological golden age that has since collapsed. Present-day society is built on the knowledge that can be salvaged and rediscovered from these relics, and so relic hunters can become super-wealthy and influential.

The catch? The golden age also left behind mutant monsters and killer robots—don’t you just hate it when that happens?—which hunters are likely to run into in their pursuits. Akira isn’t particularly strong or well-equipped, and there’s only one thing standing between him and the jaws of death: Alpha.

Alpha is a ghostly, buxom woman(?) who is invisible to most people—but not Akira. She is powerful but not omnipotent, and sees in Akira the perfect tool to accomplish her own private, unknown agenda. With their individual goals apparently aligned, at least for now, Alpha lends Akira her aid…

You can read Rebuild World at J-Novel Club’s website. At the moment, we’re releasing Volume 1 Part 1, The Alluring Specter, at a rate of 1/10th per week. Section 4 of 10 is the latest one streaming. When all ten parts are out, look forward to the complete ebook with some additional content, including some neat color spreads!

So from here on out, posting on my blog may remain sporadic—not for lack of desire, but due to the time I’m putting into editing RW. And who knows? If there’s enough interest among you all, I might post some Q&A or AMA stuff about the series.

Stay cool, y’all!