Category Archives: Group News

3-Gatsu no Lion (March Comes in Like a Lion) Volume 12

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Woo, ok. Now at long last we’re REALLY caught up. This volume came out in Japan about a month ago. And I’ve been working on it all month to get it fully translated, scanned, cleaned, typeset and checked, and now we’re finally done (I translated it in advance from the digital magazine, but there are things changed/added to the volumes). Thanks a lot of Katyusha for helping typeset and checking.

Ok, so, here’s a little explanation for those not aware. 3-Gatsu no Lion is a series that runs in the bi-weekly magazine Young Animal (The same magazine as Berserk). But it also runs irregularly (as in not in every issue) and generally only finishes 1 volume a year, usually released around September-October. The chapters we’re releasing now are the ones that were appearing in the magazine as we were finishing the other volumes earlier this year. But now we’re all caught up (except for one chapter that just came out, the chapter that’ll probably be the first volume of volume 13). A digital version for it comes out about a week after the physical magazine, which I can get, but I really just don’t have time to try to do this series on the irregular basis of “whenever it shows up in the magazine”. Plus I don’t have time for the added work of trying to make digital raws look good and I especially don’t have time to also redo them with better, scanned volume raws later. I just don’t have time to try to do something involved and time-sensitive like that in my life right now (Just doing Gintama and Toriko right now is a major compromise, and it’ll be a huge load off once those end, whenever that may be). As I’ve mentioned before in posts about this series, I’ve got almost no staff besides me doing this. And that’s a major time sink for an adult working a full time job to put into a hobby. So I’m going to continue just doing it on a per-volume basis. That also means we’ll be able to focus on making it the highest quality possible rather than trying to make low-resolution raws look good and do multiple drafts to make the translation good.

Besides that, there are 2 “Fan Books” which are essentially summaries of old material. Though there’s a bit of new material I might translate. Umino-sensei wrote new original omake comics in those so I may try to translate them at some point, just not immediately.

Anyhow, I hope you all enjoy this. I have Innocent Rouge V4 and the rest of 81diver to finish now (Also the Jojo novel The Book). Maybe once those are done I may have time to pick up a new project if it seems like there’s time. I have a few ideas but I’m not totally sure which which I’d want to go with yet.

And check out the 3-Gatsu no Lion anime, it’s amazing. Ok, see ya later.

3-Gatsu no Lion Volume 12 (Ch115-126)
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81diver Volume 4 ch35-38, Volume 5, & Volume 6

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Heeeey everybodyyy. Welp, ok here’s our group’s first release of 81diver! (Read as Hachi One Diver) For those of you who don’t know about it, it’s a comedic and sorta sports manga about shogi by the author Shibata Yokusaru-sensei, who wrote a fairly popular series called Air Master. This series ran in Weekly Young Jump from 2006 to 2014. It’s a really fun really compelling series that’s easy to read and weird as hell. I really enjoy it and if you haven’t read it yet, I hope you check it out.

Now that the introduction’s done, let me explain how this project came to be released here. And if you read the essay I wrote when we started releasing Innocent, then you’ve basically read the explanation I’m gonna give for 81diver. Also to a lesser extent, 3-Gatsu no Lion.

I’ve translated every chapter of this series that’s been scanlated so far. I started on chapter 1 in February of 2012. Aaand today we’re releasing the end of volume 4. So yeah, there’s been a fuckton of delays with this. Originally his project was being done by Utopia Scans/Mangatopia. I’d translated the first 24 chapters from late February to early September of 2012 and Utopia Scans was doing really well scanlating all I’d done, and then I had to take a break for a while to work on other projects. I had other projects among various groups we were trying to release the volumes/chapters as they came out, while this series I think we were 20+ volumes behind so it meant this project had to be put on the back burner because I just couldn’t do everything at the same time, which I sometimes have to do (In this case, that was Toriko, Gintama, Hito Hitori Futari, Billy Bat, Jojolion, Doubutsu no Kuni, REAL, Kingdom, 3-Gatsu no Lion, Spica, the Toriko anime and the Kingdom anime).

So I did a few more in early 2013, but Utopia Scans didn’t work on them. There were instances when I was told they were gonna be worked on, bu they never were. At a certain number of months with no progress being made I had to assume they weren’t actually going to do it and I had to find another group. But I couldn’t find another group to work on it and I think from that long list of projects I just typed out I think it should be clear I didn’t have time/resources to do it with my own group. So I had to stop again and try to get some other stuff finished. So I think after I finished… Innocent Volume 4, and Spica (That’s still not scanlated either), I decided I’d go back to working on this. I translated it on a regular basis trying to get as much of it done as I could. It’s a pretty easy series with not a lot of text so it was generally a good break from more intense series. But again, I didn’t have anybody to scanlate it. Shinjo volunteered to work on it but I think he only ever released 2 chapters and then quit. Then a group I had been communicating with for a while called Aka to Kuro volunteered to work on it, and got 7 chapters and an omake chapter done in 6 months. Which is uh, really really REALLLLLYYYY slow. To the point where you’d finish the whole series in around 20 years. And that was with someone in our group, Yakusho, doing the typesetting for them. So that clearly wasn’t working, just like the 2 groups before them they weren’t willing to put in the time to actually get anything released, so I had to try something else.

At this point the series had ended in Japan with a total of 35 volumes. And 3 and a half of those volumes had been scanlated. But at that point I’d translated 18 volumes in an effort to sorta develop a buffer in case I was busy later (which I was) so there would be translations to use while the groups I was working with caught up (which they didn’t). The last chapter Aka to Kuro released was in September of 2015 (And from their website it doesn’t look like they released anything of any other series since then, either) before voluntarily dropping it. I got to the end of V18, finishing the middle-volume out of 35 which was the milestone I had been going for, in October of 2015. After which I had to rush to translate Innocent because that project had fallen apart as previously mentioned after which I translated 3-Gatsu no Lion every day to catch up with that and then after that I redrew/cleaned/typeset 3-Gatsu no Lion over a couple months and now I think we’re at yesterday, so there ya go that’s the whole timeline of my scanlation life for the last few years, hope you enjoyed that rant.

TL;DR: I translated tons of this series but it got delayed for years because groups that said they would work on it didn’t work on it and I had no staff to do it or any time myself, so it didn’t get done. Hopefully it goes a bit smoother now.

So anyhow high8sky typeset these 2.5 volumes in the last 2 weeks (more progress done by the other groups in 3 years) so please send her all your thanks, because without her this sure as fuck wasn’t going all that well. Right after getting the redrawing done on a bunch of Innocent volumes. And then I quality-checked it and now I’m releasing it. So everyone please send high8sky all your warm kind feelings. She’s gonna need them to typeset the remaining 29 volumes. K I’m gonna… go to sleep I guess.

81diver Volume 4 ch35
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81diver Volume 4 ch36
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81diver Volume 4 ch37
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81diver Volume 4 ch38
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81diver Volume 5 ch39-49
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81diver Volume 6 ch50-60
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3-Gatsu no Lion (March Comes in Like a Lion) Volume 9

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3GatsuMatome1
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Everything’s almost done. Basically the way these went was I did them one job at a time. Some of it was waiting for BWYS that ultimately didn’t pan out, but it’s not like I’m doing these all in a week. Rather it took 6 months of working every day to get them all done. And before that a couple years of ~1 per week.

Edit: 3-4 was a copy of 1-2 somehow. Anyhow that’s fixed. Also fixed some typos.

3-Gatsu no Lion Volume 9 (Ch84-94)
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3-Gatsu no Lion (March Comes in Like a Lion) Volume 8

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Souya Meijin
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Whew, ok so this volume’s finally all done. I’m really glad how it turned out. It’s really just been me and Orthio working on it so I hope you all enjoy. I’ve only got 1 volume left to typeset so for the most part all that’s left is quality checking, so the last 3 volumes shouldn’t take too long hopefully.

Edits: Minor edits. Typos and such.

3-Gatsu no Lion Volume 8 (Ch74-83)
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3-Gatsu no Lion (March Comes in Like a Lion) V7 ch67-73

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Hey, so I’ll give a quick explanation here. I’ve been working on this project since 2012 with Be With You Scans (And before that I was working with them on Omoni Naitemasu). Originally I was just translating it, but after a while it became clear they didn’t have the time/staff to do the other jobs so I ended up doing all the redrawing and usually me and one other person from HWMN would do the typesetting. And now for a pretty long time now, HWMN has been doing everything except scanning raws and doing final checking/editing. So I talked it out with them and they feel they really don’t have the time to dedicate to doing the project anymore so it’s officially moving over to this group. I don’t bear them any ill will and I appreciate all the work they’ve done on this project over the last 4 years. The group’s been around a very long time now and when you get older, you have other things happening in your life you need to prioritize so you tend to have less time to work on stuff like this. That’s something I think we’ve both accepted at this point, and I appreciate them being mature about it so now the rest of the series can be scanlated.

They’ve (we’ve) just put up a news post releasing the last chapter released as part of their group (V7 ch66):
http://bwys.org/forums/index.php?topic=819.0
I encourage every reader of this series to go over there and thank them for all the hard work and dedication they’ve put into working on this series over the years.

So right now, we’re releasing the end of Volume 7. The last 7 of 10 chapters. And we’re hoping to have more in the fairly near future. I finished translating the entire series a couple weeks ago, so for the most part only redrawing, typesetting, and editing are left for the last 4 volumes (Just of what’s out so far. The series is ongoing and one volume comes out a year, usually around November). Especially with the anime coming out this autumn, I really want to get the rest of the series done by then and keep up with it as more volumes come out.

Anyhow, if you haven’t heard of it, this is a really excellent series. It’s a slice of life series about a young man who plays shogi for a living and deals with issues like feeling socially distant, 3 sisters that are trying to enjoy their life despite their mother dying when they were young, leaving them to live largely on their own, and various other characters in their lives (Many of which have a story arc dedicated to them). It’s by Umino Chica, the author of Honey and Clover, if anyone’s read that. One volume comes out in Japan a year, generally, and it’s always one of the best selling volumes that year. Umino-sensei is a master at creating relatable yet flawed characters and delving into their psyches and expressing them in a serene and fascinating way that’s different from anything else I’ve ever read. So I hope you all enjoy it and I encourage you to check out the rest of the series if you haven’t.

3-Gatsu no Lion V7 Ch67
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3-Gatsu no Lion V7 Ch68
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3-Gatsu no Lion V7 Ch69
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3-Gatsu no Lion V7 Ch70
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3-Gatsu no Lion V7 Ch71
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3-Gatsu no Lion V7 Ch72
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3-Gatsu no Lion V7 Ch73
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Delays

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For circumstances beyond our control, we will not be able to get scanlations of new chapters of Toriko and Gintama done until Sundays/Mondays for the foreseeable future. So a few days later each week than we have been for the past year or so. I’m pretty bummed out about it, but there’s nothing we can do right now. If this changes I’ll let you guys know (This won’t affect any other projects).’

Edit: Apparently Jump comes out early this week so this week we’re aiming for Friday/Saturday hopefully.

Innocent Volume 6

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Marie Kurita
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Aaand moving right along, here’s our next project! It’s a series called Innocent by Sakamoto Shinichi. It’s about executioners and intrigue and weird crazy-ass shit in the run-up to the French Revolutionary Era. And probably eventually the French Revolutionary Era itself, too.
The scanlating of this series ALSO has a huge story to it. So everybody get tucked in and Kewl0210-sensei will tell you yet another tale of scanlation hell.

Ok, so I’ve translated this entire series. I also translated all of the author’s previous series Kokou no Hito which I highly suggest you all check out, because that’s my favorite manga of all time. I was scanlating this series with the group that is currently scanlating Prison School, Utopia Scanlations. They’ve also done a whole ton of other series in the past. I worked with them on a few chapters of Hunter X Hunter I translated years ago and the beginning of 81diver (Which is a whole other story I’ll share with you guys when we get to that). Anyhow, they were scanlating the series really well, they were all high quality and ended up being released around when the next one was coming out in Japan. That was until this volume, Volume 6. I finished translating this December 24th 2014, and it’s took until today, November 4th 2015 before it finally got done. And thaaaaat is because of about every problem I could imagine.

First the head of their group M-Hario was basically working on Innocent on his own. I think it may have been him and one other person for a while. After a while he didn’t have time for that outside various personal life stuff. But it took until February to get in contact with him and get all the files he worked on. After that I had to search for another group to work on it because, as you might know if you read the rest of this blog-ish thing, I totally overwork myself and spent way too much time on this shit. So the group that was gonna work on it was Habanero-Scans. Or at least one of the leaders of Habanero-Scans, Iruyily, was going to work on it and maybe they were going to release it as Utopia Scans? I’m not sure at this point. But he was working on it for a good couple months. And then he had his own problems. He realized he didn’t have time to do all the redrawing and everything and he wasn’t able to find the help to do it so I spent a bunch of time getting other people to help him and was making very slow progress on his own. So at that point I had finished scanlating Ring, and I decided we were gonna have to try to scanlate it ourselves if we wanted to get it done. It’s really hard to do that, because that means I need to manage the staff and usually do 2 or more jobs myself, but it just wasn’t really getting done. Luckily high8sky and Yakusho were pretty enthusiastic about working on it and tochiru said she would help out when she could. It was around this point when Iruyily’s computer got messed up for something like two months and we couldn’t get in contact with him. Now, after waiting months to try to get just one volume of this done about 3 more had come out. At this point we were just trying to get Iruyily to send us his files he had spent months to do so we wouldn’t spend a huge amount of time re-doing parts of the volume he already did. And although we got some contact or another with him a few times it took months before we actually got all the files he did. I think one of his hard drives got messed up and that’s why he couldn’t send them, it wasn’t totally clear. So he sent us the files he did and then high8sky, Yakusho, Tochiru and me have been spending the last month or so doing all the rest of the cleaning, redrawing, and typesetting. Which was actually quite a lot, despite all the people that had worked on it. Probably around 65% of it.

So there ya go, that’s the fun-filled story of how this project got tossed between groups for the last year or so. Finally resulting in today, when it’s finally totally done. So it has a happy ending, yay. Everyone party like it’s 1753. We were able to make some progress on V7 in the time we were waiting and I’m working on translating volume 8 now. The first series ends at volume 9, then starts the sequel series “Innocent Rouge” which just came out a couple weeks ago for the 10th volume (Though the volume numbering starts back at 1). Also the series moved from Young Jump, a weekly magazine, to Grand Jump, a bi-weekly magazine. So chapters are longer, but come out less frequently. As do volumes. So we’ve got time to catch up. Which is what we’re trying to do right now. Not sure how long it will take, but we’re all working really hard on it.

So, I really hope you enjoy this series everybody. A lot of people worked really hard on it, and I honestly think it’s really great. Check it out.

Volumes 1-5 scanlated by Utopia Scanlations can be found here

Innocent V6 (Chapters 54-64)
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Gintama Volume 45

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The beauty that overturned a nation.
Lover's Fidelity
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Ok, so, I discussed most of the situation regarding volume scanlations of Toriko and Gintama here:

Gintama Volume 44


and here:

Toriko Volume 2

But to reiterate a bit, this is the last volume scanlation we’ll be doing for either series for now. I’m not gonna say I’ll NEVER do more, but at the moment I’d rather use my time on other series and I’m not planning to go back to these as of now. Even if we’re just doing a HQ version of what we did in the magazine, it requires debinding and scanning the book, getting it all cleaned and redrawn, then the typesetting from the original chapters has to be copied over and shifted so it’s in the right places, then I need to go through the whole thing and update/improve the translations as well as any translate any extras that are only in the volumes. All that is very time-consuming and can be really stressful, largely because it never goes smoothly. Especially when you need several people who are working on a non-regular basis to do those jobs. In volunteer groups, people tend to fall off the map part-way through when you do that sort of project. In that way it’s no less difficult than any project done from scratch. So because of that I’d rather use my free time and resources to work on series that hasn’t already been scanlated. And honestly, I think there’s way less fan-demand for doing HQ versions of things we already did than there is for doing new stuff.

Pretty soon, we’re going to be moving the projects of Innocent and 81diver to this group. I was previously working on them with other groups but they kept falling apart. Hopefully they do better in my group with the group of people we managed to get together who all want to work on them.

As per this volume, let me talk about it a bit. It’s a really great volume. This contains the conclusion of the Courtesan of a Nation Arc. A large reason I wanted to get this one done in volume form is because a lot of the art was re-done in the first couple chapters. You may have noticed that the Shinsengumi’s uniforms weren’t inked-in, so it looked like everybody was in the Mimawarigumi in the magazine version.

Here’s an example:
V45 Comparison

The other thing is the last chapter has an extra 4 pages. It didn’t change the story before like it did in V43, (With making Kintoki seem like he has a change of heart at the end.) it basically just makes the last scene longer and more pretty. There are probably more art-related changes but they’re all very minor. Though I am really glad we got this volume in HQ because the art in it it looks so good.

Anyhow, I think that covers everything I have to say on that subject. Thanks for everyone that’s supported our volume releases of Gintama up to this point, and I hope our future projects go well. I hope you all enjoy.

Gintama V45 (Chapters 390-399)
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Toriko Volume 2

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Poison Kata Omoi Chuu
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Ok, so here is the second of the two volumes we’ve been working on for the past 9-10 months.
For more info on the current situation, check out this post:

Gintama Volume 44

The Toriko volumes project has gone similar to the Gintama volumes project. The main difference being I translated these early chapters several years ago, so I needed to go back and totally re-translate them. The whole volume has to be cleaned all the redraws have to be done, then Hish has been typesetting it (from scratch). I have to scan them and give them the final check, too. So it’s quite a process to do these. So because this is largely done with staff regularly doing weekly chapters, including me, it’s really seeming like too much for me to keep going with these at least for now. Originally I wanted to get Toriko volumes done on a regular basis and eventually catch up with the current one in Japan, but it’s really just not feasible. Not unless Toriko were the one and only project we were doing, which me and the rest of the staff don’t want to do, honestly. As I said in the other post, I think I’d rather spend my time doing other things, and if we’re going to scanlate things we’d rather do things that haven’t been scanlated already. And yeah, a lot of the early scanlations of Toriko aren’t very good, but they’re at least readable. Maybe someday when my life is a little more in order and I don’t have a huge backlog of things to do both in scanlation and in real life, we could try to do more. Or not, I dunno. I’d kinda rather work on Seikimatsu Leader Den Takeshi, to be honest. Well, we’ll see.

If you’re interested at all, I’m currently working on a lot of projects in other groups. And a bunch of them are probably gonna move to this group because of problems with getting the jobs filled with the other groups. So whenever that gets done, it’ll be announced here.

Anyhow, enough of that stuff. This volume is a really interesting one. It’s really fun to go back and read after you know how extreme Toriko gets to see the old story of meeting Coco and catching the Puffer Whales. I think it’s also worth pointing out, to anyone interested, that originally I started translating Toriko in chapter 17. Back then Mangahelpers was still in the form where people just publicly posted raws, translations, and cleans. So you could kinda scanlate as a community. It was also the first series I ever tried to translate, since it was a new series and I wouldn’t be scrutinized that much (Though I guess it is now). Anyhow, later I went back and translated the first 16 chapters in like 2010-2012. But any plans I had back then to get the volumes scanlated fell apart. Buuut now, with this release, there’s officially a released version of Toriko for every chapter translated by me. Woo. I’m pretty happy about that, at least. Even if Toriko volumes don’t keep going, that’s one goal I really wanted to reach.

So I hope you guys enjoy it. We all worked really hard on it and I think it turned out dang good.

Toriko V2 (8-16)
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Gintama Volume 44

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The moon will rise again.
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Ok, well, it’s been quite some time since we finished the last Gintama volume, hasn’t it? This one is all made up of chapters we already released all fixed up with a better translation and using the volume raws, which are much higher quality. We all worked really hard on it, and I hope you guys enjoy it. Especially for those who haven’t read these chapters so far.

Originally I was hoping that we would be able to get HQ volume versions of the Gintama chapters we scanlated fairly quickly. But when you consider how reality always gets in the way, that really didn’t happen. Since they’re already translated I was hoping they could get done with minimal effort on my part so we would have a nice side project going while I focused on other things (Specifically, the 2 weekly series here plus 6 or so other projects I do with this group or others). I scanned this volume in early January of this year. We were only able to get one cleaner to work on it for the most part and that took from January to mid-June to finish Manhai did that. Then I transferred over all of the old typesetting from the issues to the new version. Then then had to be scaled/shifted into the bubbles because the dimensions of the pages weren’t identical. Tochiru did most of that but I did some, too. Meanwhile I had to translate all the extra stuff in between the chapters (The FAQs and Sorachi’s handwritten essays and all that), which took a while. And since then I’ve been meticulously going through the chapters and fixing up the translations and the typesetting. And that took few weeks, too. Often working on nothing but this every day. All this whole thing also involves me managing things, making sure everything is moving and helping out when someone couldn’t do it. And honestly it’s waaaaaaaay more stressful than I’d hoped. So really I don’t know how much more of these we can do. It’s simply more work than I have time to do and managing it is more stress than I can handle at this point in my life for something like this. I’d really rather spend my energy working on series that haven’t been translated at all rather than working on high quality versions of stuff we did 3+ years ago (We released the first chapter of this volume, chapter 381, in December of 2011 by the way. To give some perceptive on that, which also means I was that much less experienced when I translated it so it was that much more work to spruce up. Especially for a series as wordy as Gintama).

We’re part-way through Volume 45 already, so I do plan to see that through to the end. After that I dunno. It’ll depend on if there’s fan interest, if there’s staff willing to do it (Feel free to volunteer if you’d like to help by the way. Shoot me an email at kewl0210@gmail.com but please only do so if you’re experienced. As I said, it’s really more than I can handle right now). So yeah, that’s that. We’ll keep doing the weekly chapters until the series ends, of course. Whenever that is. Ok, go read it now.

Gintama V44 (Chapters 381-389)
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