u/SnooSketches6975

So Chinese manhua production is studio-based not solo-author based like Japanese mangas. A "series" is created by a for-profit studio (writers, artists, colorists, background teams) that pitches to and gets funded by platforms like Tencent Comics, Kuaikan, Bilibili Comics, WeComics, etc. The platform pays the studio per chapter/arc based on traffic and ad/subscription revenue the series generates.

Therefore this means that continuity depends on the studio's financial health and not just the creator's will to keep writing. If a studio goes bankrupt or the platform pulls funding, the IP (story rights) usually still exists on paper but the production team that was drawing it is gone.

Now about the revival of our manhua, it requires either the original studio recapitalizing or the platform re-licensing the IP to a different studio to continue it and this does happen in the industry but it's the exception.

And now on I'm an Evil God, it's officially still marked "ongoing" but has been on hiatus since June 12, 2025. The stated cause is the financial collapse and bankruptcy of the studio Shidai Man Wang. Reports point to significant capital loss and legal issues including unpaid wage lawsuits which reportedly led original artists and writers to leave. The main artist has since moved on to other projects.

The odds of return is low to moderate and not soon. Original studio bankrupt, key staff dispersed, no reboot announced within a year is usually a pattern for permanent discontinuation or at best a revival years later. There's been no official press release from a major publisher confirming the bankruptcy and no information available regarding a potential return date.

The series is not confirmed dead but is functionally dead for now with no active path to revival visible as of the most recent updates.🫠😭

This is the first chapter of a book I am currently writing. The book follows Ramu, whose wife died and her last wish was to get her talented and only daughter into an english medium school. It is based on an Indian holy city of Varanasi. The book original story line will go on while sometimes followed by a diary entries of Ramu's wife which shows the reader the hidden difficulties faced by her. Please read and give some feedback.

Chapter 1: The Weight of a Promise

The first sound was that of the bell. Not the bells of the temples, they came later on in waves from Kashi Vishwanath, as well as smaller temples hidden in the lanes as secrets, ringing against each other so loudly that the entire atmosphere reverberated with prayers. No. This bell was smaller. A thin, tinny thing, attached to the handlebar of a cycle-rickshaw, pressed by a thumb that had pressed it perhaps a million times before. It was the sound of work beginning. It was the sound of a man who could not afford to be tired.

Ramesh Sharma — Ramu to the city, Ramu to the rickshaw stand, Ramu to the men who shared chai with him at four in the morning pedaled his rickshaw through the grey half-light of Varanasi and thought about nothing.

This was a skill. A talent, even. To think about nothing while doing something that required everything. His legs pumped the pedals in a rhythm older than he was, older than his father, older perhaps than the city itself, which was saying something because Varanasi had been old when Rome was young and had been ancient when the concept of ancient was still being invented. The chain of the rickshaw made a sound — chik-chik-chik-chik — like a small animal chewing through metal, which was not far from the truth, because the chain was eating the gears which in turn were eating the wheels, and the whole machine was in a slow, graceful process of falling apart that had been going on for at least fifteen years. But it moved. It moved because Ramu moved. The rickshaw had no engine. It only had Ramu moving it.

He drove towards the ghat road, and there it was, Varanasi, spreading out around him like an open wound that would neither heal nor die. The Ganga was there, of course, ever-present, grey-green under the early morning light, sluggish and swollen from the passing of winter, floating on her waters the collective prayers and garlands and ashes of another day. Smoke billowed from Manikarnika Ghat, the burning ghats where the fires never ceased and where human bodies had been turned to ash so often that the stones themselves appeared made from the dead. The smell reached him — sandalwood, ghee, something sweet and something terrible, the particular perfume of a city that treated death as an industry and salvation as a product.

Ramu breathed it in. He had breathed it in every morning for twenty-two years, since he was sixteen and had first climbed onto a rickshaw seat that was too high for him and pedaled a fat merchant from Godowlia Chowk to Dashashwamedh Ghat for five rupees. He had been breathing it just like the fish breathes water, not out of choice, but because it is the medium in which it lives.

Today he had a fare already. A foreigner couple staying at one of the guesthouses around Assi Ghat – those with clean beds and WiFi, and "Authentic Varanasi Experience" signs in English, as though the experience of one of the oldest continually lived cities in the world could be packed into a bottle like pickles. They were arguing.

"I want to go to the Burning Ghat," the woman said. She had blonde hair and a camera the size of a small child.

"We just ate," the man said. He was wearing shorts and sandals and the particular expression of a man who has been dragged to India by a woman who read a book about India.

"So?"

"So I don't want to watch people burn on a full stomach."

"It's spiritual, Mark."

"It's cremation, Karen."

"The guidebook says it's transformative."

"The guidebook also says don't drink the water, and you drank the water."

"I had one sip."

Ramu pedaled and listened. Being a rickshaw puller meant being a taxi, a psychiatrist, and furniture at the same time — visible, yet invisible; listening to everything, yet absorbing nothing.

The couple amused him. Not in a mocking way, nor a vicious way. Just — amusing. They traveled thousands of miles to observe death, and yet, they were having an argument about lassi. That's what made them happy people, thought Ramu. They could afford to argue about petty things since all their major issues were sorted out.

He stopped the rickshaw at Dashashwamedh Ghat. The two got down from the rickshaw. The woman handed him fifty rupees, more than what was due to him and he said, "Thank you, madam," and she said, "Namaste," and pressed her palms together, and he pressed his palms together, and they parted as strangers do — with a moment of false intimacy that costs nothing and means nothing and for that reason, it is also the most honest transaction in the city.

He pedaled away. The day began. The tourists would arrive much later on, in groups, with their cameras and questions. The pilgrims were already here — old and desperate, come to die in the one city where dying guarantees moksha, liberation from the wheel, the final exit from the round of birth and death that the rest of the country was still grinding through. Varanasi was the city where you came to stop. Ramu was the man who refused to stop.

He thought about the money. Fifty rupees for the fare. If he could get five more fares today — six total — he would make maybe two hundred and fifty rupees. Three hundred on a good day. Three hundred rupees was enough for rice and dal and oil and vegetables and the kerosene for the stove and the rent for the room, which was eight hundred rupees a month for a space so small that if you stretched your arms you touched both walls, and the walls were close enough to whisper to, and some nights Ramu did whisper to them, though he would never admit this, because a man who whispers to walls is a man who is closer to the edge than he wants anyone to know.

He thought about Paro.

He tried not to. Not because he didn't love her — he loved her the way the river loved the banks, with such unbreakable consistency that it was almost geological — but because the thought of Paro would inevitably lead him to thoughts of Meera, and thoughts of Meera would inevitably lead him to the emptiness in himself which was neither here nor there, but was rather an abyss where he would continue to fall should he plunge into it, and he could not afford to fall because he had a daughter to feed.

Meera. Four months now. Four months since the government hospital, their thin mattress on the floor, her hand in his hand and the sound she made at the end — not a word, not a cry, just a sound, the sound a door makes when it closes for the last time, a click, a silence that was louder than anything he had ever heard.

He did not cry then. He did not cry at the cremation, when he placed her body on the funeral pyre at Harishchandra Ghat and set the flames ablaze watching the woman whom he had loved for fourteen years turn into smoke. Nor did he shed any tears thereafter, when Paro came to him asking about the whereabouts of Maa and he told her, "Maa is in a place where she doesn’t get hurt anymore," only to be told, "Can I go to that place too?" by Paro to which he replied, "No, Gudiya. Not for a long time," and his voice was steady, was calm, was the voice of a man who has made a decision about his own interior weather and will not allow it to rain.

He did not cry because crying is a luxury. Crying requires time, space, and the knowledge that someone will hear you and come. Ramu had none of these things. All he had were his rickshaw, his daughter, his room, and a city that had no concern for his pain, not out of malice but simply from indifference — like the way the sun is indifferent to which field it shines on.

So he pedaled. He pedaled through the morning and the afternoon. He pedaled through the lanes where the buildings leaned toward each other like old women sharing gossip, where the cows sat in the middle of the road with the confidence of animals who knew that this city was built for them as much as for anyone, where the electricity wires hung so low that a tall man could touch them and a careless man could die from them. He pedaled through the smell of frying jalebi, burning garbage, marigold garlands, human waste, incense, cooking oil and the river — always the river, the smell of water that had carried the prayers, the dead and the flowers of a hundred million souls and was, for that reason, the holiest and the most polluted water on earth.

Ram felt like he was invisible. He was a pair of legs and a handlebar. He was, in the classification system of the city, not a person but a service — like the electricity wires or the hand pumps. You could use them. You did not need to see them. If they were broken, you complained; if they worked, you ignored them.

At three in the afternoon, he stopped for chai. The chaiwallah knew him. Everyone at the rickshaw stand knew him. They were a brotherhood of exhaustion, a guild of men who sold their bodies one kilometer at a time and called it living.

"Ramu, you look like death," said Mangal, who looked like death himself but had the good grace to be drunk enough not to notice.

"Thank you," Ramu said. "I've been working on it."

"You should eat more."

"With what money?"

"With the money you're saving by not eating."

"That's not saving. That's called starving."

"Starving has better PR," Mangal said. "If you're rich and starving, it's a diet. If you're poor and starving, it's Tuesday."

Ramu smiled. He smiled because Mangal expected it, and because the smile was the cheapest thing he owned. His smiling made the other men smile, and the other men smiling made the rickshaw stand bearable, which in turn made the day possible, and the day being possible meant tomorrow was an option , and because an option of tomorrow made his very existence, both as Ramu and as alive, neither victory nor defeat. But something in-between. Something that smelled like tea and tasted like dust.

At five-thirty, he parked the rickshaw near Assi Ghat and walked the narrow alley to the room. The alley was a canyon of brick and plaster, barely wide enough for two people to pass, with the particular smell of a alley where humans have lived on top of each other for centuries — layered, dense, intimate, inescapable. Some place in the alley there was a television playing itself — probably a Hindi soap where women wearing silk sarees were sobbing about family property and their men were planning in their chandelier-lit rooms. A naked child ran past him, laughing, chased by his mother wielding a ladle. A goat was eating something off the window sill — could have been either paper or money.

He climbed the stairs — concrete, narrow, crumbling — and opened the door.

The room. A single room. A mattress on the floor, with a sheet laid on it which used to be white but was now the same colour as everything else. There was a kerosene stove in one corner, a metal trunk, and a plastic shelf with two plates, two glasses, a cooking pot, and a photograph of Meera, which was the only photograph. It was taken six years back at a marriage ceremony when she was smiling at the camera with her usual look — the look of a woman who was amused by the idea of someone watching her.

Paro sat cross-legged on the floor, with her back towards him. She was drawing.

He knew it even before seeing it. He knew it just like he knew about rain before it starts - because of the nature of the air around, the stillness of her shoulders, and the unique intensity in a child engrossed in her innate act. Paro sketched just like Ramu pedaled - continuously, naturally, as if halting was hard and performing was effortless once it halted.

"Baba," she said without turning back.

"I am here, Gudiya."

He looked up at the wall she had painted on using charcoal — the very charcoal which they burnt in the stove, crumbly and black. And there was a drawing of a woman there. The woman was in the doorway, and behind the doorway was a garden — impossible, since there was no garden that ever existed there, but that was how Paro imagined the world should be. The woman was dressed in a saree. The woman was smiling.

It was Meera.

Ramu stared at the drawing. It was — and he had no word for this, had no language for the thing his daughter could do with a piece of burnt wood on a dirty wall — it was her. The way she stood, one hip slightly forward, one hand resting on the doorframe, the tilt of her head, the particular curve of her smile that was half-shy and half-daring, as if she was about to say something she knew she shouldn't and was going to say it anyway.

He didn't cry. He wanted to. The tears were there — he could feel them, pooling somewhere behind his eyes, pressing against the wall he had built. But as always, the wall stood strong.

"Have you eaten?" he asked.

"I made rice."

"You made rice?"

"I'm eight, Baba. I can make rice."

He smiled. "You're eight. You can make rice. But can you make it well?"

"It's not burned."

"In our family, 'not burned' means very good."

She turned around now. She had Meera's face, the same dark eyes, the same obstinate jawline, the same way of looking at a person as if she was seeing not just their face but the face behind the face, the one they kept hidden. But she had Ramu’s hands; large, competent hands that were caked with charcoal.

"Baba?"

"Hmm?"

"Is Maa in the drawing?"

"She's in the drawing."

"Is she happy?"

He looked at the charcoal woman on the wall. The woman in the doorway. The woman in the garden that didn't exist.

"She's happy, Gudiya."

Paro nodded, satisfied. She turned back to the wall and added something small — a flower in Meera's hair, drawn with the careful precision of a child who knows that details are the difference between a picture and a person.

Ramu heated yesterday's rice. They ate in silence — not the oppressive silence of mourning but the comfortable silence of two individuals well accustomed to making themselves at home in a room too tiny for words.

After dinner, Paro fell asleep on the mattress, one arm flung over her head, the other clutching a stub of pencil. Ramu covered her with the sheet. He sat against the wall, across from the drawing, and looked at the charcoal woman in the doorway.

He did not cry.

He sat with the silence, with the burden of the promise that he had made back then, four months ago when the hand of Meera was in his and her voice was but a whisper and she said to him, “Promise me. English school. Promise me. She is smarter than both of us, Ramu. Promise me she will not pull rickshaws or scrub floors. Promise me."

He had made that promise. He had made that promise because his wife was dying, and a dying woman’s wish was not a wish but a commandment, because he loved her, and because she was right — Paro was wiser than both of them, wiser than this room, wiser than this alley, wiser than this life. She could draw things which never existed as if they existed. She could see things which did not exist in reality. She could hear music in leaking buckets and stories from empty tin boxes and could even make a garden out of a wall. A kid like that should not belong to poverty. A kid like that belonged to the future.

But the future had a price tag. And that price was in the form of Indian currency which he didn’t possess, in terms of a mathematics whose answer was unknown, and in the language of English which he could neither speak nor understand.

He looked at Meera's photograph. The woman at the wedding, laughing.

"I promised," he said to the photograph. "I don't know how. But I promised."

The photograph said nothing. But the charcoal woman on the wall, seemed to stand a little straighter in her doorway, as if guarding the entrance to a garden that might, if you believed hard enough, exist.

Beyond the window, Varanasi buzzed. The last sounds of temple bells. The last sounds of prayers being said. The river flowing on in its darkness, carrying away the ashes, the flowers and the prayers of those who were dead and alive.

Ramu slept. The cough came once in the night — a small cough, the kind you ignore. He ignored it. He turned over and slept.

Tomorrow, there would be another bell and he had to pedal and lift the weight.

---

Diary Entry #1

Written on the back of an old January 2016 calendar — a picture of the Taj Mahal, bleached by sunlight.

---

On the day Paro was born, it rained. This I know because I was lying on an iron table in the government hospital and heard the rain falling on the roof, making a noise like throwing rice very hard, very fast. The nurse said, "This is not the raining season." To which I replied, "Tell that to the rain." She did not laugh. In government hospitals, nurses do not laugh. I think this is part of their training. There is somewhere some instruction manual which states: Step One: Do not laugh. Step Two: Do not make eye contact with the patient. Step Three: If patient in pain, say "this is normal." Step Four: If patient dying, say "this is normal." Step Five: Go for chai.

The contractions started and I held on to the metal table and thought of my mother who gave birth to me under a tree in a field without any nurse or metal table. It took her just two hours. It took me nine hours because I was not as tough as my mother. It is something that I realized on that day; I was not as tough as my mother but I was louder.

And then came Paro.

They put her on top of my chest. She was screaming and angry and crying, and the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. I know this is something all mothers say, but it's still cliché, and clichés exist because they are real, and the reality of the situation is that I had my daughter in my arms, and the whole world shifted around us. The world said to me, This is the center now; your husband, your life, your hopes, your dreams – they all revolve around this child.

Her eyes opened. She stared right back at me. She knew nothing about me, and she knew nothing about the world, which was full of hospitals, indifferent nurses and rain out of season. But she stared right back at me, and she didn't cry.

The nurse said, "Girl."

She had said those words as you say, "It is raining." No emotion whatsoever. Just as a fact. Girl. Not boy. For in this nation, in this metropolis, in this alley, a girl is a weight. A girl is a dowry waiting to happen. A girl is a future you spend on someone else's family.

But I held her and I thought: They say girls are a burden. Then why does she feel like the only thing keeping me from floating away?

Ramu arrived in the evening. He was there waiting for nine hours before that. He had been biting on his hands. His face was – I don’t know how to describe it. Terrified and proud and broken and put back together. He looked at Paro and he cried. He cried and cried. The nurse said, "Sir, please control yourself." He said, "I am controlling myself. This is me controlled. You should see me uncontrolled."

He hugged Paro as if she were made up of the same glass as their future, fragile and translucent and valuable enough to break himself protecting.

In my mind, I could think of nothing else but: He would do anything for her. He would destroy himself for her sake and I must ensure that this does not happen.

I did not know then what all I had to do, how many things I had to hide, how many meals I had to skip, how many times I stood in a hospital and was assured that whatever I was feeling was 'normal' till it stopped being pain and started being something I never wanted to understand.

But that night, in the government hospital, with the rain falling out of season and my daughter on my chest and my husband crying beside me, I was happy. I was the happiest I have ever been. The happiest I would ever be.

I wish someone had told me that. I wish someone had said: Remember this. This is the top. Everything after is down.

But no one told me. And I held my daughter. And Ramu held my hand. And the rain fell.

And Paro didn't cry.

She never cried. Not even then. As if she knew that tears were for people who had time for tears, and she had already decided, at one minute old, that she had work to do.

It's annoying how these mfs think only they can kill MC.

Is DAVV Seats filled or 2nd clc round will happen there?

Review about SD Bansal College?

MITS Or Private clg in Indore

Query about Admission Documents.

Love is the Greatest thing in the World | FactOrCap

MP DTE CLC ROUND

I've researched about the Manhua Industry of China and the situation is worse for us gng.

Why did Indian philosophy develop so many different concepts of the Self?

Nowadays Rapido is dangerous too.

wtf is wrong with nepalis?

Guys, please help this student.

Finished this after 3 days.

Countries where nothing is happening at all.

This is the first chapter of a book I am currently writing. The book follows Ramu, whose wife died and her last wish was to get her talented and only daughter into an english medium school. Please read and give some feedback.

I am getting this Acer Aspire 7 for 45,990 from Flipcart. Should I Buy It?

Guys, is she flirting?

Guys, Lets try this. Ask any question.

Can't go into mod section of ck2 launcher.