Moritaka Mashiro, an average student with a talent for drawing, forgets his notebook at school, where his classmate Akito Takagi finds and looks through it. Takagi likes his drawings and asks Mashiro to team up with him to create a best-selling manga. Mashiro refuses because his uncle was a manga artist until he died from overworking, while deeply in debt, which derails his dream. Takagi soon invites him to visit Miho Azuki, the girl Mashiro has an unrequited crush on, and Takagi tells her of his plan to create a manga that will become an anime, in which she will play the heroine. Mashiro also proposes to marry Azuki when both their dreams come true, and she agrees that they will, but shall not see each other until then. With this motivation, Mashiro decides to become a manga artist.

Mashiro chats with Takagi, who tells him that he chose Mashiro because he is smarter than many of his peers in matters outside of scholarship, and that he believes Azuki has a similar kind of intelligence, with the ability to be appealing to others. Mashiro tells Takagi that he believes his uncle committed suicide, and thus suspects that his parents will oppose him becoming a manga artist. Mashiro's mother says his uncle did not commit suicide, but still opposes his decision until his father and grandfather show support for his dream. Mashiro's grandfather gives him his deceased uncle's studio apartment, and Mashiro brings Takagi to see it.

Mashiro and Takagi arrive at Mashiro's uncle's apartment, where they look around and Mashiro shows Takagi the manuscripts and storyboards, that the author of a manga series produces before drawing it. Mashiro realizes that his uncle was working extremely hard until his death and vows to approach it with the same resolve. Mashiro and Takagi find letters between his uncle and his friend from childhood, which stop before his hit manga was serialized, and looking at a yearbook photo of her, realize that he had been in love with Azuki's mother. They go to visit Azuki's mother the next day, and learn that she was also in love with him, but never could admit it and fell in love with someone else. Mashiro asks Azuki's mother not to tell her about the relationship between her and his uncle, and he then sets out to make a manga.

While reworking Chapter 5, Fukuda reveals that he is dissatisfied with many aspects of Jack, particularly how series are ordered by their popularity, but Yujiro tells him to get serialized before he talks about changing Jack. Nizuma tells Mashiro that he has been drawing since he was young, when his family had no money for video games, and Mashiro remembers how he also was drawing all the time before his uncle died. Mashiro, remembering his passion for manga, resigns as Nizuma's assistant and goes home, where he looks through his old manga, and decides to write a mystery next. Meanwhile, Takagi is writing cell phone novels for Miyoshi to publish, causing Mashiro to wonder if he is working on the name at all. Mashiro notices the contrast between Takagi's relationship with Miyoshi and his own relationship with Azuki, and wondering if the distance between them is increasing, asks why she is willing to accept not seeing him.