Ruri never expected her life to turn out the way it has, although if you had told her that she would need to travel to another world to be free of her childhood frenemy Asahi she might have believed that. Not only is her life the most peaceful it’s ever been, due to a lack of Asahi clinging to her and (magically it turns out) turning everyone against her, but Ruri has found out that her very nature is one that draws spirits to her, something more precious than any treasure in a world where spirits are the source of all magic that runs everything. It’s turning out to be a comfortable life for Ruri, one she enjoys from the Dragon King’s lap.
When I finished volume 1 I was a bit puzzled at where it ended, since it was essentially a non-ending, and after reading volume 2 I’m equally puzzled why they weren’t combined into a single installment (length perhaps?). None of Ruri’s problems are resolved by the end of the first volume and, likewise, no new issues come up in the second volume: Ruri is still working to stop the growing military conflict she was summoned into and she’s especially wondering what on earth she should do with Asahi. Asahi is clearly being used to promote the growing conflict but she’s a combination of too brainless to realize what’s happening to her/change her actions and Asahi’s innate, uncontrolled (because again, brainless) ability to charm people makes her a bit too dangerous to be let “loose” in the world without any kind of limiter.
Asahi is still probably the biggest dealbreaker in the series so far — I’m truly not sure what creator Kureha was going for by creating a character so chaotically stupid that it’s not only obvious to all the characters in the story but Asahi is also considered weird by everyone for just how much of a dummkopf she is. Although, there is also a very minor subplot involving another character who is possessed of a similar, but unrelated, fit of stupidity (which is also recognized in-series as being just as foolish) so I hope this isn’t a sign that Kureha will keep returning to this character/conflict archetype!
There’s another major plot point from the first volume that wasn’t resolved there but is here: how Ruri can let the cat out of the bag to Jade, king of the Nation of the Dragon King (who’s her “employer”), that she’s actually not a cat but has been a human all along! Given the title of the series, I was wondering how long this miscommunication would be stretched out but events do force Ruri to come clean in this volume, clearing up several questions other characters had been wondering about this monumentally spirit-beloved “cat.” Readers also have known that Jade has been searching for Ruri’s “human” self all along, that he had a case of love at first sight, and it was very funny to see some of the characters in this volume put two and two together, before Ruri is “outed”, and their reactions to this mess. Since this is an on-going series, there is of course far to go before Ruri and Jade reach the presumed endgame of babies and royalty ever after but there’s just enough development that the story doesn’t feel like it’s stringing you along.
Quite honestly, The White Cat’s Revenge could have ended here with only some minor tweaks and have been a fun, short series. Kureha has inserted some other plot threads throughout, and a rather unusual turn of events at the end of this volume that I can’t recall happening in an isekai before, and I’m interested in seeing how those turn out. Once again, the illustrations are rather bland (it appears that the manga adaptation has nicer, although still somewhat bland, art) but that’s easy enough to ignore and certainly won’t keep me from finding out what challenges await Ruri and her companions.