I relate to everything you said quite a bit. The brain draining part is real – if I could just go without the loss of energy feeling I could fill all my free time with many, many things in Japanese pretty easily, but after a certain point it hurts and I get sloppy. And wanting to reach it faster, yeah, so much. Like, I’ve actually made pretty remarkable strides in this time, but I managed to extremely quickly switch from being intimidated by all Japanese media to being annoyed when there is anything I don’t understand, heh (which is always, to some degree). My brain is always an enemy that way.
I must admit the one big difference is I’ve gotten lazy about J-J dictionaries. I made an effort into using them and still haven’t totally abandoned them, but they’ve largely been relegated to backup when I just think the English on Jisho seems off for the context I’m finding the word in. So many words I look up in J-J dictionaries have like 10 definitions, still using a bunch of words I don’t know, and it’s a bit of a drag to interrupt my reading so much or make my Anki cards take even longer if it’s not a super simple definition.
Summary post
I’m here again, trying to focus on Japanese and ignore everything else. While it was hard to do much yesterday, I don’t think anything is going to keep me from being extremely stubborn in the end.
Today was, in fact, quite good! I think it was only roughly two hours for me to read roughly 8000 characters, which is a nice little speed up for me. I always see these near the ends of routes. On that note, my bet is that tomorrow I finish this one. I’m still enraptured by the vibes, with the art, music, and voice acting, but this route has been a little more predictable I think. It basically proceeded as expected once the full situation was laid out. Which is fine; there’s enough character to keep me interested, and it’s not over yet so we’ll see if this stays true. But as of now I feel like Tsumugi’s route hit the emotions harder and Shizuku’s had a little more interesting complexity in its dilemmas.
Because I don’t have to hide it, have a picture simply of butterflies. They’re animated in game, so they look a little odd in a still frame. I don’t really feel like spilling out full spoilers right now, but it’s difficult territory to talk about or share spoiler free.
The word of the day is 一挙手一投足 (いっきょしゅいっとうそく), because I’m struck by what a big kanji monstrosity it is, even if they’re mostly simpler ones. In this context the meaning was along the lines of “one’s every action.”
Japanese found in the tall grass 
. Also learned what the 
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tiny update
Chinese Tang Dynasty-inspired imperial palace kind of setting, especially with all the characters having Chinese names. And historical expressions(?), not necessarily dated, just very relevant to the setting. Like, five different words for “servant”? Check 
I tried the audiobook but could not make much sense of what I understood (vans, knights, and monsters? How does that fit together 
