The Law of Ueki, Volume 12

The Law of Ueki is a shonen manga by Tsubasa Fukuchi, serialized in Shogakukan's Weekly Shonen Sunday from 2001 to 2004. It ran for 154 chapters, collected in 16 volumes. The story begins with Kosuke Ueki, a first-year student at Hinokuni Junior High: his homeroom teacher, Mr. Kobayashi, is actually a candidate god from the celestial realm, and he grants Ueki the power to turn anything he deems trash into a tree. The god of the celestial realm is about to abdicate, and one hundred candidate gods each choose a middle school student and grant them a unique power, setting off an elimination tournament; the candidate god represented by the final winner ascends to the throne, and the winning student receives the Blank Talent, which can be freely designated. Ueki has no interest in power or status—he simply hopes this power will not fall into the hands of those who would abuse it, and so he fights match after match with a boyish sense of justice and an almost clumsy persistence. The penalty that using the power to harm others diminishes one's own Talent makes every strike come at a cost. This volume is the 12th of the 16-volume series, first published in Japan on March 18, 2004; the traditional Chinese edition was released by Ching Win Publishing on October 1, 2004. The series is now in its second half, with character relationships and power rules gradually converging and the main confrontations continuing to heat up. This entry covers only this single volume and does not include the contents of other volumes.