Do you think now that the kuro anniversary is over manga will start speeding up again hopefully?
Story speeding up now?
Ah, an easy one.
Nope.
Because I don't think it ever had much to do with the 15th anniversary. It's not even much to do with Yana-san's other obligations, like Twisted Wonderland. Because this issue started before then.
Other obligations have an effect on how much time she can physically devote to the series, true, but they shouldn't affect the pace too much. She could do slightly shorter chapters than before (pre-Blue Sect) and maybe skip some side story content and, therefore, cover more ground on the main story per chapter. She could even write these very short chapters and skip a lot of extra stuff to rush to the end. That's what someone might do, if they were "over" the series (and wanted to focus on other projects) but were still determined to finish it. Another way to accomplish that but not lose too much story would be to work even harder to push out long chapters and cover everything that "needs" to be said in as few chapters as possible, ending the series as soon as possible to devote all time and effort to other things. But that's not what's happening. None of that.
No, this is mostly about GFantasy telling her to write shorter chapters, which she tweeted about when the Blue Sect arc started -- she tweeted that they implemented a lower page limit on the series -- and possibly "suggesting" that she slow down the pace of the storytelling, too... though I'm sure she wants to cover as much story as she can, anyway. I see it as a hint from her that the story's timeline is approaching its end... that this Blue Sect "super-arc" is the last true arc of the series.
Manga publications like GFantasy usually announce either the last arc (if it's short) or the last twelve chapters (if it's part of a long arc) of a series. This series is a HUGE readership draw for GFantasy. They want to keep those sweet, sweet sales numbers, and they have no idea how a new, replacement series will fare. Likely, they will experience a massive drop in the readership, and it will take a while for the other series (even with a new one to fill the slot) in the monthly publication to make up for the loss.
Since this arc is being drawn-out into all these mini-arcs (the assignments, etc.), we should see the "nearing the end" notification at the start of either the last of these mini-arcs or at the start of the last 12 months of chapter publication... whichever is shorter, probably. If the last mini-arc is just a little over 12 chapters, we might get a "last arc" notification quickly followed by a "last 12 chapters" notification.
