Lucius Returns to Jump+ After Eight Months Off the Page
After roughly eight months without a new chapter, Yamazaki Mari's Zoku Thermae Romae (続テルマエ・ロマエ) — the sequel to her time-bending bathhouse comedy Thermae Romae — is back. Chapter 14 went live on Shonen Jump+ on May 19, 2026, according to a Comic Natalie report, continuing a sequel that's been running in irregular installments since it launched in February 2024.
The new chapter heads to Itō, a hot-spring resort town on Shizuoka's Izu Peninsula, and brings two characters readers had been waiting on into focus: Satsuki, Lucius's missing wife, and her grandfather Tetsuzō (鉄蔵). Satsuki has been absent for the entire run of the sequel, so the choice to anchor the return chapter around her — and to set it in the place she lives with her grandfather — is the kind of beat that gives the on-and-off serialization a clear sense of forward motion.
What Zoku Thermae Romae Is Actually About
For readers who haven't picked up the sequel since it began two years ago, the premise: Zoku Thermae Romae jumps forward 20 years from the end of the original manga. Lucius — Rome's tireless bathhouse architect — is older now, despondent over Satsuki's unexplained disappearance and quietly miserable about a strained relationship with his son, Marius. Once again, his solution to creative and emotional burnout is to slip through time to modern-day Japan, where the country's bath culture pulls him out of his slump.
The sequel has only one collected volume in print so far, released by Shueisha in April 2024, and Jump+ chapters have appeared on a famously irregular schedule. An eight-month gap is on the longer end even by those standards, which makes today's return notable in itself — not just for what's in the chapter.
Every Chapter of the Original Goes Free
To mark the return, Shueisha is making every chapter of the original Thermae Romae free to read, rolling out installments sequentially starting today. For newcomers — or for anyone who hasn't revisited the manga since its 2008-2013 run in Monthly Comic Beam — it's a clean on-ramp before tackling the sequel.
The original wrapped at six volumes in Japan and took a clear sweep of industry recognition along the way: the Manga Taisho Award in 2010 and the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize's Short Story Award the same year. It also became one of the more successful cross-media franchises of its decade, spawning two live-action films starring Hiroshi Abe and a 2022 Netflix-distributed anime adaptation, Thermae Romae Novae.
Looking Ahead
The original Thermae Romae is available in English from Yen Press in three hardcover omnibus volumes that collect all six Japanese volumes. As of this writing, the sequel has not been licensed for English release — readers outside Japan who want to follow Chapter 14 will need to use the Japanese Shonen Jump+ site or wait for a future license. With the original now free in Japanese, expect Shueisha to lean on that momentum if and when it lines up an international partner for the continuation.