I do not know if the official publisher will bring out more chapters or not, since there is no news of any new chapter. If anyone has any updates let me know so that I can decide whether to drop this and pick a new manga or I can continue it.
I wouldn't worry about it. It's very rare for an official publisher to come after a single scanslator such as yourself.
And besides, J-Novel Club only has themselves to blame for overextending themselves far beyond what they're capable of handling. They have way too many titles, and not enough staff to properly handle the workload. This is clearly evident in the lack of quality in their work combined with the lack of updates.
And, regardless, there's also the issue of licensing and who gets the money - something I frequently harp upon as a proponent of scanslation.
Basically, all licensing is done on the terms of the
publisher, and not the mangaka or the LN's author. And usually, this means that the licensing fees are done at a "flat rate" with no accounting for how many copies of the licensed and localized version are sold.
This means that for most manga and light novels translated into another language, those sales figures count for absolutely nothing when a publisher is weighing the pros and cons of continuing a title or axing it.
And, what's more, the author/mangaka sees very little of your money this way whenever you purchase a translated version of a title.
This is why it is so very critically important that if you want to support the mangaka/author and make it more likely that a title will continue to be published, then you absolutely
must purchase the title in its original language. Purchasing a translated edition is secondary.
No, it's not fair that it is like that. And I doubt that it'll change much. Reason being: the original publishers are exposed to very little risk at all with this setup. The licensing publisher has to shoulder the entire cost of translation, redrawing, typesetting, as well as the costs of printing and/or online publishing, and even the advertising in their market. And, meanwhile, the original publisher pretty much pockets all of the licensing fees and walks off whistling happily.
This new English-language publisher, Azuki Manga, shows some promise in that the amount of money paid out to the original publishers and mangaka depends on a title's readership. However, it remains unclear just how well this benefits the mangaka, or if the number of "reads" benefits the "popularity" of a title to keep it from getting axed.
Time will tell, I guess.
But until then? Don't worry about the legalities. The most important part about this is that you make it clear that you're not doing this for profit. Which is why it's foolhardy of some scanslators to publish on their own website. Why sink money into that when you have Mangadex? Answer: they're trying to profit off of it by way of advertisement revenue on their website. And that's the big legal no-no of scanslation: the moment you're profiting off of it is where you've crossed the line, and you will have absolutely no legal defense at all.
(Granted, this is still very rare. And, more often than not, they'll just hit you with a "Cease and Desist" which means "Okay, you stop scanslating this/these title(s) and we won't sue you." It's even more rare for a publisher to go straight for the lawsuit, and usually only done by the REALLY big fish, like Sony or NIS America, who have money to burn and lawyers on their actual payroll.)
So yeah. Don't be one of those guys.
As for whether J-Novel Club would come after you? That's entirely up to them... HOWEVER!!! I strongly suspect (for the reasons I cited before regarding quality and lack of output) that they don't have enough cashflow to blow their money on lawsuits against scanslators. Let
that be an cautionary tale for others looking to get into the business.