Mira held the torch tightly as she stepped into the dark mouth beneath the Spiral Tree. The air was cold. Not from lack of warmth, but from the weight of unspoken truths. “If this place was sealed… then who unsealed it?” she muttered.The Tomb of the First Author wasn’t marked on any official maps. Only a few surviving blueprints hinted at its location, buried beneath discarded ideologies and corrupted core codes. The further she descended, the more the laws of narrative twisted. Time folded into itself.Her memories reordered, making her question what had happened just minutes before. The words she spoke came out in different voices, some not her own. Yet she pressed on. Because down there, beneath the spiral, lay the Last Unwritten Chapter, the only place the story might still be saved.At the final gate, she found an old mechanism: a quill pressed against a stone pad. Only living authors could enter. Mira raised her trembling hand and cut her palm on the tip of the quill, letting h

The corrupted Nara moved with terrifying elegance, her unsaved draft-spear ripping through the sky like a punctuation mark tearing open grammar itself. Cael barely rolled aside in time.The spear crashed into the courtyard tiles, erasing a five-meter crater of stone, memory, and existence. No rubble remained, only silence. “You’re not her,” Cael shouted. “You’re what was left of her after deletion!”The corrupted Nara turned, the mark on her forehead pulsing like a bleeding semicolon. “I am every version of her they tried to suppress,” she hissed.“And you’re the hero they never let win.”Her second spear materialized, swirling with scenes from cut timelines: A moment Cael held his mother’s hand as she died in a version that was never published. A kiss with Mira that ended before it could begin. A betrayal by Nara, one they’d never even lived. Each vision pierced Cael’s heart harder than any weapon.Mira activated the Rewrite Glyph. A ripple of golden code expanded from beneath her fe

The sky didn’t break. It peeled. As though the heavens were paper, a massive hand ripped through the clouds, its fingers blotched with runes, dripping black ink instead of blood.Each drop landed with an ear-shattering boom, warping the land into twisted fonts and crumbling narrative structures. “Who gave you permission to change my story?” The voice thundered across dimensions.Cael stumbled back, his aura flickering. Mira clutched the Last Chapter, now glowing red-hot. The quill in her hand vibrated with warning, Unstable Manuscript. “That… that’s the Original Author,” Mira whispered.“I thought they were a myth,” Cael said, shielding Nara.“Everyone does. Until they write you out.” The hand descended, slow and deliberate, as if savoring the fear it stirred.A single finger brushed against the earth. Where it touched, everything unraveled. Mountains dissolved into margin notes. Forests reverted to early drafts. Characters entire generations vanished, replaced by red-ink corrections.

Cael stood at the edge of a rewritten battlefield. But something felt… off. The air buzzed not with electricity but with intent. As if the world was now conscious of him, observing him, reading him back. “The story’s looking at us,” Mira whispered.Nara’s hand tightened around her sword. “That’s impossible. It’s fiction.”Vale shook his head. “Not anymore. Cael broke the authorial seal.”Every breath Cael took triggered ripple effects, text bending around him like heat waves. Trees whispered plot points. The sky scrolled with half-finished subtext. Every step left behind a shadow of speculation.In a cavern far from the battlefield, ancient stone tablets cracked open. From them rose ethereal beings formed from curiosity, bias, and expectation, collectively known as The Readers. Not audience. Not fans.Critics. Observers. Speculators. Entitled minds who believed they knew how the story should go. “He diverged,” hissed one.“Unacceptable,” murmured another.“Rewrite him.”They moved ind

Cael stared at the doppelgänger, his face, his build, his voice, twisted by arrogance and cruelty. Dark Cael smirked, stretching his fingers, each glowing with script-runes from the corrupted system. “Let’s skip the monologues,” the double said. “You know exactly who I am.”Cael braced himself. “I know who you’re not.” With a slash of his Sovereign Quill, he launched the first attack, golden glyphs roaring through the air like comet-tipped chains.But the Shadow Cael laughed. With a flick, he rewrote the laws of inertia Cael’s attacks spun away harmlessly. “I’m not bound by rules. I am the rules.”They clashed in midair, above a fragmented dimension of raw narrative. The battlefield bent with every swing. Each impact between them carved new arcs into the void: Cael’s quill burst with Will of the Witnessed, drawing strength from those who believed in him.Shadow Cael wielded Entropy of Forgotten Drafts, turning every lost hope into fuel. They fought with metaphors sharpened into blades