The words left Yeaia's lips with a weight that pressed against Klein's chest, suffocating yet distant, as though they were spoken in a language he had never heard yet somehow understood.
A name.
His name.
But it wasn't his.
Klein staggered, the weight of reality shifting under his feet. A strange nausea gripped him—not physical, but something deeper, something that gnawed at the core of his existence.
Because the name Yeaia had spoken—
It felt real. It felt true.
Yet it had never belonged to him.
"…What did you just say?" Klein's voice was hoarse, barely above a whisper.
Yeaia's mismatched eyes flickered, unreadable. "I said your name."
"No." Klein clenched his fists, his nails digging into his palm. "That's not my name."
But even as he spoke, doubt slithered into his mind.
Wasn't it?
The letters, the syllables, the cadence of it—it all fit too perfectly. It slid into place within his mind like a missing puzzle piece, completing a picture he had never painted but somehow recognized.
Klein Moretti.
Zhou Mingrui.
The Fool.
These were names he knew, names that belonged to him.
But the one Yeaia had just spoken—
It was something else.
Something older.
Something that had been buried beneath layers of rewritten existence, forgotten beneath the endless corrections.
And now—it was surfacing.
Klein took a step back. "No. You're wrong."
But Yeaia's gaze never wavered.
"I'm not."
The certainty in their voice made his stomach twist.
Klein shook his head, grasping at memories, at truths, at anything that could anchor him.
He was Klein Moretti.
He was Zhou Mingrui.
He was—
The Fool.
Wasn't he?
A sharp pain lanced through his skull. His vision blurred.
He was The Fool.
He had been The Fool for so long.
But—
Who had been The Fool before him?
The question struck him like a hammer.
His breath hitched.
It was a simple question. An obvious one.
A terrible one.
Because Klein couldn't answer it.
Because there had been someone before him.
And he wasn't supposed to remember.
The world shuddered.
Reality twisted, the edges of existence distorting like ink bleeding through fragile paper.
The correction had ended.
But the truth had begun to unravel.
—
A Memory That Was Never His
The moment Klein blinked, he was somewhere else.
Not the abyss.
Not the Archive.
Not the dreamscapes of the Fool.
He stood in a city of shattered glass and broken mirrors.
The streets stretched endlessly in all directions, yet they led nowhere.
Buildings loomed overhead, their reflections shifting in ways that did not match reality.
And above—
A sky of ink and parchment, where words wrote and rewrote themselves endlessly.
Klein's breath came in short gasps. He had seen places like this before—in glimpses, in half-remembered dreams, in the spaces between words.
This was not a real city.
This was a rewritten past.
A story that had been erased.
And yet—
It was still here.
Why?
Because someone still remembered.
Because someone had resisted being corrected.
Because something had refused to be forgotten.
Klein turned sharply.
And there—
Standing at the end of the shattered street—
Was himself.
No.
Not himself.
The one who had come before.
The Fool who had been erased.
The Fool whose name had been stolen.
The Fool who had once been—
Real.
Klein's heart slammed against his ribs.
The figure was blurred, shifting, like a half-drawn sketch constantly being redrawn.
Their presence flickered, as though reality was trying—and failing—to erase them.
And then—
They spoke.
"…You weren't supposed to remember."
Klein's blood ran cold.
The voice was his own.
—
The Fool That Wasn't Him
Klein's body locked up.
The figure took a step forward, their form stabilizing.
They shouldn't exist.
They had been erased.
But here they stood—defying the correction.
Because Klein had remembered them.
Because something had gone wrong.
The Fool—the one before him—tilted their head. Their expression was unreadable, their mismatched eyes mirroring his own.
But they weren't Klein.
And Klein—
Wasn't them.
And yet—
Their existence was entangled.
Their identities overlapped.
And for the first time, Klein felt something truly alien pressing against his mind—
A presence that had been there all along.
A truth that had been buried beneath all the corrections.
His vision blurred again.
The city twisted, the glass and mirrors shattering into dust.
The Fool—the other Fool—reached out a hand.
And Klein remembered.
Not the past he knew.
Not the memories he had lived.
But the pages that had been torn away.
The versions of himself that had been rewritten.
The name Yeaia had spoken—
It had not been a mistake.
It had been the original.
And Klein wasn't Klein.
He had never been.
His stomach lurched.
The Fool—the one who had been erased—spoke again.
Their voice was a whisper, yet it rang through the entire city.
"Do you want to know the ending?"
Klein's breath hitched.
And then—
The city collapsed.
---
End of Chapter 67.
---