I stood alone in the living room.
The silence crept back in once the door shut behind him. The air felt… heavier. Like something was pressing down, just behind my ears.
Then
Ping.
A high chime rang through my skull. clear, sharp, and completely internal. My vision blurred for a heartbeat, like static flickering over reality.
And then, right in front of my eyes.
A glowing rectangle of light unfolded midair, no projector, no screen just light in the shape of thought.
[System Initiated]
User: ???Soul Signature: UnregisteredSyncing with Narrative Core...Progress: 12%... 43%... 81%...Success.
[Welcome, Eli.]
[Your existence has been acknowledged.This story has no ending.Would you like to become its author?]
I stepped back instinctively. My heart was hammering.
"What… the hell?"
The interface didn't disappear. It floated there shifting slightly, humming with a rhythm I could feel in my bones. It looked nothing like the interface in the novel. This wasn't Kael's system. This was new.
Customized.
Personal.
The final line on the interface flickered again:
You are now being written in.
And just below that—
[System Fragment Detected][ Initial access granted.][ Passive ability unlocked: Narrative Perception](You may now perceive when story events are in motion.)
The room tilted slightly. I grabbed the side of the couch to steady myself. Light danced at the edges of my vision like strings pulling from the walls, from people, from objects.
Some were taut. Some were trembling.
Lines of cause and effect.
I turned back toward the hallway.
And I saw it.
Trailing behind the door my "father" had gone through was a thin thread of dark violet. tense, vibrating, pulling toward something unseen. Something off-script.
Another thread pulsed from the kitchen. A golden one, soft and warm. My "mother."
My brother? A faded orange line, dancing like sunlight.
But then I saw something else.
Outside the window.
A thread.
Black.
Still.
Coiled like a noose, pointing toward the sky. toward the Fragment.
The system pulsed again:
Unwritten elements detected. Anomaly convergence: In motion.[ Story branch unstable.][ Recommend caution.]
My hands trembled. This wasn't just a system. It was a warning.
I wasn't just inside the book anymore.
The book was reacting to me.
And whatever was out there…
It was getting ready to turn the page...
My fingers hovered over the glowing interface, though I didn't need to touch anything. It responded to thought.
Narrative Perception?
I didn't know what it meant exactly but the name alone felt… intrusive. Like peeking behind a curtain that wasn't meant to be drawn.
Still, I focused.
"Activate," I whispered.
The system pulsed again. soft, like a heartbeat behind my eyes.
[Narrative Perception: Active][Detecting nearby narrative threads...][Classifying events...]
And suddenly, the world sharpened.
I staggered back.
Everything shimmered. subtle at first, like the room was dipped in fog and someone wiped it clean. Then, the threads returned. Only now, they glowed with intensity.
I saw the one from the kitchen again. Warm, flickering.my mother's thread, tied to a minor event: emotional comfort scene: domestic stability.
Then, the hallway. my "father." His thread pulsed faster, darker. Foreshadowing node: concealed knowledge. The system tagged him in red letters: Potential Catalyst.
I stared at it, heart racing.
This wasn't just an ability to "see" story tension. It was a map of story weight how close something was to breaking the narrative.
I turned toward the living room window.
That black thread.
It hummed like a dying star, coiled and hungry. My eyes followed it all the way up toward the crack in the sky—barely visible in daylight now, but still there.
[ Unstable Narrative Convergence Detected.][Branch Prediction: [????][Priority: Unknown.][Estimated Divergence: 3 Days, 7 Hours, 12 Minutes.]
"Divergence?" I whispered.
Was that when the story would shift?
When something breaks?
Suddenly, a new alert flashed:
[New Node Forming...]
[Location: Unknown.][Trigger: User Acknowledgement]
Trigger?
I didn't even know what I had acknowledged.
The system dimmed slightly, waiting, like it was holding its breath.
I stepped away from the window. The threads dimmed, fading from view like fog retreating into the corners of the world.
Narrative Perception shut off with a soft blink, and the world returned to "normal."
Only it didn't feel normal anymore.
Now that I'd seen beneath the surface, every conversation felt rehearsed. Every glance had weight. Every silence felt loaded.
This wasn't a home.
This was a stage.
And I had just been handed a script with blank pages.
I sat back on the edge of the couch, heart thudding, mind spinning.
This story had no ending.
But now, it had something worse
......Me.......