Rain.
It wasn't the kind that washed things clean. It was heavy, bruised rain — thick enough to drown out thought. The drops struck the cracked pavement like falling stones, turning the alley behind the orphanage into a streaked reflection of a world that had stopped caring. The buildings leaned inward as if to watch the small boy kneeling alone in the center of it all.
He wasn't crying. Not really. His eyes stung from the downpour, and his breath came in shallow pulls. But his hands never left the notebook pressed against his chest — a thin, weather-worn thing with a half-torn spine and water-blurred words scrawled across the front:
"H.W."
Behind him, the door slammed open. A man's shadow cut through the rain.
The headmaster. His black umbrella didn't hide the disgust on his face.
"You're out here again?" His voice cracked through the air like a whip. "I told you to stay inside."
The boy didn't answer.
The headmaster stepped forward, umbrella tipping to reveal eyes sharp with a kind of authority that came from cruelty. "You think I don't see what you do? The whispers at night. The way the lights flicker when you get upset. The other children are scared of you, Hae-won."
He crouched down, grabbing the boy's chin hard enough to bruise. "You're not normal. You were left here for a reason."
Hae-won's lips parted, but no sound came.
His reflection in the rainwater looked like a stranger.
"Do you understand me?" the man said again, shaking him.
And then, softer — but so much worse:
"You're cursed."
The umbrella tilted. Water poured down over both of them.
The boy said nothing.
He just held tighter to his notebook, knuckles white.
The headmaster sneered. "One day, you'll understand I'm right. This world doesn't need monsters pretending to be human."
He turned and walked away, leaving only the sound of his footsteps fading against the storm.
Hae-won stayed kneeling long after the rain washed the footprints away.
When he finally looked down at the notebook again, he noticed something he'd never seen before — faint silver writing between the pages, words glowing just enough to be visible under the gray sky.
"The world will test you until you remember who you are."
He didn't understand what it meant.
He only knew it made his chest hurt.
That night, lightning hit the orphanage.
Some said it was an accident — old wiring, bad luck.
But the fire spread too fast. Too clean. Like it had been waiting.
The headmaster escaped first.
The others followed.
No one came back for Hae-won.
When the fire reached the window where he stood, the world twisted.
He remembered the sensation years later — a heartbeat too loud, a voice too soft whispering, "Run."
And when he stepped out of the burning building, barefoot, smoke rising behind him, the rain stopped.
For the first time in years, the sky was clear.
⸻
He never went back.
He didn't have to.
Hae-won learned fast that Seoul's streets were just another orphanage, bigger and crueler. He grew up fighting — not because he wanted to, but because it was the only way to stay fed. Fists were currency, pain was language. Every broken knuckle bought him another day.
At fifteen, he discovered something terrifying.
When he bled, the world seemed to remember him.
Shadows bent differently. People hesitated without knowing why.
Pain didn't weaken him; it sharpened him.
Every fight ended the same: with him standing, and his opponent on the ground.
At sixteen, he broke a man's arm and didn't blink.
At twenty, he had a reputation.
At twenty-one, he realized fighting wasn't enough.
Because no one ever knew him. They only feared him.
So he wrote.
In an old apartment with one lightbulb and a broken laptop, he poured everything he'd seen — the pain, the rain, the children who whispered, the man who called him cursed — into words.
He called it Chains of the Forgotten.
It wasn't fiction, not really.
It was memory disguised as metaphor — a boy born from chaos trying to find his place in a story that didn't want him.
And when he finished, he smiled for the first time in years.
He thought maybe, finally, someone would understand.
No one did.
It sold four copies.
Three were refunds.
He read the last line again and again — "Even gods bleed when no one believes in them."
Then he closed the laptop. Deleted the file.
And in that moment, something in the world cracked.
⸻
The next day, the sky split.
A column of light rose over Seoul — too white, too pure, too wrong.
It swallowed the skyline. People screamed. Cars stopped.
The air turned heavy with mana, thick like gravity had doubled.
The Tower had appeared.
At first, Hae-won thought it was an illusion, another trick of his cursed luck.
But then the voice came.
Cold. Systemic.
[ Welcome to the Prologue Scenario. ]
[ Author recognized. ]
[ Draft 1 begins. ]
And for the briefest instant, before the pain came, before the world began to reset and repeat and spiral into loops of blood and fire,
Hae-won understood something terrible:
The Tower wasn't punishment.
It was his story — coming to life.
The rain never stopped in his memories.
Even when the world outside changed — towers rising, mana flooding, constellations whispering — the storm in his head was constant.
He remembered fire, and glass, and the way the headmaster's eyes had gleamed when he'd called him cursed.
For years, Hae-won had believed him.
But as he stood now amid the illusion of ruined Seoul, chains humming quietly around his wrists, pieces of truth began to drift back like ashes carried on wind.
He wasn't human.
Not fully.
He could still feel the warmth of that night: a woman's voice, soft but firm, carrying him through the burning halls.
"Close your eyes, my child," she'd said. "Do not look back. The fire is not meant for you."
He had thought it was a dream.
Now, decades and regressions later, the words rang with the resonance of power — language older than heaven, older than the system itself.
He was remembering her.
⸻
The Goddess
Her name surfaced slowly, syllables half-forgotten: Elyne, Guardian of Thresholds.
A minor goddess, they said, one who stood between mortality and divinity — the protector of those who should never have been born.
She had been gentle, Hae-won's fading memory told him. Her touch left traces of light on skin, and wherever she walked, suffering eased for a moment.
But compassion, in the divine realms, was a heresy.
The gods had declared her an aberration for loving a demon.
And that demon was his father.
⸻
The Demon
He remembered eyes like black fire and laughter that rumbled from deep within the earth.
His father's name was Rakaros, called the Chainbreaker — once a warlord of the lower hells who sought to tear open the walls between realms.
He had fought angels and triumphed, not because he wanted heaven, but because he wanted freedom.
When he met Elyne, something changed.
The stories said he laid down his weapons and built her a garden of molten glass.
The gods called it blasphemy.
Their child — half-light, half-void — was an impossibility.
So heaven sent hunters, and hell sent assassins, and between their blades a single infant was left to fall to the human world.
⸻
The Orphanage
The orphanage hadn't been a coincidence.
The headmaster wasn't a man trying to help strays; he was a warden, placed there by the Narrators — the beings who oversaw storylines like puppeteers.
His task was simple: suppress the half-divine child, erase every trace of his lineage, make sure the story never remembered him.
But it hadn't worked.
The more they tried to erase him, the more the world twisted around his absence.
Each time someone forgot his name, reality glitched.
Each time he was beaten, mana leaked through the cracks of existence.
They called it misfortune.
It was divinity leaking into the mortal script.
And when he wrote Chains of the Forgotten, he unknowingly turned that leakage into narrative form.
Every word was a containment spell.
Every paragraph, a lock.
Every ending, a prayer disguised as failure.
When the book flopped, he had cursed his own insignificance.
But now he realized — it hadn't failed.
It had worked.
The story had trapped his power inside itself.
The Tower was the consequence.
⸻
Hae-won ran a trembling hand through his hair.
The streets around him shifted — illusions thinning as his comprehension grew.
Seoul's ruins flickered, replaced for an instant by golden light and the faint tolling of distant bells.
The illusion wanted to hold, to hide the truth.
He tore through it with a single command.
"Show me."
Chains burst from the ground, unraveling the mirage.
And beneath the rot and rubble, the city was still alive — ordinary, humming with mana, people moving like ghosts unaware of the story written over them.
At the center of it all stood the old orphanage.
Unchanged.
His heart slowed.
Even after five hundred regressions, even after dying more times than he could count, he hadn't expected this:
a fragment of his first life, preserved like a scar.
He pushed open the rusted gate.
Every creak echoed like a heartbeat.
Inside, dust lay thick over the floors. The walls were cracked but upright.
And there, on the desk where he'd once begged for mercy, sat the thing he'd come for.
A laptop.
Old. Scuffed. Screen dark.
But when he touched it, power rippled outward — not technological, but divine.
The chains around his wrists trembled in response.
He could feel his own words pulsing within the metal.
All the drafts. All the deaths.
Everything he had ever written or suffered.
He whispered, "You never burned, did you?"
The headmaster's voice answered from the shadows.
"I made sure it didn't."
Hae-won turned slowly.
The man looked the same — maybe a little older, maybe a little less human.
His eyes glowed faintly gold, like pages reflecting sunlight.
"Why?" Hae-won asked.
"Because it wasn't yours to destroy," the man said. "It was ours. We, the Narrators, wrote the first story. You were only meant to play your part."
Hae-won's jaw tightened. "And if I refuse?"
The man smiled, thin and cruel.
"Then the world collapses. Again."
He stepped closer, his voice softening to a whisper.
"You think you're rewriting destiny, boy. But all you've ever done is edit our mistakes. Even your regressions are just revisions of the same failed draft."
Something inside Hae-won snapped.
"I don't edit," he said. "I rewrite."
His fist moved before the chain did. The impact cracked through the room, splintering desks, sending dust into the air. The headmaster staggered back, eyes wide — not from the force, but from recognition.
For the first time, he saw it too: the crimson glow beneath Hae-won's skin.
Half-divine. Half-demon. Entirely unwritten.
⸻
Outside, the world responded.
Lightning split the clouds, carving a spiral of flame and light over Seoul.
Somewhere far above, the Tower began to tremble — a monument remembering its author.
Hae-won looked down at his hands, bruised and bleeding, the faint shimmer of chains curling around his wrists like veins of light.
He could destroy the man.
He could burn the orphanage to ash.
But he didn't.
He simply took the laptop, opened it, and whispered to the blinking cursor:
"If I can't rewrite the past, then I'll remember it."
And deep within his chest, a single chain settled — not in servitude, but in acknowledgment.
The world tilted, reality folding like paper.
The illusion peeled away, revealing the true Seoul below — a city about to awaken to its author. The hum of the city returned — low, rhythmic, alive.
Cars that had once been motionless illusions now roared through the streets.
People walked again, unaware of the storm coiling above their heads.
But Hae-won could hear it.
Every heartbeat, every voice, every chain beneath the skin of the world.
It was all part of his story.
And someone else had been writing it.
The headmaster stood at the far end of the room, backlit by the fractured light bleeding through the windows.
His shadow stretched long across the walls — and in that shadow, faint outlines of script shimmered and moved, living ink crawling like veins.
"Do you know what the first story was?" the man asked quietly.
His voice was almost kind. "It wasn't about gods or demons. It was about observation. The act of watching. The first Narrator looked at chaos and said: This is meaning. And meaning birthed everything else."
Hae-won's knuckles whitened around the laptop. "And what about me?"
"You?" The headmaster smiled. "You were an error in the observation. A sentence that wrote itself."
He stepped closer, the air thick with the scent of paper and static.
"Your mother thought she was protecting you when she sent you here. But in truth, she gave us what we needed — a vessel born between story and soul. We hid you among the forgotten because only the forgotten can be rewritten without consequence."
The chains at Hae-won's wrists rattled softly.
Each link burned with restrained light — crimson for fury, silver for grief.
"So you made me your character," he said.
The man tilted his head. "No. You made yourself ours the moment you started writing. You gave us voice, Hae-won. Every word you penned about despair, every scene of defiance, every death — they all strengthened us. Do you think Narrators are born? We're created by those who believe."
The words hit him like a blade through memory.
He saw flashes: sitting alone in the rain, scribbling stories that no one read; whispering promises to himself that he'd make the world notice him.
Every line he'd written was a wish — and the system had answered.
Not with fame.
But with imprisonment.
⸻
The laptop flickered to life, screen glowing faint blue.
Words began to appear on their own, typed by unseen hands.
[ Scenario Correction Detected. ]
[ Author entity attempting unsanctioned edit. ]
[ Countermeasure: Narrative Reinforcement — Level 1. ]
The orphanage trembled.
Walls twisted like melting wax. The air rippled with invisible pages turning.
The headmaster's form blurred — his body dissolving into shifting letters and fractured sentences.
"You see?" the headmaster's voice echoed, layered with static. "This world only exists as long as its author obeys its structure. If you kill me, you kill the stability of your own story."
Hae-won closed the laptop gently.
"I've died five hundred times already. What's one more?"
He raised his hand.
The chains around him uncoiled, slower this time — deliberate, heavy, beautiful.
Each link shone like a fragment of rewritten scripture.
When he moved, it wasn't rage that guided him, but clarity.
"You called it observation," Hae-won said, stepping forward. "But you forgot the second rule of creation."
The headmaster's fading form hesitated. "And what's that?"
"Observation doesn't stop something from changing."
He struck.
The chain pierced through the illusion, wrapping around the man's body, dragging script and form together. The headmaster screamed — not in pain, but in resistance, as if the concept of his existence was being rewritten line by line.
Golden light burst from the impact, blinding, sacred — yet the edges of it bled crimson, corrupted by something deeper.
Through that chaos, Hae-won saw him clearly for the first time.
Not a man.
A page.
A living fragment of divine text.
"You were never real," Hae-won whispered.
The man's smile didn't fade even as his body disintegrated. "Neither are you."
He dissolved into letters — thousands of glowing glyphs scattering through the air, then collapsing into dust.
⸻
Silence.
The chains settled.
The air stilled.
And then—
[ System Notification: Author entity has overwritten Core Narrative Node. ]
[ Consequence: Narrative Sovereignty Transferred. ]
[ Title Acquired: Murderer of a God. ]
The words echoed inside Hae-won's mind, hollow and heavy.
For a long time, he didn't move.
He simply stood there, staring at the empty space where the headmaster had been.
He could still feel it — the faint echo of the man's presence, not gone, but lingering, waiting to be rewritten.
That was the curse of being an author.
Nothing truly disappeared.
Every death was a comma, not a period.
He sank to one knee. His breathing came ragged.
The chains hummed, as if trying to comfort him.
"Don't," he murmured. "Not yet."
He looked at the laptop again. The screen no longer flickered.
Instead, it showed a single blank page, the cursor waiting.
And suddenly, he understood what the Tower was.
It wasn't a punishment. It wasn't even a trial.
It was a book.
Each floor — a chapter.
Each scenario — a rewrite.
Each death — a revision.
And at the center of it all, one unspoken question pulsed:
What happens when the author kills his own story?
Hae-won wiped the blood from his mouth, his voice low, steady.
"I'll find out."
He stepped into the street.
The city was awake now — a storm of mana and light gathering above the skyline.
From somewhere far above, the Tower descended again, its shadow stretching across Seoul like a blade.
This time, it wasn't a command.
It was an invitation.
[ Main Scenario: The Tower of Rewrite ]
[ 100 Floors Ascending / 100 Floors Descending ]
[ Objective: Choose Your Path. Correct the Story. Rewrite the End. ]
The chains pulsed once,aligning to his heartbeat
And for the first time,Hae won smiled—not bitterly, but with quiet terrible resolve
"Then let's write a better world"