Between the folds of the reality we inhabit, there are cracks visible only to those exhausted by long hours staring at anime screens. Adel wasn't just a casual viewer; he was obsessed to the point of noticing glitches no one else did: illogical tremors in the frame corners, and shadows that moved in the background while the characters remained static.
One rainy December night, Adel stumbled upon a link on the Deep Web for a lost anime titled "The Echo Behind the Paper." There were no promotional images, only a cryptic description: "If you enter, do not close your eyes; the other world hates to be forgotten."
The moment he hit play, the anime didn't start with a theme song, but with the sound of heavy, ragged breathing. The main character appeared—a boy who looked exactly like Adel, sitting in a room identical to his own. Suddenly, the character turned toward the camera and whispered in a trembling voice: "Adel, do not look behind you."
The Black Void
Adel ignored the warning, dismissing it as advanced AI using his personal data. But suddenly, his computer screen began to melt. The glass turned into a viscous black liquid, and a hand drawn in sharp manga lines reached out, grabbing him by the collar. In a single second, the dust of his room vanished, and he found himself falling through a vast white void, rendered entirely in pencil sketches.
This was the "World of Drafts"—a place inhabited by characters deleted before their stories were finished. These were distorted beings with incomplete faces and crudely drawn eyes, screaming in silence because they had no mouths.
The City of Moving Shadows
Adel walked for hours in this bizarre realm. Gravity shifted with every "shot." Sometimes he walked on a watercolor sky; other times, he fell into pits of liquid ink. He finally reached what looked like an old Japanese city, but it was entirely flat, as if made of cardboard.
There, he met "Kayo," an anime girl with glowing purple hair, though half of her face was nothing but charcoal scribbles.
"You are alive," Kayo whispered, her voice sounding like the rustling of paper. "Why have you come to the graveyard of imagination? Here, abandoned ideas feast on human flesh to become real."
Kayo told him that this world was ruled by an entity called "The Grand Author"—not a human, but an ancient ink that gained consciousness from the suffering of artists. This entity hunts obsessed fans to turn them into "static backgrounds" in eternal anime worlds, where they are forced to repeat the same scene for thousands of years without the mercy of death.
Escape Through Genres
The ground beneath Adel began to crack, and "Seinen" monsters appeared—giants made of flesh woven from old manga pages, their eyes were camera lenses tracking his every move.
"Run to the Shonen portal!" Kayo screamed. "The laws there are less cruel!"
Adel ran through corridors shifting from black and white to neon colors. He entered a world resembling a fighting game, but the combat here wasn't for fun. He saw superheroes with decaying faces fighting endless monsters; the blood spilling from them wasn't red, but cold, black ink.
As Adel ran, he felt his body changing. His skin became unnaturally smooth, and sharp black outlines began to appear around his joints. He was turning into a drawing.
Confrontation in the Inking Room
Adel reached the top of a towering spire made of giant G-pens. There, he found The Grand Author. It wasn't a monster, but a massive drawing table with a golden pen floating above it, constantly drawing itself.
"You seek an end to your story," the voice echoed in his mind. "But in our world, there are no endings, only 'discontinued.' I will make you the protagonist of a tragedy no one will ever read."
The golden pen began drawing shackles around Adel's wrists. He felt the chill of the ink seeping into his veins. He remembered Kayo's words: "The other world hates to be forgotten." Adel realized his only weapon wasn't strength, but the "logic" that breaks a story.
He began to visualize things that didn't belong in anime; he thought of the mundanity of reality, the dust, the smell of ordinary coffee, the imperfect details of human beings. He screamed scientific facts and laws of physics that don't apply to drawings.
The Distorted Return
The world around him shook. Colors began to bleed into one another, and lines shattered, unable to process the "realism" Adel projected. The drawing table exploded, and everything turned into a blinding white light.
Adel woke up gasping on his bedroom floor. The computer was off, and the rain was still drumming against the window. He breathed a sigh of relief, thinking it was just a nightmare born of exhaustion.
He got up to wash his face, but when he looked in the mirror, his blood ran cold.
His features were not the same. His eyes were drawn with impossibly sharp, fine lines. Behind his right ear, there was a tiny mark written in Japanese, meaning: "To be contin
ued in the next chapter."
#Horror
#AnimeWorld
#Psychological
#Mystery
#Supernatural
#DarkFantasy
#Metaverse