The sun is a witness I didn't invite.
It crawled through the blinds in thin, surgical strips, dissecting the room and the mess I had made. The blood on the floorboards had turned from a vibrant, poetic crimson to a dull, honest brown. It looked like spilled coffee, or perhaps old rust.
Reality has a way of losing its luster once the adrenaline evaporates.
I stood in the center of the room, my muscles aching with a fatigue that felt ancient. On the desk, my laptop screen remained lit—a lighthouse in a sea of wreckage. I looked at the words I had written. They were still there. They hadn't vanished with the night. They were sharp, rhythmic, and terrifyingly alive.
Then I looked at the man.
He was no longer a metaphor. He was eighty kilograms of cooling meat and deteriorating cells. He was a logistical problem.
"You're staring again," the voice remarked.
Nox Lucis was leaning against my bookshelf now. In the daylight, he was less of a shadow and more of a smudge in reality, like a thumbprint on a lens. He was wearing a suit that seemed woven from the space between stars—dark, matte, and utterly devoid of texture.
"I'm thinking about the disposal," I said. My voice was raspy, stripped of its usual resonance.
"Disposal. Such a sterile word. You speak as if you're deleting a paragraph."
"Isn't that what this is?" I turned to face the smudge. "The world is a narrative, Nox. Too many characters, too many subplots that lead nowhere. This man... he was a typo. A mistake in the margins. I simply redacted him."
Nox chuckled. The sound was like dry leaves skittering across a gravestone.
"Spoken like a true artist. But typos leave marks when you erase them, Ryo. And the police have a very keen eye for bad editing."
I ignored him and walked to the kitchen. I needed plastic. Tape. Bleach.
The mundane tools of a monster.
As I scrubbed the floor, the physical labor felt like a ritual. Every wipe of the cloth was a sentence. Every splash of chemical was a punctuation mark. I worked with a precision that I had never applied to my housecleaning before. My mind was unusually clear. Usually, when I'm not writing, my head is a cacophony of anxieties—unpaid bills, my agent's disappointment, the crushing weight of my own potential.
But now? Silence.
The act of ending a life had granted me a strange, borrowed peace. It was as if the violence had acted as a vacuum, sucking out all the trivial noise and leaving only the essential.
The man's name was probably in his wallet. I didn't check. Names imply history. History implies humanity. I didn't want a human being in my living room; I wanted a spent ink cartridge.
I moved his body to the bathtub. The sound of his heels dragging against the wood was a rhythmic thud-thud-thud.
*Thud-thud-thud.*
Like a heartbeat that had lost its home.
I spent three hours in that bathroom. By the end, my hands were raw from the bleach, and my throat burned from the fumes. I felt disconnected, as if I were watching a movie of myself. A psychological thriller where the protagonist is too calm to be the hero.
My phone vibrated on the edge of the sink.
Mika.
I stared at the screen for five seconds before answering.
"Ryo? Are you there?" Her voice was a burst of sunlight—too bright, too warm.
"I'm here, Mika."
"I read it. The first chapter. Ryo... I don't even know what to say. I've been staring at the last page for twenty minutes."
I leaned against the tiled wall, looking at the shower curtain. Behind it, the logistical problem was hidden.
"Is it good?" I asked. I already knew the answer.
"Good? It's... it's devastating. Where did this come from? Last week you couldn't even describe a chair without sounding like you were having a breakdown. This... this feels like you climbed into someone's chest and started writing on their ribs."
I closed my eyes. The validation was a drug. It surged through my veins, more potent than any praise I had received in my youth. It made the bleach burns stop hurting. It made the body in the tub feel worth it.
"I found a new perspective," I said. "A more... visceral approach."
"Whatever it is, don't stop. The board is going to lose their minds. I'm sending this to the senior editor right now. We need Chapter Two by Friday. Can you do that? Can you keep this energy?"
I looked at the bathtub.
The energy wasn't mine. It was a flickering flame fed by a very specific fuel.
"I'll try," I said softly.
"I know you will. I knew you had this in you, Ryo. I never doubted."
She hung up.
*I never doubted.*
The irony was a bitter taste in the back of my throat. She loved the fruit, but she would vomit if she saw the soil it grew in.
"She wants more," Nox said. He was suddenly standing in the doorway of the bathroom, his presence casting a long, unnatural shadow across the white tiles. "The world always wants more, doesn't it? They want to be moved. They want to feel something real, something dark, because their own lives are so painfully beige."
"Shut up, Nox."
"Are you going to tell her the truth? That every beautiful sentence cost a gallon of blood? That the 'visceral approach' involves a kitchen knife and a heavy paperweight?"
"It's just a story," I muttered, heading back to the living room.
"Is it? You aren't just writing a book anymore, Ryo. You're building a monument. And monuments require foundations."
I sat at my desk and opened a new document.
*Chapter Two.*
The cursor blinked.
One.
Two.
Three.
Nothing.
I typed a sentence. *The air was cold.*
I deleted it.
I typed another. *He felt the weight of the secret.*
I deleted that too.
The silence started to return. Not the peaceful silence of the morning, but the heavy, suffocating silence of the void. The screen was turning white again. The arrogance of the blank page was returning, mocking me.
My hands began to shake.
"It's gone, isn't it?" Nox whispered, leaning over my shoulder. I could smell him now—the scent of ozone and old paper. "The high. It's wearing off. The fuel is spent."
"I just need to focus," I hissed, gripping the edge of the desk.
"Focus won't save you. You've tasted the truth now. You've seen what it takes to be a god of words. You can't go back to being a mortal tinkerer."
I looked at the bathroom door.
The man in the tub was a single chapter. A prologue.
The realization hit me with the force of a physical blow. To finish the book—the masterpiece that Mika was currently showing to the world—I would need more.
A lot more.
I stood up and walked to the window. Down in the street, people were moving like ants. Salarymen in grey suits. Students with colorful backpacks. Mothers pushing strollers.
A city of eighty million chapters.
I saw a man standing on the corner, smoking a cigarette. He looked lonely. He looked like a minor character.
My heart gave a small, traitorous flutter.
I wasn't a predator. I told myself that. I was an artist. I was a man doing what was necessary for the sake of the work. If the world wanted brilliance, it had to pay the price.
Suddenly, a black sedan pulled up across the street.
A man stepped out. He was older, wearing a long charcoal coat that looked expensive but functional. He didn't look like the others. He moved with a heavy, grounded authority. He stood on the sidewalk for a moment, looking up at my building.
His eyes were sharp. Too sharp.
He pulled a notebook from his pocket and scribbled something down, his gaze lingering on the fourth floor.
"Who is that?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper.
Nox moved to the window, his form shimmering.
"Ah," the demon breathed. "The antagonist enters. Precise. Relentless. A man who believes that every puzzle has a solution and every crime has a ghost."
"A detective?"
"Daniel Hartmann," Nox said, his voice dripping with dark amusement. "He's been looking for a pattern in the chaos of this city for years. He hasn't found one yet. But you, Ryo... you're about to give him a masterpiece to study."
The man in the charcoal coat looked directly at my window.
I stepped back, my heart hammering against my ribs.
I had a body in the tub.
I had bleach on my hands.
And I had a blank page on my screen.
The detective didn't move. He just watched.
I realized then that the game had changed. I wasn't just writing a story anymore. I was living in one. And in a psychological thriller, the first chapter is always the easiest.
The real pain begins when the world starts to write back.
I turned away from the window and looked at the kitchen knife sitting on the counter.
I needed to finish Chapter Two.
And the man across the street was looking for a lead.
"Write," Nox whispered in my ear, his voice a freezing wind. "Before the silence catches you."
I reached for the knife.
Not to hide it.
But to feel the weight of it.
The cursor blinked.
And for the first time, I realized that I wasn't the one holding the pen.
The blood was.
I walked toward the bathroom. I had to finish the disposal. I had to be clean.
But as I looked at my reflection in the hallway mirror, I didn't see Ryo Kanzaki.
I saw a predator with a literary degree.
I saw the end of the world.
And I liked it.
I went back to the bathtub, pulled back the curtain, and looked at my muse.
"Tell me," I whispered to the corpse. "What happens next?"
The detective downstairs started walking toward my front door.
The doorbell rang.
A sharp, jagged sound that cut through the silence like a blade.
The blank page was waiting.
And so was the law.