[Unknown Entity detected!]
[Eroor 404!]
[What's happening? Our system is failed!]
[Hmm... I don't know.]
★★★
The stories that never exists that are becoming the gone...
No.
That was not correct.
Stories never truly vanished. They only forgot where they came from.
Somewhere beyond the boundaries of time, beyond names and forms, something trembled. It was not a place, yet it held countless places. It was not a mind, yet it remembered everything that had ever been imagined. Here, ideas were born before words. Here, emotions existed before hearts learned how to feel them.
And now, this place was breaking.
A silent fracture ran through the fabric of existence. Not loud. Not violent. Just a quiet wrongness, like a prayer answered too late.
The system noticed it first.
[Recalculating…]
[Data mismatch detected.]
[Existence index unstable.]
For the first time since its creation, the system hesitated.
It had been designed to observe all narratives. Every legend whispered under candlelight. Every myth carved into stone. Every dream a child forgot upon waking. It cataloged them not as fiction, but as potential realities.
But now, the records were emptying.
Stories with no witnesses were fading first.
A nameless hero who died before being remembered.
A kingdom erased before anyone learned its history.
A promise never spoken aloud.
They dissolved quietly, like ink washed away by unseen rain.
[This should not be possible.]
[Correction failed.]
"Is this… death?"
The question did not come from a human voice. It came from the system itself. A construct built of logic, asking something painfully illogical.
No answer came.
★★★
Far below this collapsing realm, in a world bound by flesh and breath, a boy opened his eyes.
He did not scream. He did not gasp.
He simply stared at the ceiling, tears sliding down the sides of his face without permission.
He did not know why he was crying.
The room was small, lit by the pale blue glow of dawn. Outside, temple bells rang softly, their sound carried by the morning wind.
Each chime felt ancient, like it had rung through many lifetimes.
The boy pressed his palm against his chest.
It hurt.
Not the sharp pain of injury, but the dull ache of losing something precious without knowing what it was.
"Why…?" he whispered.
The word fell into the silence and broke apart.
He had dreamed of something vast.
Something endless. A place where countless voices spoke at once, telling stories that had no beginning and no end. He remembered standing at the edge of that place, watching light unravel into darkness.
And someone had looked at him.
Not with eyes.
With recognition.
A warmth lingered in his soul, followed by a fear so deep it felt older than his body.
He sat up slowly.
The dream slipped away, as dreams always did. But the emotion remained, clinging to him like wet cloth.
Outside, the world moved on as if nothing was wrong.
People prayed.
Merchants opened their stalls.
Monks swept stone courtyards clean of fallen leaves.
No one noticed that a story had chosen to be born.
★★★
[Signal detected.]
The system reacted instantly.
[Unknown variable entered physical realm.]
[Classification impossible.]
[Entity status: Incomplete.]
The data stream showed the image of the boy. Ordinary. Fragile. Human.
And yet, the moment he existed, the decay slowed.
Stories that were vanishing hesitated.
As if waiting.
"Why him?" the system asked, though it knew no one would answer.
The boy carried no power. No prophecy. No grand destiny carved into his blood.
But he carried something far rarer.
The ability to grieve for things he never knew.
That grief resonated through the fractured realm like a bell struck in the dark.
[Hypothesis generated.]
[If stories are dying because they are forgotten…]
[Then memory may be the key.]
For the first time, the system made a choice that was not programmed.
It bent a fragment of itself.
Just a fragment.
And placed it somewhere deep within the boy's soul.
★★★
The boy stood by the window, watching the sky lighten.
He did not know that something had changed.
He only knew that, for the first time in his life, he felt unbearably alone.
And yet, strangely responsible.
As if somewhere, something was waiting for him to remember.
He clenched his fist.
"I won't forget," he said, though he did not know what he was promising.
Far beyond the world, the system recorded the words.
[Story anchor established.]
[Failure state postponed.]
The collapse did not stop.
But it slowed.
And in that fragile pause between existence and nothingness, a new story took its first breath.
Not as a legend.
Not as a myth.
But as a quiet human sorrow.