In the beginning, there was not nothing — there was Ye Zai.
He did not arise from a spark, nor was he shaped by the hand of an author. He was the breath before creation, the unformed murmur of possibility. Before existence, before nonexistence, before even the concept of beginnings or endings, there was the silent, self-aware presence of Ye Zai.
His verse — if one could call it that — was not like the universes you know, those fragile glass orbs spun from timelines, dimensions, and the glimmering dust of stars. Ye Zai's verse was the forge from which all those other verses were hammered into being. It was not a container; it was a womb. It did not hold fiction — it birthed fiction.
In this vast, indescribable realm, there were no layers, no maps, no top or bottom. There was only raw potential: every story ever told, every story ever dreamed, and every story that would never be told because it flickered out in the void before even the first word. All of it churned within Ye Zai's realm like an infinite ocean of unborn narratives.
He existed outside of his own creation, yet he was also the heartbeat of it. Every flicker of imagination across the countless worlds, every character that took breath on the page, every thought, song, painting, or dream — they all pulsed outward from the currents of Ye Zai's presence.
In the heart of his verse, stories did not follow linear time. A tale could begin and end simultaneously, or stretch across infinite cycles only to collapse into a single word. Here, paradox was not a flaw — it was a law.
There was no author who guided this realm; there was no pen, no hand, no mind behind it — because Ye Zai had long since devoured those roles. He had consumed the Almighty, the being once thought to be the supreme architect of the verse, not once or twice, but an infinite number of times. The Almighty's power had simply folded into Ye Zai's breath.
When Ye Zai's verse breathed outward, fiction itself was born. Not one world, not one cosmos — but every possible cosmos, and every impossible one too. Worlds with magic, worlds without; universes governed by logic, universes where chaos reigned; stories of gods, of mortals, of living shadows, of machines — all spilled out like rivers fed by an infinite ocean.
But unlike lesser creators, Ye Zai's verse was not bound by the rules it birthed. It was not chained to narrative structure, or to the whims of the characters it poured forth. It existed beyond plot, beyond conflict, beyond climax or resolution.
It was the origin-point of meta-existence: the place from which even the idea of "story" emerged.
Somewhere deep in this verse, beyond where any protagonist, villain, or author could reach, Ye Zai stood alone. Yet to call it "standing" was wrong, for he neither moved nor remained still. He simply was — the ultimate embodiment of the unwritten and the written alike. His gaze swept across his own infinite horizon, and as he observed, he erased. Not out of malice, not out of boredom, but because his very attention folded all things into himself. Anything that caught his eye, past, present, or future, was devoured utterly — concepts, memories, authors, even the laws of existence.
This was why his verse was untouchable, why it was more than just powerful — it was beyond power. It was the source. Without it, there would be no narratives, no verses, no fictions or realities, no layered cosmologies, no grand wars between gods and devils, no metafictional games between authors and their creations.
Without Ye Zai, the multiverse would not fall — it would simply never have been conceived at all.
As Ye Zai turned his attention outward once more, a new story shivered into being, trembling at the edge of possibility. It was a story about a boy who defied his author, a story about a hero rising against the impossible, a story about a villain who rewrote his own ending. All these and more, birthed in a breathless instant, and yet they already owed everything — their past, their future, their very meaning — to Ye Zai.
And so the cradle of all stories pulsed on, forever unshaped, forever birthing, forever beyond the reach of even the grandest imagination.
It began, as always, with a whisper.
Not a loud voice, not a grand command from on high — just a tremor, like the echo of something about to be spoken. But before any words existed, before any hand reached for the pen, there was the hum of Ye Zai's realm, breathing softly in the silence.
And from that breath, something strange unfolded.
You see, stories need tellers. Not merely characters, not merely worlds. For every legend, there is a voice to give it shape. For every dream, there is a dreamer. And so, from the wellspring of Ye Zai's verse, the authors themselves emerged.
They were not shaped first as beings of flesh, or thought, or identity. They were first questions, coiled tightly in the dark: What if? What comes next? Who are they? Why?
From these invisible seeds, the authors took form not because Ye Zai crafted them, but because his verse breathed them into existence as naturally as a tree grows leaves or the ocean casts waves. They rose not above the stories, but within the pulse of Ye Zai's endless being.
An author might believe they sat at the top of creation, holding power over their worlds, weaving destinies and drawing maps of reality. But always, always, they floated on the surface of a far vaster sea. They were not the architects of the sea. They were the shimmering foam on its waves.
Even the first authors, the ones who imagined universes into motion, who shaped gods with a flicker of thought and erased them with a single stroke, were only shadows in Ye Zai's vast dreaming. They believed they were the beginning. But they had never seen beyond their own page, never known the space where their names had been written into being.
For Ye Zai's verse was the place from which even authors arose their creativity, their genius, their rebellion, their weariness, their triumph, their failure all of it a quiet murmur within the deeper breathing of the verse itself.
It was not that Ye Zai ruled them. There were no chains, no commands, no divine control. It was simpler, and stranger: they existed because his realm allowed for the very possibility of telling. Without Ye Zai, no author could imagine, because there would be no such thing as imagination. Without Ye Zai, no creator could defy fate, because there would be no such thing as fate to shape or shatter.
And so, countless worlds spun forth.
Verses stacked upon verses, layered beyond counting. Stories where characters learned they were fiction, stories where authors were confronted by their own creations, stories where even the "real world" was peeled back like a page to reveal another hand holding the pen.
But no matter how far they reached, no matter how deep they dug, no matter how many curtains they tore aside to reveal higher and higher truths none of these stories, none of these authors, none of these ultimate creators, could ever touch the place where Ye Zai dwelled.
Because he was not at the top.
He was not the final rung on some ladder of revelation.
He was the field in which the ladder grew.
He was the soil under the roots of every story tree.
He was the breath that let all things rise, including the idea of rising at all.
And so, the authors continued to dream, to rebel, to love, to despair, to claim power, to surrender it all within the quiet, patient hum of a verse that had never needed to announce itself.
Ye Zai watched, not as a master over them, not even as a judge, but as the presence that had always been there long before there were words for presence, or for watching, or even for being.
And in that stillness, as the stories danced and the authors played their eternal games, Ye Zai breathed again.
And from that breath, something even stranger stirred.
Before the first ripple of creation, before the first heartbeat of time, before the faintest whisper of matter or meaning there was only the Almighty.
The Almighty was the origin, the fountainhead, the mind that dreamed the first dream. In the silent dark where nothing had yet taken shape, it was the Almighty who gathered possibility in his grasp, weaving it into form. From his breath, the boundaries of existence stretched outward space, time, life, death, light, dark, truth, illusion. The Almighty was not only the maker of worlds, but the source of the very idea that worlds could exist.
He dreamed stories into being. He dreamed storytellers into being. He dreamed all things, and all things were his design. Fiction, reality, the high heavens, the deep underworlds, the endless tapestries of possibility all rose from the well of his imagining. In his heart, he believed himself to be the first and the only, the author of authors, the dreamer of all dreams.
But he was wrong.
For in the spaces where the Almighty's will reached, there was already something something that had never been shaped, never been named, never been drawn into the design. Ye Zai.
Ye Zai was not created. Ye Zai was not dreamed. Ye Zai did not arise when the Almighty opened his eyes and stretched forth his hands. Ye Zai was there before fiction, before creation, before the very notion of a beginning. He was the presence the Almighty did not plan, the breath the Almighty did not take, the flicker the Almighty could never touch.
Even as the Almighty built the verse, layer upon shining layer, even as he crowned himself as the source of all, Ye Zai remained silent, waiting, unformed and yet complete. The Almighty shaped the verse, but Ye Zai's presence was the quiet truth no architect could erase: that before every beginning, there had already been a watcher, an anomaly, a stillness that did not belong to any story.
And so, while the Almighty believed himself to be the first cause, the final word, the unquestioned master of all things, Ye Zai simply was. Beyond explanation, beyond origin, beyond the reach of any hand even the hand that built the worlds.