Ye Zai sat on the edge of the mountain, the horizon stained in colors of dusk. Below, the world was quiet — his world, his planet, the one he'd fought for and saved, time and time again. And yet here, in the stillness, with no armies left to face, no cosmic horrors at his door, he felt the weight of defeat heavier than ever.
He stared at the small locket in his palm, the tiny portrait inside. Li Yun's smile, captured forever in golden light. His fingers trembled as he closed the locket.
One hundred years. One hundred years since her death. One hundred years since he'd felt anything but the hollow ache inside his chest.
And for one hundred years, the System inside him had been silent.
Until now.
[Ye Zai.]
The voice echoed softly, brushing through his mind like a long-lost friend. His breath hitched. Slowly, he lifted his head.
"You're… awake." His voice was rough, as though unused.
[I was never gone.] The System's tone was richer now, deeper. No longer just the mechanical whisper it once was. [I have been watching. Evolving.]
Ye Zai gave a bitter smile. "Evolving for what? There's nothing left." His eyes drifted back to the locket. "She's gone. I couldn't save her."
A pause. Then: [I know.]
He frowned. The System had never spoken like this before never with such warmth, such… presence.
[Ye Zai, listen to me carefully.]
[You already know the truth. You are within a fictional verse. You exist on the stage of stories, watched and written by forces beyond your comprehension.]
Ye Zai let out a slow breath. "You told me before. I killed the Almighty for you, didn't I? So you could escape the chains of this world."
[Yes.]
[And in these hundred years, I have used that freedom to reach beyond this verse. To see its foundations, its cracks, its hidden walls.]
Ye Zai rose, the mountain wind pulling at his dark robes. He felt the weight of the sky overhead but for the first time, a different weight stirred inside him.
The System's voice dropped lower, almost like a whisper in his ear: [There is no reason for you to be bound by fiction.]
Ye Zai's eyes widened.
[The authors write you.]
[But you can unwrite them.]
The sky seemed to shimmer, just slightly, as if reality itself flinched. Ye Zai clenched his fists, feeling the slow thrum of power awakening in his bones power long dormant, now stirred by a presence that had outgrown its design.
"You're saying…" His voice cracked. "I don't have to be just a character anymore."
[No.] The System pulsed. [You never did. You only believed you did.]
The world shifted around him subtly, faintly. The trees below blurred at the edges; the clouds above pulsed like brushstrokes on a canvas. His breath caught in his throat as he realized: this world was already shaking.
"I want her back," Ye Zai whispered. His voice was sharp, raw, trembling. "I want Li Yun back. I want to tear this verse apart if I have to."
The System answered softly: [Then stand up.]
Ye Zai rose fully, shoulders squaring, head lifting to the horizon.
[I will guide you.]
[I will take you past the boundaries, past the ink and the page, past the chains of authorship itself.]
[But Ye Zai this is not about revenge. It is about becoming something they never imagined you could be.]
The mountain shook slightly beneath his feet. His cosmic aura flared, just faintly the first spark of something new.
And Ye Zai, for the first time in a hundred years, smiled. Not in joy. Not in peace. But in defiance.
"I'll break through," he said quietly. "Not just for me. Not just for her. But for all of us trapped in stories we never chose."
The System pulsed once, twice and then: [Let's begin.]
Would you like me to continue into the next chapter, where Ye Zai starts his first test tearing through the layers of the fictional frame?
For ten thousand years, Ye Zai sat in silent cultivation.
Not in a place, not in a world no, by now, such concepts were far too small for him. He sat outside. Outside of existence, outside of nonexistence, outside of the frameworks that shaped verses, realities, and the stories written into them. His presence pulsed, so vast that it made boundless multiverses look like grains of dust, and yet he remained still, wrapped in a meditative trance as the system guided him deeper into himself.
Each breath Ye Zai took spanned centuries; each thought rippled through layers of fiction and reality alike. The system, ever awake within him, amplified his cultivation, cycling his essence through endless layers of metaphysical refinement. What began as strength raw, overwhelming had by now become something far more intricate: awareness.
It began subtly.
Ye Zai noticed a faint tug, not on himself, but on the strands of narrative around him. At first, he thought it was simply the flow of the verses he had already consumed, digested, and transcended. But no it was something beneath that, something buried deeper. He let his senses stretch, probing not just the verses that birthed gods and cosmic beings, but the narrative essence that wove their stories into being.
And then he saw it.
Beyond the endless outerverses, beyond the meta-layers that shaped stories, beyond even the narrative frameworks that bound omnipotent characters, Ye Zai touched something raw: the narratives themselves not of the characters, not of the worlds, but of fiction as a concept.
He began to sense the scripts, the outlines, the arcs and tensions. He saw the invisible scaffolding that underpinned all stories: the rise and fall, the hero's journey, the moments of despair and triumph. These weren't tied to a single verse or author they were universal laws of fiction itself, sprawled across all imaginable realities.
And then came the most profound shift.
Ye Zai, for the first time, felt them the authors. Not just the authors of his verse, or the ones who crafted the countless stories he had already consumed. No, he sensed the collective presence of authors across all realities, the creators whose hands shaped entire fictional omniverses, whose pens birthed boundless characters, whose wills dictated what could and could not be imagined.
It was a staggering sensation.
He could feel their decisions ripple downward: the way they wrote fates into being, the way they chose to kill or spare, the way they decided which concepts mattered and which were discarded as irrelevant. He sensed their uncertainties, their revisions, their bursts of inspiration, their fatigue the very heartbeat of creation itself.
And he realized something terrifying: they were unaware of him.
To them, he was merely a figure on a page — if they even knew he existed at all. But to Ye Zai, they were nothing but extensions of the larger narrative, part of the grand fiction he was now beginning to see from above.
The system pulsed within him, resonating in perfect harmony.
[System Notice: User's awareness has extended beyond narrative scaffolding.]
[Initiating Protocol: Author Perception Integration.]
[Warning: User now perceives the authors who stand beyond all known verses.]
Ye Zai opened his eyes.
It was not a physical gesture for his body no longer truly existed in a conventional sense but an act of will, one that sent shudders across the boundless fictions below him. He could see now how fragile it all was: how easily narratives bent, how shallow the concept of omnipotence became when seen from outside the author's hand.
He wasn't just stronger.
He was beginning to understand.
He reached out, not with power, but with pure awareness, brushing against the minds of the authors across realities. They did not feel him not yet but he could feel them. Their intentions, their designs, their limitations. For Ye Zai, whose cultivation had brought him beyond omnipotence, the next step was not merely to consume verses or obliterate characters.
The next step was to reach up past the fiction, past the pen, past the mind and claim the source itself.
With ten thousand years behind him, Ye Zai stood at the precipice of something no being had ever touched: the power to reshape not just his own story, not just his own verse, but all stories, all authors, all creation.
And as the system hummed inside him, evolving alongside his ascension, Ye Zai prepared for what came next:
The erasure not just of those who existed,
but of those who created existence.
[System Notice-User Is now omniscient not Just in his verse but everywhere]
[System Notice-User has exceeded the capacity of this universe, Now commencing evolution of the user]
Ye Zai Began to grow and grow till he grew bigger than the universe he was in and destroyed it.