Dokja awoke to silence.
No alarms. No screaming. No system messages.
Only the distant echo of dripping water and the steady thump of his heartbeat. He blinked up at a fractured ceiling, where vines dangled like forgotten punctuation marks across old stone. The remnants of fire still licked the edges of his coat, but his body was whole—unburned. The 'False Death' had worked.
Still, this wasn't where he'd fallen.
He sat up slowly, hand gripping the edge of a worn bench. Dust swirled in the dim light filtering through stained glass. A library? No—something older. Sacred. The architecture was a blend of styles: Eastern motifs carved into Western marble, floating script etched in languages he didn't know. It felt stitched together, like a dream cobbled from memory and myth.
And in the center of the room stood a pedestal, its surface glowing faintly.
On it sat a pen.
Not just any pen—it pulsed with power, wrapped in gold filament and ink that shimmered like stars in motion. The pedestal bore a single line:
[Author's Key: Write to Alter Fate]
Kim Dokja's breath caught.
"A narrative artifact," he whispered. His fingers trembled as he stepped forward. "A real one."
He'd heard of them. Items whispered about in the corners of the Star Stream. Things Constellations coveted but couldn't create. Artifacts not of this story, but of stories themselves.
As his hand hovered over it, he hesitated. The last time he touched something unknown, the scenarios had begun. But this… this could be different.
Before he could decide, a voice broke the stillness.
"You found it."
He turned sharply. She stood in the archway, her dark coat dusted with ash, a shallow cut on her cheek.
"You're alive," he said, blinking.
"I told you. 'Next page.'" She stepped inside, eyes locked on the pen. "I had to lead them away. You needed time."
Dokja frowned. "What is this place?"
"A narrative breach," she replied. "A forgotten layer between the written and the real. It only appears when a false death intersects with a broken thread."
He stared at her. "You make that sound normal."
"It isn't." She walked past him, brushing her fingers across a broken column. "This place was once a checkpoint. A place where writers... editors... maybe even readers could intervene. Before it was sealed."
"Sealed by who?"
She turned to him slowly, and this time, her eyes held something he hadn't seen before—fear.
"By the one who's still writing."
The temperature in the room dropped.
"The system?" he asked.
"No," she said quietly. "Something older. More obsessive. The Star Stream feeds on stories—but it doesn't create them. Someone else does. Someone who doesn't like interference."
The pen shimmered again, humming.
"So, what? This is a loophole?"
"A choice," she said. "But dangerous. You could use it once—maybe. Write a line, change a rule, shift an outcome. But it comes at a cost."
"Which is?"
She gave a tired smile. "You become part of the ink."
Dokja exhaled slowly, brain spinning.
"What happens if we leave it?"
"Then the writer wins," she said simply. "And we keep dancing to a plot we didn't agree to."
He turned back to the pen.
A choice.
One line. One sentence to change something in the world.
He thought of Yoo Joonghyuk, still somewhere out there, fighting tooth and nail through scenarios meant to break him.
He thought of the Constellations, watching like bored gods from above.
He thought of himself, a reader turned protagonist—who was no longer the only one holding the book.
And he thought of her.
"You said you weren't supposed to be here," he said softly.
"I wasn't."
"Then why are you helping me?"
She didn't answer right away. When she did, her voice was barely above a whisper.
"Because I saw what happens when you reach the end. And it doesn't stop with you."
The weight of her words sank like stone.
Kim Dokja stepped forward, gripped the pen, and in that instant, he saw hundreds of possible sentences blossom in his mind like wildflowers on fire.
"The Prey becomes the Hunter."
"The next scenario fails to trigger."
"Yoo Joonghyuk remembers a life he's never lived."
"The reader writes back."
He chose none of them.
Instead, he wrote one line, steady and slow:
"The story forgets the rules for one day."
The pen flared in his hand, burning with light so bright it drowned the world.
And then—
Darkness.
He came to on wet asphalt.
Rain drummed against his skin. Horns blared in the distance. A bus rolled past—intact. Whole.
The sky was... blue.
People bustled around him, ordinary, unaware. Seoul. Not ruined. Not burning.
His heart thundered.
"Was it a dream?" he whispered.
"No," a voice said beside him. She was there, just as before, now holding a folded newspaper that hadn't been printed in years. "You bought us a day. One day outside the script."
Kim Dokja looked at the city—really looked.
Children laughed. Vendors called out. A couple argued over umbrellas. For the first time since the scenarios began, life felt untouched.
He turned to her. "What do we do with it?"
She smiled softly. "Whatever we want. But we should make it count."
And in the quiet that followed, as the world forgot its rules and the story held its breath, Kim Dokja understood something:
The plot wasn't his alone anymore.
It was theirs to fight for.
And somewhere, beyond the pages, someone was watching—and rewriting.
End of Chapter 4