The first word hit Lin's shoulder like a shard of glass, embedding itself in her blazer before she could flinch. **Zhang Wei**—the male lead's full name in crisp Times New Roman—bled ink down her sleeve. The next one struck the ground between them, fracturing into syllables as it landed: **Song**-**Yan**-**hui**, the heiress's name splitting apart like an overripe fruit.
Lin caught the third word midair. It writhed in her palm, the characters morphing between simplified and traditional Chinese before settling into a name neither of them recognized: **Editor No. 7**.
Zhang—*their* Zhang, the flickering third iteration—reached for a falling word just as it grazed his forearm. **Protagonist** seared into his skin, the letters branding deeper with every heartbeat. He made a sound that wasn't quite pain. "They're not names," he said, staring at the bleeding sky. "They're *roles*."
The ground buckled. A paragraph crashed down beside them, its sentences wrapping around Lin's ankle like shackles: *The genius girl calculates the variables, her fingers flying across equations only she can—* Lin snarled and ripped free, leaving a strip of her slacks behind. The fabric dissolved into footnotes.
He grabbed her elbow, pulling her toward a gap in the wordstorm. "The draft's collapsing! We need—"
**CRACK**.
A penstroke split the void above them, unleashing a torrent of discarded scenes. They ducked as a fully rendered Porsche convertible—Song's, from Chapter Fifteen—slammed into the ground where they'd stood, its doors hanging open to reveal seats upholstered with rejected dialogue.
Lin lunged for the car, yanking a seatbelt free. The material stretched unnaturally as she knotted it around Zhang's wrist, tethering him to her. "The names are anchors!" she shouted over the cacophony of falling text. "They're trying to reassign us!"
A word the size of a textbook hit Zhang between the shoulder blades: **Rival**. He arched backward, his spine cracking audibly as the word fused with his skin. The glowing corruption in his chest pulsed in protest, flickering between **[PROTAGONIST.EXE]** and something newer, rawer: **[PLAYER 2?]**.
Lin didn't pause. She shoved him into the Porsche's front seat and vaulted over the hood, her knees hitting the passenger side just as another volley of names rained down—**Best Friend**, **Mentor**, **Sacrifice**—each one carving a groove into the car's paint job. The steering wheel trembled under his grip, its leather stitching unraveling to reveal typewritten instructions: *Turn left at the plot twist*.
The engine roared to life without a key. Lin slammed her palm against the dashboard, where the radio dials were labeled not with numbers but tropes: **Misunderstanding Arc**, **Confession Scene**, **Final Showdown**. She twisted it hard right just as a tsunami of redaction marks surged toward them.
The Porsche lurched sideways—not skidding, but *italicizing*, the entire vehicle slanting at a forty-five-degree angle as they careened between falling chapters. Zhang gripped the wheel with white-knuckled intensity, his branded forearm darkening to boldface.
A single word hovered in their path, ten times larger than the others: **AUTHOR**.
Lin's breath hitched. "Hit it."
Zhang didn't hesitate. The Porsche's tires screeched against the paper-thin ground as they accelerated straight toward the word—and through it.
The impact never came.
Instead, the world inverted, the Porsche flipping end-over-end in a slow-motion rewrite that left them suspended midair, watching as their own story unfolded below them in reverse: Zhang's grip on the wheel becoming the proofreader's pen becoming Lin's fingers tracing equations that hadn't been invented yet.
Somewhere beyond the draft folder, a keyboard clattered.
Lin's glasses slid down her nose as she stared at the inverted scene. "Oh," she whispered. "That's the problem."
Zhang followed her gaze to where their past selves moved like marionettes—not just along plot threads, but *through layers of the manuscript itself*, their actions repeating in every draft simultaneously.
The Porsche hung suspended over an endless recursion of rooftops, brokerage statements, and bleeding account numbers.
And at the center of it all—
A single blinking cursor.