Lin Moshi died at 2:47 in the morning with a half-eaten bowl of instant noodles beside her keyboard and chapter forty-seven stubbornly, aggressively, personally unsaved.
This was, she would later reflect, extremely on-brand.
She had been a web novelist for six years. She had published four completed novels, accumulated three million followers, and developed a deeply unhealthy relationship with caffeine and fictional men. She was twenty-six years old, perpetually underpaid, and had been wearing the same oversized university hoodie for four days straight.
The last thing she remembered was reading through her own outline; that sprawling, color-coded document titled THECELESTIALINK SAGA: COMPLETE STORY BIBLE (DO NOT LOSE THIS FILE); and thinking, with the distant clarity of someone running on three hours of sleep: I never actually figured out what Gu Yanche's deal was, did I?
He had been meant to be a background character. A powerful scholar in the Eastern Meridian Sect, glimpsed occasionally in crowd scenes, referenced in passing as someone important. She had written his name, his title, his cold eyes and colder reputation; and then, like everything else past chapter forty-seven, had simply... left him there.
The power cut out.
And then Lin Moshi woke up.
✦ ✦ ✦
The first thing she noticed was the smell.
Pine resin and morning mist and something sweetly floral she couldn't name; the kind of smell that didn't exist in any apartment she had ever lived in, which meant either she had somehow sleepwalked into a botanical garden, or something had gone catastrophically, cosmically wrong.
She opened her eyes.
Wood-beamed ceiling. Paper window screens. A thin mattress that felt like sleeping on a very polite opinion. Somewhere outside, a bird was making a sound she had definitely never programmed into any ambient noise app.
Lin Moshi sat up slowly.
She was in a small servant's room. She knew it was a servant's room because she had written servant's rooms; she had, in fact, written this exact architectural style into the Eastern Meridian Sect's residential quarter layout, right down to the slightly-too-narrow doorframe and the single shelf that was always inexplicably crooked.
The shelf was crooked.
"Oh no," she said.
Her voice came out wrong; softer, slightly different in timbre, belonging to a throat that wasn't quite hers. She looked down at her hands. Smaller than she remembered. Rougher. The hands of someone who had been doing manual labor for years rather than typing twelve hours a day.
"Oh no," she said again, more emphatically.
She was in her novel. She was in the Celestial Ink Saga, in the Eastern Meridian Sect, in the body of; she frantically searched her own memory, nobody. Absolutely nobody. A background servant she had placed here once in a crowd scene and never named, never described beyond average height, brown eyes, forgettable. She had written the words 'a servant girl passed through the corridor' and this, apparently, was the result.
"UNSAVED FILE," she announced to the empty room, because it felt important to document this.
✦ ✦ ✦
The second thing she noticed, after the smell and the existential crisis, was that something was wrong with the world.
Not wrong in the dramatic, world-ending sense, not yet. Wrong in the way that a song sounds when someone is playing it from memory and keeps stumbling over the same bar. Wrong in the way that a clock sounds when its mechanism is catching.
She stepped outside into the sect's outer courtyard and watched a junior disciple walk past, pause at the eastern gate, turn around, and walk past again from the exact same direction.
She waited.
He walked past a third time, wearing the exact same expression, stepping over the exact same loose paving stone.
Lin Moshi pressed her fingers to her mouth.
She had written this world up to chapter forty-seven. Everything before that point had been plotted, described, built with care. Everything after it had been left in an outline document that was currently sitting on a hard drive in an apartment where she was presumably dead.
The junior disciple looped past again.
"Right," she said quietly. "Right. So that's happening."
She needed to think. She needed to find out what chapter the story was currently on. She needed to figure out if the original plot was still intact, if Bai Xuening had already appeared, if Zhan Beiling had begun his arc, if...
"You."
The voice came from directly behind her. Low, precise, carrying the particular tone of someone who was not accustomed to being surprised and was currently experiencing it against their will.
Lin Moshi turned around.
The man standing in the courtyard entrance was tall, dark-robed, with the kind of still, contained presence that made the air around him feel slightly more organized than everywhere else. His eyes were sharp as annotated margins. He was looking at her the way someone looks at an equation that isn't resolving correctly.
She recognized him immediately.
Of course she did. She had written him.
Gu Yanche. The unfinished man. The character she had placed in this world and abandoned. The one she had given sharp eyes and a colder reputation and not a single completed scene.
He looked exactly as she had vaguely imagined him and nothing like she had specifically described, because she had never specifically described him, and her brain filled in the rest with something that made her feel suddenly, intensely aware that she had been writing him as her personal ideal for three years.
"You were muttering," he said, in the tone of someone filing a formal complaint. "About an unsaved file. Loudly. At dawn."
"I was processing," Lin Moshi said, with great dignity.
Gu Yanche looked at her for a moment longer than was comfortable. Something moved behind his eyes; not warmth, not recognition, but a kind of precise, dissecting attention that she had written into him without fully understanding what it would feel like to be on the receiving end of it.
"You are one of the outer servants," he said. "You have no reason to be in this courtyard at this hour."
"I was just leaving," she said.
"You were standing still."
"I was leaving mentally," she said. "I'm very fast at it."
There was a pause. The junior disciple looped past in the background again. Gu Yanche did not look at him. Lin Moshi watched understanding flicker briefly across Gu Yanche's face; the recognition that something was wrong, that the disciple had passed too many times, that the world had a catch in it, and then he looked back at her.
She had made him too smart. She had absolutely made him too smart.
"What is your name?" he asked.
Lin Moshi opened her mouth. Closed it. The body she was inhabiting had no name. The character she was wearing had never been given one. She was, in the most literal possible sense, a nameless background detail in someone else's story.
Well.
She had always wanted to name a character after herself.
"Moshi," she said. "My name is Moshi."
Gu Yanche's eyes narrowed by approximately one degree; the equivalent, she suspected, of anyone else making a loud scene.
"That is an unusual name for a servant," he said.
"I'm an unusual servant," she said.
He looked at her for three more seconds. Then he turned and walked away without another word, his robes moving with the quiet authority of someone who expected the world to be orderly and was beginning to suspect it wasn't.
Lin Moshi watched him go.
Gu Yanche. In person. Real, breathing, aggravating, and more dangerously perceptive than she had intended when she'd written "sharp eyes."
She had written him into existence and left him unfinished, and now she was standing in the ruins of her own abandoned story with no cultivation, no plan, and a body that belonged to a character who didn't even have a name in the original manuscript.
The junior disciple looped past again.
"Okay," Lin Moshi said to the empty courtyard, with the quiet resolution of someone who had met a deadline before and would do it again.
"Let's finish this book."