The moment Yeaia remembered, the world fractured.
It was not an explosion, not a dramatic unraveling, but a quiet, insidious thing—a shiver in the fabric of reality, a silent scream in the depths of the Archive.
The loop resisted.
It wanted to repeat.
But something had changed.
A single variable.
That whisper—so quiet, so foreign. It did not belong to Klein. It did not belong to Yeaia. It came from something outside the loop.
And that was enough.
Yeaia gasped as reality shuddered. The ink on the books bled, but this time, the words did not reform. They dripped off the pages, pooling on the marble floor like spilled memories.
"Klein."
Klein wasn't moving.
He stood, book still in hand, his mismatched eyes frozen. Stuck.
No. No, not again. Not like this.
"Klein!" Yeaia grabbed his wrist. It was ice-cold, stiff, unyielding. His fingers were clenched around the book, his knuckles white.
He was trapped.
The loop was fighting back.
The ink on the floor slithered toward them. The bookshelves groaned as if they were alive, shifting, curling inward, walls closing like the maw of some unseen beast.
Yeaia's own body flickered—translucent, unstable.
It was trying to pull them back in.
Their mind screamed. Think. THINK.
What had broken the loop?
The whisper.
Yeaia clawed at the sensation, that fleeting voice they had barely heard.
"Wake up."
It had cut through the repetition like a knife through fabric. It had come from outside.
Then that meant—
There was something beyond this place.
A reality that still existed.
A place they could reach.
Yeaia's grip on Klein tightened. Their form blurred, flickered—almost like they were half in this world and half in another.
That was it.
If they could exist in-between…
They could escape.
The bookshelves collapsed.
The ink surged.
The loop howled.
Yeaia let go.
Not of Klein.
Not of the fight.
Of the loop itself.
And then—
They fell.
Not physically. Not in any way that made sense. They slipped between the cracks of the world, through the gaps in the written pages, into the spaces outside the ink.
Falling—
Falling—
Waking.
And then—
Darkness.
—
Somewhere far away, beyond the loop, beyond the Archive, in a reality that still existed—
A book snapped shut.
A figure lifted their head.
They had been reading for so long. Tracing the same words. Reaching the same ending.
But this time—
This time, the ink did not bleed.
This time, the story did not repeat.
This time, something was different.
A slow, knowing smile curved upon their lips.
And in the space where reality and fiction met—
They waited.
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End of Chapter 62.
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