The sky of shifting pages loomed above Klein and Yeaia, whispering words they couldn't understand, reshaping reality with every breath. Klein's pulse pounded in his ears as he took a cautious step forward, feeling the uneven ground beneath him. The faint glow of ink-veined stone pulsed with something—an awareness, a memory, a presence.
He wasn't sure how much time had passed since they had escaped the Archive of the Unwritten. Time itself felt loose, slipping through his fingers like sand.
But there was something else.
A shadow. A lingering presence.
The figure.
Klein remembered it—the thing he had glimpsed in the depths of the Archive, standing at the edge of his vision. A being wrapped in veils of ink and darkness, its presence like a forgotten dream. It had not moved. It had simply watched.
And now, Klein felt it again.
"It's here," he said quietly.
Yeaia turned, their mismatched eyes narrowing.
"I know."
The air grew heavier, pressing down on them like the weight of an unwritten story, a reality waiting to take form. Klein shifted his gaze toward the horizon, scanning the broken ruins.
Then—
There.
A silhouette, barely distinguishable from the shadows around it. It stood at the far edge of the cracked landscape, motionless, featureless, like a figure drawn in the margins of an unfinished tale.
Watching.
Waiting.
Klein's hand twitched toward his revolver, but he hesitated. This was no ordinary entity. The moment he acknowledged it, he felt something shift—like a page turning, like a thought slipping into place.
"Who are you?" Klein asked, his voice steady.
The figure did not respond. But the pages above them twisted, words unraveling, reshaping—
"Who are you?"
The voice did not come from the figure. It came from the sky itself. From the ruins. From the dream.
Klein's breath caught. The question wasn't being asked to the figure. It was being asked to him.
Yeaia stiffened beside him.
"It's testing you," they murmured. "It wants to see if you know the answer."
Klein clenched his jaw.
"I am Klein Moretti," he said.
The words hung in the air, waiting. Then—
The pages above them twisted again, and the question changed.
"Who were you?"
Klein felt something in his chest tighten.
Memories flickered—the man he had been, the name he had taken, the paths he had walked. Zhou Mingrui. Klein Moretti. The Fool. The awakening. The madness. The power. The fear.
"I was..." He hesitated.
A ripple passed through the world. The silhouette at the edge of the ruins shifted, as if reacting.
Yeaia exhaled slowly.
"Don't lie," they said softly. "Not here."
Klein closed his eyes for a fraction of a second.
"I was someone who no longer exists."
The moment the words left his lips, the sky shook.
The ruins trembled, ink seeping through the cracks, pooling at their feet. The air turned thick with the scent of old paper and something deeper—something like regret.
The figure finally moved.
A single step.
The sound it made was wrong—like ink drying too fast, like a quill scratching against a page that refused to be written.
Then, for the first time, it spoke.
"Not enough."
The voice was layered—dozens of voices speaking at once, overlapping, contradicting, agreeing, denying.
"You are still incomplete."
Klein's grip tightened around his revolver.
"Then tell me what I'm missing."
The figure tilted its head, as if considering. Then, the ink pooled around its feet surged forward—toward Klein, toward Yeaia, toward everything.
The dream folded.
Reality collapsed.
Klein gasped as he felt himself falling, the ground beneath him vanishing into a sea of unwritten ink. He reached for something, anything, but there was nothing to hold onto—
Nothing except the weight of a story that had yet to be told.
And somewhere, beneath the layers of ink and whispers, he heard the figure's voice again.
"You do not understand your own name."
Then—
Darkness.
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End of Chapter 81
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