The pen trembled in Aeren's hand.
It wasn't an ordinary pen. Not anymore. After unlocking the "Scripture of the End," everything he touched had begun to carry weight—narrative weight. Even a stroke of ink could now twist fate. Even a scribbled margin note could kill.
And that terrified him.
He stood in the middle of a forgotten library—no, a labyrinth of knowledge. Books floated instead of resting on shelves. Scrolls whispered among themselves. Ink splattered the air like blood in a suspended moment of chaos. Time didn't flow here. It folded.
His status panel blinked:
[Title Unlocked: "Narrator of Ends"]Skill Gained: Rewrite Reality (Lv. 1)
You may rewrite a recent event within a limited radius by paying the cost in Essence of Narrative.
Caution: Tampering with major plot events will alert the Author.
Aeren's hands tightened.
He had already seen what happened when the Author noticed him.
Back in Chapter 12, he barely survived the backlash of interfering with the flow. His arm had turned into liquid ink for a full minute, and his heart beat backwards. Even now, his shadow twitched out of sync.
But it had to be done.
"The Quill Cycle is nearing the Final Draft," whispered the Old Editor. He was no longer bound by form—just a presence in torn pages and editing marks. "Either you become the one who writes the ending, or you remain a sentence waiting to be erased."
Aeren took a breath.
He needed allies. And he knew just where to find them.
Scene Shift: The Archive of Broken Realities
This was where failed protagonists were sent—characters who lost their power midway, betrayed by their own plots, discarded like crumpled paper.
Aeren found her first: Lys.
She once led an S-rank dungeon guild in a LitRPG world where stats determined everything. But in a cruel twist, the system had deleted her class mid-battle. Her fate was to fall, forgotten.
She still wore her shredded UI frame like a cursed tattoo.
"You're the Reader?" she asked, voice hollow.
"No," Aeren replied. "I'm the one rewriting the ending."
"You've seen the Ending Thread?" she whispered, hope flickering. "The final battle?"
He nodded, handing her a rewritten scene fragment—one where she lived.
She stared.
It shimmered like salvation.
And without another word, she followed.
Next: The Dungeon That Was Never Written
They gathered others:—Kai, a tarot wielder from a mystery realm where fate was decided by shuffled cards.—Naru, an AI from a collapsed meta-narrative who remembered every erased chapter.—And finally, an unnamed shadow from "The Book That Writes Itself," a cursed manuscript that bled when you read it.
Each one of them broken. Forgotten. But now, characters in Aeren's own story.
Together, they stepped into the dungeon.
Not a dungeon, really.
A Rejection—a chapter that had never made it past the outline.
Rooms shifted by reader reviews. Traps activated based on genre clichés. And at the end of every floor… a deleted antagonist waited.
This was where the Author threw out what didn't fit.
Now, Aeren would make them all matter.
Three Floors In: The Meta Battle Begins
"Trap ahead," whispered Kai, flipping the card.
The Tower.
Aeren grimaced. That meant collapse.
The room groaned. Reality peeled like wallpaper. A flood of unrendered code poured out of the ceiling.
"System breach!" yelled Naru, her eyes turning hexadecimal.
Aeren lunged forward and used Rewrite Reality. It cost him nearly half his Narrative Essence, but he twisted the moment: the ceiling froze, and the code turned into a staircase instead.
They ran.
At the top, an old man waited. His body was made of old drafts. Names crossed out. Sentences redacted.
"You want the pen?" the man said.
Aeren didn't answer. He raised the pen.
"You think you can handle it?" the man laughed. "This is the Pen of Destiny. The one that writes everything. You don't use it. It uses you."
Aeren moved before the man could finish.
He slashed with words, parried with themes, and dodged with motifs. It wasn't a physical fight. It was a battle of narrative control.
And Aeren had read every genre there was.
Romance. Slice of life. Cultivation. Apocalypse. Even satire.
He turned the fight into a parody.
Then a tragedy.
Then a twist ending.
The man exploded into bookmarks.
The Pen Awakened
The pen glowed.
A voice echoed:
"Final Draft sequence initialized.""Begin rewriting the Fate Protocol.""Warning: Author awareness threshold rising…"
The others stared.
"What now?" asked Lys.
Aeren smiled faintly.
"We write our ending before the Author writes us out."
And with that, the dungeon collapsed behind them, and a new page opened beneath their feet.
Not printed.Not bound.But infinite.
The Final Arc had begun.