[PART 1: THE AUTHOR'S DRAFT]
Once upon a time, in the magical Kingdom of Luv-Luv Hearts...
The sun rose over the crystal palace in a cascade of shimmering pink light. It wasn't just dawn—it was a statement. The kind of sunrise that came with its own background music and inexplicable cherry blossom petals, even though it was clearly autumn.
Princess Sakura-Aria stood upon her balcony, her hair shifting from pastel rose to hopeful peach as a gentle breeze passed through. Her eyes—which sparkled like boba pearls catching sunlight—gazed wistfully toward the castle gates.
"Oh..." she sighed, fingers brushing the enchanted ribbon in her hair. The one that had cost three million gold pieces and been woven by silkworms that ate only moonbeams. "I hope Sir Haruto notices this today."
Below, the handsome knight rode past on his noble steed—a majestic white horse with a single crystal horn and hooves that sparkled against the cobblestones like someone had bedazzled them during the night shift.
Sir Haruto looked up at the balcony. His jawline could cut glass. His eyes held the depth of a thousand unspoken emotions (or possibly just one emotion repeated a thousand times, it was hard to tell).
For a moment, the world held its breath.
The Princess's heart beat like a sparkly drum.
Time itself seemed to—
[PART 2: REALITY CHECK]
—STOP.
Wait.
Wait, wait, wait.
WHAT IS THIS?!
I'm standing at the base of this gods-forsaken balcony, wearing armor that feels like spray-painted cardboard, and I need everyone to understand something:
This is not normal.
My name—according to some kind of cosmic joke I'm still trying to understand—is "Toby."
Just Toby.
No last name. No backstory. I exist in this world with all the narrative weight of a potted plant.
I died three weeks ago.
Well, three weeks there. Time is weird when you're dead and then suddenly not-dead in the wrongest possible way.
My real name is Arata Shimazaki. I was twenty-two years old. I'd won the Golden Pen Award for Best New Mangaka two years running. My dark fantasy series "Ashen Throne" had just hit volume five, and I was three chapters away from finishing the story I'd spent four years building.
Three. Chapters.
But before I could start on the first of those three, I'd made the mistake of checking the latest reader reviews on the Manga-Hub digital store. Most were the usual praise, but one review sat at the very top, mocking me.
---
User: Sakura_Dreams_14
Rating: ⭐⭐☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
"I don't get the hype. The art is technically good, I guess, but the plot is just... mean? It's all dark and everyone is miserable. Where are the sparkles? Where is the light? Stories are supposed to make you feel happy. 2/10 because it gave me a headache."
---
I'd stared at that comment for an hour. 'Where is the light?' I was a professional! I'd won awards! My father had told me I'd never amount to anything, and I'd spent my entire career proving him wrong by creating the most structurally perfect, serious dark fantasy of the decade. And here was some kid dismissing it all because I didn't include enough 'sparkles.'
I was drawing out of pure, concentrated spite—driven by the need to prove that a story didn't need "light" to be a masterpiece—when the end came.
I died at my desk with my stylus still in my hand, trying to fix the anatomy on a dragon's wing because the shoulder joint looked wrong and I couldn't just leave it like that. My chest had tightened. The room had spun. The screen had gone dark.
And then I'd woken up here.
In armor. In a body that felt both familiar and wrong, like wearing someone else's clothes that happened to be exactly my size.
I expected a lot of things after death. Judgment, maybe. Reincarnation as a bug. An infinite library where I could finally read everything I'd put on my "someday" list.
What I got was a front-row seat to the worst-written fantasy story I've ever had the misfortune of experiencing.
I looked up at the balcony.
At her.
Princess Sakura-Aria, the protagonist of this... I hesitate to call it a story.
Her hair just shifted from pink to blue because a pigeon flapped too loudly.
Three million gold pieces for a ribbon.
The kingdom's economy is literally collapsing. Last night I watched three peasants share a rock for dinner because "Food" apparently wasn't in the scene budget.
The unicorn Sir Haruto is riding clips through the cobblestones every third step. One of its legs vibrates like bad video game rendering.
"This is a disaster," I muttered, rubbing my temples.
The world around me felt... thin. Like reality was just a coat of paint over something hollow. I could sense it—the story's structure, weak and buckling under its own lack of internal logic.
It was the same feeling I'd get reading a first draft from a rookie assistant. That instinct that screamed: This needs work.
Except now, that instinct was the only thing keeping me real.
I felt it in my bones, this certainty: if this world collapsed under its own bad writing, I'd go with it.
"Okay," I whispered to myself, watching Sir Haruto's horse moonwalk backwards for absolutely no reason. "So I died, and my unfinished story—my regret—pulled me to... this?"
A story so incomplete, so desperate, it had reached across death itself looking for help. It was a world built entirely of the "sparkles" that Sakura_Dreams_14 had whined about.
"Lucky me."
Then the sky cracked.
[PART 3: THE FIRST CRISIS]
It wasn't a sound at first. It was a feeling.
Like the air pressure had suddenly dropped ten atmospheres. My ears popped. The morning light flickered, like someone was messing with a dimmer switch.
The world's narrative thread—that invisible structure I could somehow sense now—went taut. Then started fraying.
I looked up.
Reality was peeling back like burnt film.
And I could read what was being written into existence.
Not with my eyes. With that same editorial instinct that had driven me to perfect dragon anatomy at 3 AM until my heart gave out.
The words appeared in my mind like handwritten notes on a manuscript:
Then, a big scary dragon came to kidnap the Princess because he was jealous of her ribbon!!! He was the most evilest dragon ever and he breathed fire that smelled like stinky gym socks (like the ones in Haruto's locker lol).
I closed my eyes.
Took a breath.
Opened them.
The words were still there, burning themselves into reality.
"No," I said quietly. "No, no, absolutely not—"
The sky split open.
Something heavy began forcing its way through the gap. Scales formed without structure—just texture slapped onto a formless mass. Wings attached at impossible angles, defying every principle of aerodynamics I'd spent years studying for my own manga.
The creature's jaw opened, but no sound came out—just distortion, like a corrupted audio file trying to play through broken speakers.
Then the smell hit.
Not sulfur. Not smoke.
Gym socks.
Actual, literal, stinking gym socks.
The dragon—if you could call this abomination a dragon—was the size of a school bus, colored a nauseous shade of purple-green that shouldn't exist in nature. Its eyes were comically oversized, spinning in opposite directions like a cartoon character seeing stars.
This wasn't a monster.
This was a first draft.
And it was going to kill everyone.
I felt my own existence flicker. The thin thread connecting me to this world started to fray in sync with the narrative collapse happening above me.
The story's logic was rejecting the dragon. And when a story rejects its own content, everything else goes with it.
Including me.
My armor flickered between solid and transparent. The world was trying to erase me like a panel cut from the final print.
"Absolutely not," I snarled.
My hand moved on instinct, reaching into the air.
I didn't think about it. I just knew—the way I'd known exactly which panel needed redrawing, which dialogue bubble was too wordy, which background detail was breaking the composition.
That editor's instinct that had defined my entire adult life.
It was still here. Still me.
And in this world, that instinct had weight.
A translucent red pen materialized between my fingers.
It felt right. Familiar. Like an extension of my will made manifest.
The dragon roared (or tried to—it came out sounding like a whoopee cushion with reverb). Drool dripped from its fangs and evaporated into sparkles before hitting the ground.
Guards were screaming. Civilians were running. Sir Haruto's unicorn-horse fainted.
I didn't have time to think.
I just drew a line through the air, the Red Pen leaving a trail of crimson light.
[THE EDIT]
It wasn't a system notification.
It wasn't a game mechanic.
It was memory.
My memory of every dragon I'd ever drawn. Every anatomy study. Every reference photo. Every frustrated night spent getting the muscle structure right because "good enough" was never actually good enough.
Four years of craft condensed into one instinctive slash.
The Red Pen's light touched the dragon, and reality rewrote itself.
I felt it happen—not like clicking a button, but like creating. Like drawing the correct line over a sketch mistake.
The dragon's spine straightened with an audible series of bone-shifts that made my teeth ache. Its wings realigned, membranes stretching taut across properly articulated frames. The nauseous purple-green bled away, replaced by layered obsidian scales that caught the light like oil on water.
The spinning eyes snapped into focus—burning amber, intelligent, furious.
The gym sock smell vanished.
What replaced it was worse: ozone, brimstone, and the metallic tang of superheated air.
Real heat rolled outward in waves. The cobblestones under the dragon cracked.
This wasn't funny anymore.
This was dangerous.
The dragon inhaled—a deep, mechanical sound like a blast furnace drawing air.
Fire erupted from its jaws. Not sparkly cartoon fire.
Real fire.
White-hot plasma that turned the morning sky orange and sent guards diving for cover.
From somewhere far above—somewhere beyond this world—a young voice echoed faintly, confused:
"Wait... why does the dragon look so cool all of a sudden?"
A pause.
"Oh! I must've improved! I'm getting so good at descriptions!"
I looked up at the void where that voice had come from.
At the Author.
A fourteen-year-old girl somewhere in another world, writing this story in a notebook during math class, completely unaware that her half-baked ideas were becoming solid reality here.
"You didn't improve," I muttered, gripping the Red Pen tighter. "I fixed your disaster."
But my hands were shaking.
Because I'd just learned something important:
I could edit the story.
I could make it better.
But better didn't always mean easier.
The dragon's head swiveled toward me.
Its eyes—no longer cartoonish, now sharp and predatory—locked onto mine.
It recognized me.
Not as a threat.
As the thing that had made it real.
The creature that had given it coherent thought, proper anatomy, actual intelligence.
a rough sketch I'd accidentally inked permanently into a genuine apex predator.
The dragon lowered its head, nostrils flaring as it scented the air.
Hunting.
For me.
"Okay," I whispered, watching those obsidian scales ripple as muscles coiled beneath them. "So I can edit things. I can make them better."
The dragon's shadow passed over me.
"But 'better' doesn't always mean I survive the correction."
I felt the Red Pen pulse in my hand—warm, alive, hungry for more edits.
But I also felt something else.
Exhaustion.
Deep, bone-deep exhaustion, like I'd just pulled an all-nighter working on deadline.
The edit had cost me something.
Not health points or mana.
Something more fundamental.
Energy. Creative energy. The same kind that had fueled four years of weekly manga chapters until my body couldn't sustain it anymore.
I'd burned through a third of my daily capacity just fixing one badly-written monster.
And the day had barely started.
The dragon landed in the center of the plaza, cracking the stones under its weight. It lowered its head, sniffing, searching.
For the one who'd made it smart enough to hunt strategically.
I peeked around the fountain's edge.
Those amber eyes were scanning the plaza methodically.
Not randomly.
Tactically.
Because I'd given it a functioning brain.
"I don't need this world to be perfect," I murmured, watching the beast's muscles coil beneath those obsidian scales. "I just need it to survive its own writing."
The dragon's head snapped toward my hiding spot.
Our eyes met.
Me: a dead mangaka wearing a background character's body and holding a magic red pen.
It: a properly anatomically correct killing machine with a grudge.
"Alright," I said, stepping out from behind the fountain.
The dragon's lips pulled back, revealing rows of properly structured teeth. Each one designed for maximum damage.
My own damn edits staring back at me.
"Let's see if I can fix this," I raised the Red Pen like a sword, "before it kills me."
The dragon roared—a real roar this time, deep and resonant and absolutely terrifying.
The sound rattled my ribs.
I ran.
[MEANWHILE]
Fourteen-year-old Sakura Himura sat in the back of her math class, notebook hidden behind her textbook, scribbling furiously.
The dragon scene was going so well.
She'd been worried it would be boring, but somehow the description had just flowed. The words came naturally—obsidian scales, intelligent eyes, tactical hunting behavior.
She didn't remember writing those specific details, but they were definitely in her handwriting.
"Huh," she whispered, reading back over the passage. "I guess I am getting better."
She added a heart and three exclamation marks to the margin.
Then she started writing the next scene: Princess Sakura-Aria watching bravely from her balcony as a mysterious guard fought to protect her.
She didn't know his name yet.
Just wrote: [brave guard whose name I'll figure out later]
In another world, Arata felt his existence solidify slightly.
He had a narrative purpose now.
[Brave guard].
It wasn't much.
But it was something.
He dove behind a collapsed wagon as dragon fire turned the air where he'd been standing into superheated death.
"I'm going to edit my way out of this," he gasped, Red Pen glowing in his hand. "Or die trying."
He paused.
"Again."
[END OF CHAPTER 1]
[HANDWRITTEN NOTE - Appears in margin, visible only to Arata]
Well.
That could've gone better.
Edit Summary:
- Vocabulary Enhancement: Applied
- Biological Realism Override: Applied
- Consequence: You made the boss fight harder
- Remaining Capacity: ~60%
- Author Awareness: Zero
- Survival Probability: Declining
Next time maybe DON'T fix the anatomy until AFTER you figure out how to kill it?
Just a thought.
— Your Editorial Instinct
(AKA: The part of you that died trying to be perfect)
[TO BE CONTINUED...]