I scrolled through the latest chapter of Saga of the Divine Swordsman on my phone, my thumb smearing a faint streak of red across the screen. The blood wasn't fresh—dried now, flaking from my knuckles—but it was mine to ignore.
"What a ridiculous way to ruin a masterpiece," I said, voice low and edged, sharp enough to draw more if I wanted. I wasn't just watching a story die—I was carving it open, picking apart every misstep with a precision I'd honed on things far less forgiving than words.
There'd been a time—a fleeting, brutal glory—when this novel was untouchable. Murim warriors clashing with blades like thunder, high-tier spellcasters twisting reality into knots, all set in a dystopia teetering on collapse. Battles unfolded like chess matches I could've won blindfolded, each move a note in a symphony of violence. The twists? Woven so tight I'd traced them back a hundred chapters once, just to prove I could unravel anything.
Now? Now it was a bleeding mess.
Lucifer Windward, the protagonist, was losing his grip—sanity slipping faster than the plot's coherence. Characters fell like I'd dropped them myself, quick and messy, background fodder in a war I'd have ended cleaner. The story's logic was a corpse, kicked aside like a broken hovercar. And then—vampires.
Vampires.
Extinct, the author had promised, gone for a hundred and sixty years. Dead as the trust I'd had in this tale, as the fool who'd left this blood on my hands earlier today. Yet here they were, swaggering out of some unmentioned underground city, led by a Vampire Monarch who'd dodged history with all the subtlety of a brick through a window.
The comment section was a slaughter. Fans raged, theorists flailed, apologists tried to stitch the guts back in. One had posted an essay tearing apart Chapter 141's contradictions—I'd skimmed it, nodding, already three steps ahead. Another gave up, spamming AI memes of Lucifer weeping over noodles. I smirked, flexing my stained fingers. It wasn't just a decline. It was a massacre—a pileup of wrecks, each one rigged to blow, elephants and all.
It hadn't started this way. Humanity, crushed by non-human overlords—elves, dwarves, magic beasts sneering from the peaks—had clawed back with tech, guts, and a recklessness I admired. Elves and dwarves bent to our rules, demons got banished, vampires were butchered.
Or so the story claimed.
At its heart was Lucifer Windward—a prodigy, a storm with a pulse. Yin-Yang body, elemental affinities that could melt bone, ocular powers that'd leave you blind, broken, or just gone. He was a blade, Immortal-rank, cutting through warlords like I'd cut through—
I stopped, glancing at my hands. The blood was old, from a fight I hadn't started but had damn well finished. I didn't flinch at it. I never did.
I'd mapped his rise, memorized his moves, reworked his battles in my head—sharper, bloodier, mine. That's why this stung. The author had taken a titan and buried him in misery. The Windward family fell—his father's death a move I'd called early. Allies shattered, the Kagu dynasty—once a martial fortress—crumbled under threats I'd have crushed myself. Then the pacing snapped. Lucifer faced enemies that shouldn't exist, stakes spiraling into nonsense, the power balance I'd respected torn apart.
It'd been thrilling once—unpredictable, vast, a mirror to the thing inside me that didn't sleep. Now it was a failure, but even that sharpened my edge. I wiped my hands on my jeans, leaving faint red smears, and leaned back.
Then the world broke.
It wasn't a flicker, not a shadow creeping in. Light didn't dim—it vanished, ripped away like skin from a wound. A void opened beneath me, cold and endless, pulling with a force I couldn't fight. Not yet. I'd faced worse in my head—crafted pits darker than this—but this wasn't my design. My feet slipped, the floor gone, and I fell, air howling past me. The phone was lost, my hands empty but still stained, still steady.
What was this?
A voice sliced through the dark, low and far, threading the nothing like blood through water. "I am sorry," it said, heavy with finality. "This was the only way."
I tried to speak, to demand, to rip an answer from the abyss. My voice failed. My body locked. My mind—keen as a blade, dangerous as the hands that wielded it—frayed, threads snapping, dissolving into the black.
Then—
Nothing.