"Some stories survive because they're told. Others survive because someone bled to keep them alive."
---
Ash Ketchum woke up screaming.
But not because he was in pain.
Not yet.
He screamed because he remembered everything.
And no one else did.
---
The room he stood in had no ceiling—only an infinite sky stained with glitching stars, each one flickering with lost timelines.
No floor—just darkness pulsing beneath his feet, like a heart broken too many times to beat right.
No walls.
Only mirrors.
But in the mirror… Ash didn't see himself.
He saw them.
All of them.
---
Butterfree, wings tattered in the acid rain of an altered Johto.
Pidgeot, lying motionless in the ruins of Route 1, feathers soaked in the blood of a war that never happened.
Infernape, chained in a reality where the Sinnoh League crowned Paul instead.
Greninja, standing alone as Kalos burned behind him.
They looked at him like strangers.
Because they no longer knew him.
---
> "You saved the world," said the voice behind him.
"But you didn't save them."
Ash turned.
And there he stood—the version of himself that gave up.
Eyes void of spark. Hat faded gray.
No Pikachu.
No smile.
Just the hollow carcass of a dream once chased too long.
> "Every rewrite has a cost. You erased evil… but what good got caught in the purge?"
"You chose to remember… and now you'll carry the weight for all who can't."
Ash ran from the mirror.
But the reflections followed.
---
In the real world—if it could still be called real—nothing was right.
Galar's skies refused to cycle.
Sinnoh's legendaries no longer answered summoning calls.
Hoenn's ocean surged without reason, no tides, no moon.
Pokémon were glitching.
Trainer cards corrupting.
And some Gym Badges turned black, their emblems faded into static.
And still—
Pikachu wouldn't wake up.
---
The one being that always stood beside him—
The one he had trained with, bled with, died with—
Lay in his arms, alive, but… vacant.
His breathing was real.
His fur still sparked when touched.
But his soul was somewhere else.
Somewhere between deleted timelines and rewritten memories.
> "I'll get you back," Ash whispered.
"Even if I have to tear open reality again. Even if I have to shatter what's left of me."
---
The League called a Summit.
Every surviving Champion arrived.
Cynthia, Leon, Lance, Steven, Iris.
Even Red came down from Mount Silver.
He didn't speak.
But Ash didn't need him to.
One look said everything:
"It's coming back."
---
They found the first tear in Johto.
Where the Burned Tower used to stand, there was now only an empty crater. And in that crater?
A single phrase burned into the earth.
> "Chapter Zero is waking."
---
Professor Oak ran simulations.
What he found was impossible.
Hidden deep within the base layer of Pokémon data—beneath evolution logic, battle AI, type mechanics—there was a core.
A living, beating string of code.
And it was not part of the current reality.
It was older.
A remnant of the first draft of the world.
A prototype timeline.
Abandoned by the creators.
Buried. Forgotten.
Until now.
---
> "Ash," Oak said, voice trembling, "the Rewrite was never the disease. It was the firewall."
"And now that it's broken… the original infection is coming back online."
---
To make matters worse:
Ash was glitching.
His left hand began phasing through objects.
He'd look in mirrors and see different versions of himself.
Sometimes younger.
Sometimes older.
Sometimes… dead.
At night, he heard his own voice whispering things he didn't remember saying.
And when he touched his Poké Ball belt, it screamed.
The Poké Balls remembered everything.
Even the timelines he never lived.
---
The weight crushed him.
He remembered Goh now—clearly, vividly.
Their bond. Their missions. Their laughs.
But no one else did.
Not a single record of Goh existed. No files, no footprints, no memories.
Even the lab where he once lived had a different layout. Different assistants.
Ash carried that absence like a broken rib.
He started writing Goh's name in dirt wherever he went.
> "So the world doesn't forget him again," he whispered.
---
One day, Ash sat beside Misty and tried to talk.
But she kept forgetting mid-sentence.
Like the memory of knowing him was being eaten away.
> "Do you ever feel like we're all just… broken backups?" she asked.
"Like we've been patched so many times we've lost the original version of ourselves?"
Ash wanted to scream.
But he just held her hand.
And watched as she forgot his name for three seconds.
---
When the Chapter Zero signal spread, it wasn't just data.
It was a pulse.
A wave that shook the memories of every Pokémon.
Some went feral.
Others went silent.
But a few—like Lucario, Gardevoir, and Metagross—began to remember previous lives.
One Lucario howled in a human voice.
A Gardevoir sang a lullaby in a language older than time.
A Metagross spelled Ash's name with stones… and then smashed them, screaming.
They were remembering things that should never have existed.
---
Then came the vision.
Arceus appeared.
But not like before.
It was wounded.
Its golden ring cracked, energy leaking in code-like sparks.
> "You stopped the Rewrite… but that allowed the true origin to awaken."
"I did not create this world alone."
"There was another."
And Ash saw it—
A shadow behind creation.
A primordial code that wanted freedom.
A god forgotten by even Arceus.
And it was coming back.
---
Ash knew what he had to do.
He had to return to the beginning.
Not just Kanto.
But Episode 1.
The first moment.
The first decision.
He would go back.
Not as a child.
But as a man scarred by time, loss, and memory.
He would walk through the journey again—rewriting nothing, but confronting everything.
---
But the price?
He'd lose everything else.
---
He looked down at Pikachu, still sleeping.
"I'm coming for you, buddy."
He stood, cloak whipping in the storm winds of fractured reality.
Chapter Zero was calling.
And Ash was ready to answer.
---