The first thing he noticed was the ceiling.
Stone. Low. A crack running diagonal from the far corner to somewhere above his head. Old water stain at the edge. The kind of ceiling you get in cheap housing or old institutions, the kind that tells you exactly what the building thinks of the people sleeping under it.
He stared at it for a while.
Then he sat up.
The room was small. A cot. A desk with one leg slightly shorter than the others. A window with no curtains that let in gray morning light and nothing else. His hands — and he looked at them, both of them, turned them over — were not his hands. Too long in the fingers. A scar on the right palm, healed white and old, that he had no memory of getting.
He set them down on his knees.
Okay, he thought. So that happened.
He had finished Rise of the Eternal Sovereign: I Became the Academy's Unrivaled King at 3:47 in the morning, two weeks ago. Chapter 2848. The ending. He had sat in his chair for four minutes afterward, not moving, because he needed those four minutes to organize what he was feeling into something he could actually use.
Then he had left a one-star review.
It was a good review. Thorough. He had been specific about every failure of the novel — the protagonist's escalating self-righteousness dressed as humility, the heroines stripped of anything interesting around the 900-chapter mark, the villain who could have been something and was instead used as a stepping stone, twice, in back-to-back arcs, and then killed off before he could have a single scene that mattered. He had been — he would say — fair. He had acknowledged the early chapters were competent. He had noted the world-building was solid in isolation even if the story stopped caring about it by arc four.
He had posted it at 3:51 in the morning.
At 3:52, he died.
He did not know the mechanism. Heart, maybe. Or something else. It had not been dramatic — no warning, no long decline. One moment he was reading the comments under his review, mostly people telling him he was wrong, and then nothing, and then this ceiling.
He looked at the scar on his right palm again.
Rael Marre, he thought. Chapter 2. Burned at the post and forgotten by chapter 4.
That was what Rael Marre was. Not a character, really. A prop. Kael Aurentis needed something to demonstrate his mercy in the early chapters, so the author had written in this minor noble son — disgraced family, slight and bitter, picked a fight with Kael in a corridor and lost badly — and Kael had extended his hand instead of finishing it, and the crowd had oohed and the narrative had moved on. Rael Marre had one more appearance in chapter 4, where he tried to cause trouble at the Rankings and was again effortlessly handled. Then nothing. Dropped. Two thousand eight hundred and forty-four chapters of nothing.
He was, objectively, no one.
He looked at the room.
He looked at his hands again — Rael's hands, the scar — and something in his chest did a thing he didn't have a good word for.
Huh, he thought.
[System Initializing.]
The text appeared in the top right corner of his vision, brackets and italics both, like a footnote that had decided it was more important than the page. He watched it load. Progress bar. Percentage ticking up.
At 100%, it stopped.
[Author's Override — Active.]
[User: Vincenzo. Host body: Rael Marre. Current novel: Rise of the Eternal Sovereign — in progress. Current chapter: 2. The system would like to note that you have arrived at an inconvenient juncture. Chapter 2 is the corridor scene. It begins in approximately four hours.]
He read that twice.
"Four hours," he said, out loud, to the room.
His voice was different. Lower. He put a hand to his throat, which was a weird thing to do, and then stopped.
[The system is aware this is disorienting. It has no plans to make it less so.]
"What are you, exactly."
[Author's Override is a system designed to interface with the original novel's plot structure. It reads ahead. It takes notes. It will share information when it determines sharing is relevant. The system would like to clarify that 'relevant' is a determination made by the system and not by you.]
"Great."
[Plot Vision: Active — Chapter 2, corridor scene, 09:14 academy time. Kael Aurentis enters the main hall with his study group. Rael Marre — you — approaches. In the original text, you initiate a verbal confrontation, escalate physically, and lose. Kael extends his hand. You are humiliated. Three witnesses write diary entries about it.]
He let that sit for a moment.
"Three people wrote diary entries."
[This is a story about Kael Aurentis. Secondary characters generate narrative texture.]
He got up. The floor was cold through his socks, flagstone, and the room smelled like stone dust and something faintly metallic — old building smell, the kind that meant the walls had absorbed fifty years of other people's stress. He walked to the window. Outside: a gray courtyard, and beyond it, stone towers he recognized from the novel's early chapters, before the author stopped describing them. Vaelthorn Academy. Built on the bones of the First Calamity site. Impressive in theory, grim in practice, the kind of institution that had decided atmosphere was a personality.
He knew this place chapter by chapter. He had read every scene set here. He knew where the dining hall was, where the practice courts were, which wing held the good instructors and which wing held the political appointments. He knew the layout of Kael's social circle, the fracture points in every heroine's backstory, the structural weak spots in the academy's faction politics.
He knew Rael Marre was a dead man walking in the original story.
He also knew Rael Marre had Null frequency.
[Character Sheet: Rael Marre — Updated to Host Status.]
The sheet appeared in his peripheral vision like a sidebar, neat and specific and annotated in a way that felt faintly judgmental.
Rael Marre
Age: 19. Year 1.
Resonance Frequency: Null.
Rank: Attuned.
Status: Minor noble family, House Marre — financial collapse, two years prior. Father dead. Mother relocated. No siblings.
Academy status: Enrolled on academic scholarship. Standard housing. No faction affiliation.
Original plot function: Narrative prop, Arc 1. Eliminated from story at Chapter 4.
[Note: Null frequency is officially classified as non-functional. The classification is wrong. The system declines to explain why the classification is wrong at this time. It will be more interesting later.]
He read the last line twice.
"Do you always do that."
[The system provides information in the order it determines is most useful.]
"That wasn't an answer."
[No.]
He closed the sheet and looked at the window again. The courtyard was empty this early. A bird crossed the frame, fast, gone before he tracked it.
Null frequency. He knew what the novel said about Null — useless, inert, the frequency type that got you assigned to administrative tracks and written off before your first year finished. He knew what the novel hadn't said: that Rael Marre had spent three chapters being quietly desperate about it before the author dropped him entirely. There had been one line, chapter 3, background detail: Rael stood at the edge of the practice court and watched the other students train, his Null frequency sitting in his chest like a locked door with no keyhole.
The author had moved on. Hadn't come back to it.
It had been, Vincenzo thought, the only interesting line in all of Rael Marre's material.
He flexed his right hand. The scar pulled slightly — the old kind, tight at the edges.
He had four hours until the corridor scene.
He sat back on the cot, because there was nowhere else to sit, and he thought about it.
The original scene went like this: Rael approached Kael in the main hall, said something cutting, Kael responded with the specific brand of polite condescension that the novel framed as admirable, Rael escalated, Kael handled it physically in about six seconds, then offered his hand, and Rael either had to take it or look worse. The author had written him taking it. Bitter, humiliated, barely grateful. The crowd loved Kael for it.
He did not intend to be the prop in that scene.
[Plot Vision — current deviation: 0%.]
Zero percent. He was still exactly on script. That was fine. He had four hours and he hadn't done anything yet.
He lay back on the cot and looked at the cracked ceiling again.
The thing about the novel — the thing that had made him leave that review, the reason he'd kept reading for 2848 chapters even as it got worse, which he'd asked himself about more than once in those last few hundred chapters — was that it had been good, once. Not great. But the bones were there. The world was interesting. The magic system had logic to it. The original heroines, before the author had stripped them down into orbit around Kael's gravity, had been people. Seraphine Valcourt had been genuinely terrifying in the early arcs. Lyra Ashfen had walked into a Gate solo in chapter 80 and come out with a scar on her collarbone and exactly nothing to say about it, and it had been one of the better chapters in the whole run.
And then, chapter by chapter, the author had filed off anything that didn't reflect well on Kael.
He thought about Seraphine in chapter 3. He'd read that chapter four times, actually, because she'd been interesting. The way she moved through rooms. The way she watched Kael with something that wasn't adoration — something cooler, more careful, like she was waiting for him to prove something and not sure he would. The author had never developed it. By chapter 200, she was defined by her engagement to Kael and her eventual softening toward him. The coolness was gone. The waiting was explained away as trauma.
He hated that. He had written two paragraphs in his review about just that.
[Author's Note: She's still in chapter 3, from your timeline. Whatever she was in the original text — she hasn't been rewritten yet. The system mentions this as a point of interest.]
He read the note.
"I know," he said.
[Yes. The system is aware you know. It mentioned it anyway.]
He stared at the ceiling.
Outside, somewhere in the building, a door opened and closed. Footsteps, distant, unhurried. The academy was waking up. In four hours the corridor scene would happen, and in four hours he would either be in it or not be in it, and either way the deviation counter would move.
He thought about what it would mean to stay.
Not as Rael Marre, prop, chapter 2 and chapter 4 and then nothing. As something else. As whatever he decided to be in a story that had already been written and was in the process of being wrong about everything.
He had 2848 chapters of notes. He knew every plotline, every fracture point, every moment Kael was going to take something that should have been left alone. He knew who was going to be hurt by it and when and roughly how, because the author had telegraphed all of it, badly, the way bad authors do when they think they're being subtle.
He had Null frequency in a story where Null frequency was classified as nothing.
[Plot Vision — corridor scene: 4 hours, 7 minutes. Deviation: 0%.]
[The system is not making a suggestion. It is providing information.]
He sat up.
"Right," he said, to the room, to the system, to no one in particular. "So this is what I'm doing."
The system didn't respond.
He stood up. Crossed to the small desk, opened the drawer — empty except for a stub of charcoal and a folded piece of academy stationery, blank. He looked at those for a second, then closed the drawer.
He didn't need to write anything down. He had the whole story in his head.
[Null Amplification: Locked. Condition for unlock: First external frequency absorbed. No frequencies currently absorbed.]
"How long does the first absorption take."
[That depends on the frequency and the source. The system will note that Kael Aurentis has Flame frequency, Rank Fractured, and will be in your immediate vicinity in approximately four hours. The system offers no further comment on this correlation.]
Vincenzo stood very still for a moment.
Then he laughed.
It came out short, dry, mostly exhaled — not because it was funny, or not only because it was funny, but because the shape of it had landed in a way he hadn't expected. The system offering no further comment while being entirely clear about the comment. The irony of it. That in the original novel, the scene existed so Kael could demonstrate his power over Rael Marre, and the author had written it as a showcase — Flame frequency, Fractured rank, effortless and golden.
And the author had no idea what Null actually did.
Neither had Rael Marre.
But he did.
[Deviation — current: 0%. Projected deviation post-corridor scene: variable.]
[The system looks forward to updating this number.]
He looked at the cracked ceiling one more time. The water stain. The diagonal break in the stone that someone had decided not to fix.
He picked up the stub of charcoal from the desk — he didn't know why, he just put it in his pocket — and went to find out what Rael Marre's body looked like in a mirror before he had to be him in public.
He had a story to ruin.
He was going to enjoy it.