"Before the first word, there was silence. And in that silence, a question."
The Path Between Realities
The wind had lost its voice.
Shen Wei and Lian Yue walked across a bridge of shattered constellations; beneath them flowed the Sea of Unwritten Things, a current of all the stories that had never begun.
Every step erased their footprints instantly, as if the universe refused to acknowledge trespassers at the edge of its script.
The air trembled with half-formed words—"why," "begin," "again"—and each syllable tried to graft itself to their skin. Lian Yue shielded them with her flute's song, weaving notes that bent language away.
"We're nearing the Origin," Shen Wei said.
"Can you feel it?"
"No heartbeats," she answered. "Only the pause between them."
A horizon appeared, neither light nor dark, but blank—the uninked parchment where existence stopped. At its center sat a figure, writing nothing.
The Face of the First Question
The figure lifted its head. It had no features; its body was translucent parchment upon which sentences appeared and vanished: Who am I?Who writes me?
"You are the Author of Nothing," Shen Wei said.
"You wrote even the gods."
The being's voice was both whisper and thunder.
"I am the question that birthed you. You were my answer, Shen Wei—the proof that words could dream."
The blankness rippled, forming memories of his entire life—the wars, the love, the rewriting. Every scene replayed, but in this retelling, the Author's quill moved through his hands.
Lian Yue stepped forward.
"If you created him, why summon us now?"
"Because the Codex is awakening beyond control," the Author replied. "Your defiance taught every story to resist its writer. Soon all creation will speak for itself—and silence will die."
"Perhaps that's what should happen," Shen Wei said softly.
"A world that answers back is alive."
The Author's parchment eyes flared with disbelief.
"If every story rewrites itself, meaning will scatter. Chaos will consume the page."
"Then let chaos be called freedom," Lian Yue said.
The Battle of Meaning
The Author rose. The Sea of Unwritten Things erupted, forming titanic quills that rained inkfire. Shen Wei summoned his own light, the remnant of the Void Codex, while Lian Yue's flute unfolded into a crescent blade of sound.
Each strike birthed galaxies; each parry erased them again. The battlefield was language itself—verbs became swords, nouns became shields, silence became a wound that could not heal.
The Author's voice filled the cosmos:
"I gave you purpose!"
Shen Wei countered, "You gave us cages!"
He unleashed a thousand characters of radiant ink—memories of mortals laughing, crying, loving. They struck the Author's chest, burning holes through the parchment body until light bled from within.
But with every word he spoke, parts of him dissolved; his existence depended on the very story he was destroying.
"Stop!" Lian Yue cried. "If you erase the question, there'll be no answer left."
She stepped between them, flute raised. "Let me play the silence instead."
The Song of Nothing
She played—not a melody, but the spaces between notes. The sound was absence, the echo of breath before creation. It reached even the Author's heart.
The storm ceased. The Sea fell still.
The Author looked at her and whispered, trembling,
"What… is that?"
"It's what you forgot," she said. "The pause that gives meaning. You don't need to write every word. Some stories can breathe on their own."
The Author's form flickered. The blankness around them shifted from white to dawn-colored. For the first time, the primordial being smiled—a fragile curve written by light.
"Then write me no more," it said. "Let me rest in silence once more."
It placed the final quill into Shen Wei's hands, and with that motion, the Author dissolved—returning to the nothing it had always been.
The New Beginning
The bridge crumbled behind them as they crossed back into existence. In the heavens above the mortal world, countless new constellations formed—not dictated by divine script but shaped by every living soul's desire.
The Void Codex floated before them, now truly blank.
Shen Wei turned to Lian Yue.
"The question is gone. What do we do with the answer?"
She smiled. "Live it."
They tore the final page in half, each keeping one side. When they let them fall, the halves dissolved into wind, scattering across creation to become new possibilities.
As the first light of a rewritten universe rose, a whisper moved through every corner of being:
"The void is not empty. It listens."