At three in the morning, Lin Ci typed the final line.
"Xiao Yan ascends the throne, then dies three days later. Poisoned wine burns through his guts, and his life ends on the imperial throne."
She hit Enter, then closed the document. The comment section exploded. Readers had been cursing her for four years. She never opened that document again.
Then she woke up.
Her cheek pressed against cold flagstones, the smell of damp earth filling her nostrils. She wore coarse clothes, and a wooden hairpin held up her thin, limp bun. Before her was a narrow alley. Most of the roses along the wall had withered, their leaves riddled with insect holes.
She recognized that brick.
Three years ago, at three in the morning, she had typed it out one word at a time.
Now she was standing inside it. Not as the author, but as a palace maid who did not exist in the original story.
Worse, this world was falling apart. The bottom of the well had turned white. Walls vanished into blankness. The parts she had left unfinished were collapsing through cracks. Voices came from the emptiness, very far away: furious curses. The resentment of readers and characters had pierced the wall between two worlds.
Xiao Yan had already set his sights on her.
The man she had written for 178 chapters, then poisoned to death in three, was standing before her. He hadn't drawn a blade, but there was something in his eyes colder than one.
"When you wrote about me, did you ever think I might feel pain?"
Lin Ci opened her mouth, but no sound came out.
She had thought about it. But she didn't dare say so.
Because the man she had written for 178 chapters was no longer the one she had created.
