I slept very little.
Not from insomnia.
Not from fear.
But because I had found something better than rest:
the silence between the system's ticks.
---
There are moments the world doesn't register.
Fragments so small that not even the narrators, the lesser gods, or the tainted moons seem to notice them.
I hunted them.
They were slivers of time with no owner.
Little gaps in the code where I could move without leaving a trace.
That's where I trained.
That's where I experimented.
That's where I learned to bend reality without breaking it.
---
I discovered I could "postpone" wounds.
Not heal them. That would be magic.
Just... convince the world they hadn't happened yet.
A broken arm became a pending debt.
Pain got filed like an unopened notification.
But everything had a cost.
And the cost was that every postponed wound returned.
All at once. At the worst possible time.
I called it: Causality Compensation.
And still, I kept doing it. Because it meant that I, a mere extra, could negotiate with the rules.
---
One day, I stopped hearing the other slaves.
Not because they hated me —though they probably did— but because I could no longer understand them.
Their complaints sounded like glitches.
Their prayers like miswritten commands.
I had become a spectator in a badly acted play.
And I was terrified by how much I was starting to resemble the system I despised.
---
I began talking to myself.
Whispering. Sometimes in dreams.
Not to my current self.
But to the versions I saw in future timelines.
One of them told me to cut out my tongue before I learned to speak to the system.
Another said I should get caught and "re-scripted" as an NPC, just to spy from within.
All of them insane.
All of them me.
---
But in the middle of that madness, something new appeared:
a question the system couldn't answer.
Every time I thought it, the shadows twitched.
The air blinked.
And reality stuttered as if trying to render a scene that didn't exist.
The question was simple:
> "What if this world isn't being played… but written as we live it?"
---
The possibility burned through my mind.
Because if it was true, then every step I took —every glitch, every anomalous choice— wasn't breaking the script.
I was writing it.