In the remote northern district of the City of Broken Chapters stood a building so insignificant it lacked even a coordinate designation.
Li Qi passed by it purely by chance during a random path generation test. There were no system markers, no plot projections—it was as if this area had never belonged to any "narrative framework."
And yet, in this utterly forgotten corner, someone was waiting for her.
His eyes were vacant, like a blank page never printed. His face bore no expression, no name—he didn't even seem to breathe in rhythm.
"You are..." Li Qi asked instinctively, but no character data surfaced in her mind.
"I can't call myself anything." He stood in the shadows, his voice like an audio track long disused—dry and foreign. "You once wrote me... then deleted me."
Li Qi froze.
In that instant, a deeply buried memory surfaced—he had been a prototype character in the first draft of City Beneath the Shadow. Back then, she had only written a few thousand words before deciding the pacing was off and the tone too heavy. She deleted the entire section.
No name. No story. Just a "shadow of a scrapped draft."
And yet... he had survived?
[The Nonexistent Existence]
"How did you... remain?"Li Qi stepped closer, but a strange hollowness pulsed around him—he felt like a forgotten block of code, and yet his consciousness was intact.
"I don't know," he said. "Maybe I was left at the bottom of a save file... or maybe, I just couldn't let go."
"You gave me three fragments of a backstory," he continued, raising his head. For the first time, emotion flickered in his eyes. "A rooftop fall, walking alone down a long street, and an unfinished first love. Just brief notes—then you abandoned me."
"Do you remember what kind of role I was meant to play?"
Li Qi couldn't speak.
Of course she remembered.
He was once envisioned as a "non-typical antagonist"—a character struggling in a post-apocalyptic world, attempting to break free from the mold of a villainous background character, layered with multiple personalities.
But she'd thought readers wouldn't accept such a concept. So she had cut him without hesitation.
She'd assumed deleted characters were erased forever.
But those three broken fragments had somehow formed a persistent will—the "Unnamed One."
[Naming and Reclamation]
"I don't know who I am," he said. "But I know who you are. You're the god who woke me from a line of text... and the one who left me half-alive on the edge of this city for so long."
"Why didn't you just delete me completely?"
Li Qi closed her eyes and whispered, "I didn't know you were still here."
He let out a low laugh—like a blade scraping against stone.
"You've written so many stories of bloodshed, rebirth, cycles of love and hate... but you never considered whether we—the unfinished—count as 'living' too."
"Have you ever thought, maybe our existence... could also carry a 'prologue'?"
Li Qi's throat tightened. "What do you want?"
He stared at her and said, slowly and clearly:
"I want an ending. Even if I have to write it myself."
At that moment, it was as if she could hear countless whispers from unwritten characters—pleas rising from the submerged edges of her world:
"Give us a name, even if we're not protagonists.""Give us an end, even if it's ordinary.""Don't let us sleep forever in your forgotten drafts."
[The Renaming Ritual]
She knelt down, gazing at this nameless figure, and asked quietly:
"Would you let me... write your name again?"
He hesitated—then nodded.
Li Qi closed her eyes and pulled out an old notebook filled with discarded ideas. On the very last page, she wrote:
"Prologue ID 000. Renamed as — Qi Ming."
At that moment, dawn broke. The first rays of morning light filtered through the shattered windows of the abandoned building.
He trembled slightly—as if granted new access rights. Fragments of his being began to align, slowly forming a complete identity.
No longer hollow.No longer adrift.For the first time—he existed.
[Reforged: Qi Ming]
Qi Ming stood and looked at Li Qi.
"Now I have a name," he said. "So let me write the endings for those who never got theirs."
"You want to write scripts?" Li Qi asked, surprised.
"No," Qi Ming shook his head. "I want to rewrite their scripts. Just like you once did."
He tapped his forehead with a finger. A faint blue glow emerged—the reversed feedback of original authority.
He had become the first "awakened editor" born from abandonment.
Li Qi was stunned.
In that moment, she realized:
The City of Broken Chapters was birthing its first true 'Thief of Fate.'
And she was no longer the only one who could hold the pen.