The City of Manuscripts breathed.
That was the only way I could describe it. The streets stretched like paragraphs, curling into alleys shaped like commas. Towers rose and fell as if they were lines of text being revised. Whole districts flickered out of existence, then reappeared with new details: an extra balcony, a window, an entirely different roofline.
And through the shifting streets wandered people.
Not people exactly.
Their outlines shimmered, unstable. Some had faces, some didn't. A woman's eyes blinked in and out, leaving her sockets blank before snapping back into focus. A merchant's hands repeated the same coin-counting gesture endlessly, looped like corrupted code. Children skipped in perfect rhythm, then froze mid-step, their laughter stuttering like a broken record.
The sight made my stomach knot.
These weren't NPCs. They weren't alive either. They were… drafts. Characters left half-finished, waiting for someone to decide who and what they were supposed to be.
[Draft World #27: City of Manuscripts.]
[Stability: 27%. Collapse predicted in 42 hours.]
[Archivist Task: Stabilize or Abandon.]
"Stabilize or abandon…" I whispered. The words felt heavy. If I abandoned the world, did that mean everything here—every half-formed soul—would vanish?
The thought haunted me.
I stepped forward. The cobblestone street beneath me shifted, words engraved across the stones. They weren't random letters—they were sentences.
"The Candidate arrives. The Candidate looks around. The Candidate walks forward."
I froze.
The ground was narrating me.
A figure suddenly emerged from a side street. A man in a long robe, stitched together from parchment strips. His face was blank parchment, but words scrawled across it, sentences rewriting constantly.
He raised a hand.
"Archivist Candidate." His voice was layered, echoing like overlapping drafts. "Another one survives the Gate."
My blood chilled. He knew me.
"Who… are you?" I asked, keeping my distance.
"I am a Scribe." The words across his face twisted as he spoke. "A remnant of the Authors' will. My duty is to maintain the Manuscript Worlds until they are finished."
"And what happens if they're abandoned?" I asked.
The Scribe's head tilted. His parchment-face crinkled. "Then we are edited out."
His words rang like a sentence passed down from a judge.
Edited out. Erased. Forgotten.
I glanced around. The flickering people on the streets. The buildings that rewrote themselves. If the world collapsed, all of this—all of them—would disappear.
And yet the System had given me the option: Stabilize or Abandon.
I clenched my fists.
"Why me?" I asked. "Why an Archivist Candidate?"
The Scribe's parchment-face rippled. "Because you are not fixed. You are still being written. You are… a paradox. And only paradox can resist deletion."
Before I could respond, the city groaned.
Entire blocks of buildings twisted, collapsing into black ink. The ground cracked, spilling letters into the void below.
The half-finished citizens screamed—though the sound cut in and out, fragmented like corrupted audio. Some of them simply froze in place, mid-motion, their forms unraveling into drifting sentences.
[Warning: Stability drop detected. Current: 23%.]
The Scribe snapped his parchment-hand toward me. "Candidate! If you wish to stabilize, you must patch the collapse. Use your System."
My System window flared to life.
[Draft Edit Available.]
Option 1: Annotation.
Option 2: Draft Fusion.
Option 3: Abandon.
My heart pounded. Annotation had worked before—but it came with paradox risk. Draft Fusion had saved me against the Glitch Entity, but it ate fragments. Abandon…
No. Not yet.
I raised a trembling hand toward the collapsing district.
The Annotation window blinked open. Cursor ready.
I typed:
[The collapsing buildings should stabilize.]
The window shimmered.
[Annotation accepted.]
[Paradox +1.]
[Current Paradox: 3.]
The ground shuddered. The collapsing structures froze mid-fall. Ink rewound, letters reassembling into bricks, beams, windows. The district knitted itself back into existence.
But something else stirred.
From the rift of black ink that had almost consumed the district, shapes crawled out. Shadowy figures made of writhing letters, their forms shifting between words and claws. Their bodies dripped sentences, fragments of abandoned storylines.
[Glitch Entities Detected: Narrative Wraiths.]
[Objective: Neutralize or Evade.]
The Scribe hissed. "The Wraiths! Products of unfinished drafts. They feed on stability!"
One of them lunged at me, letters slashing across its body: "he failed, he died, he never mattered."
I staggered back, Verdant Impact glowing in my fist. My punch connected, green energy bursting outward. The wraith recoiled, its words scattering like ashes—then immediately reformed, sentences stitching back together.
I cursed. It wasn't enough.
Another window blinked.
[Draft Fusion Possible.]
Suggested: Fuse Verdant Impact + Null Annotation.
"Fuse…?" My breath caught. Null Annotation had an 80% failure chance. If I merged it, what would I get?
The wraith lunged again. I didn't have time to doubt.
"Do it!"
Light flared as the two fragments merged.
[New Skill Acquired: Paradox Fist (Beta).]
A strike that rewrites the target's narrative for one instant. Costs Paradox to use.
The wraith screeched, its body spelling "he was erased" as it lunged.
I swung. My fist glowed black and green, paradox burning in my veins.
When I struck, the wraith unraveled into blank space. The words it had been made of dissolved into nothing, leaving silence behind.
But my System pulsed a warning.
[Paradox +2.]
[Total: 5. Detection risk: Severe.]
I gasped, clutching my chest. The cost was real.
But the wraith was gone. The others hissed and recoiled, slithering back into the cracks of the collapsing city.
For now.
The Scribe lowered his hand. His parchment-face shifted into something like a smile. "You see now. Stabilization requires sacrifice. Each paradox you weave keeps the story alive… but it also draws the Editors' gaze."
The word Editors made my skin crawl.
I thought of the corpse in the tutorial. Paradox overload.
I thought of the whispers. The Candidate persists.
And I thought of what would happen if the Editors decided I shouldn't.
The Scribe stepped closer, parchment-robe rustling. "Archivist Candidate, you must choose. Will you bear paradox and preserve us… or abandon us, and live longer?"
His words rang like a challenge.
Behind him, the city writhed. Half-finished people looked at me with blank eyes, silently begging to exist.
Ahead, my System waited, cursor blinking.
[Archivist Choice Pending.]
Stabilize.
Abandon.
I clenched my fists.
If I stabilized the world, I risked detection, paradox, maybe even deletion.
If I abandoned it, these people—half-finished or not—would vanish forever.
The weight of authorship pressed on me.
And for the first time, I realized the truth.
The Archivist's System wasn't just about survival.
It was about deciding who deserved to exist.
To be continued…