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.

  Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

  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.