The void is not empty. It is a canvas of white noise and static, where time doesn't flow—it loops.
I didn't know that then. To me, the universe was a dual-monitor setup in a cramped office, a cold cup of coffee, and a heart that finally decided twenty-nine years of solitude was enough. I died with a sigh of relief, thinking I had reached the finish line. I thought I had finally earned the right to disappear.
But the universe is a cruel author, and it wasn't done with me.
When I opened my eyes, I wasn't in the afterlife. I was in a hospital bed, wrapped in a body that wasn't mine, greeted by a floating ball of fluff named Bǎo Bèi. It told me I was an "Extra" in a melodrama titled 'My CEO Hubby'. It told me my job was to be the background noise to someone else's symphony.
I accepted the deal. Not for the sake of the story, but for the warmth of the parents I had never had—Lin Meiling's ginger soup and Lin Jian's steady hand. If playing a puppet was the price for a home, I would dance on my strings until they snapped.
But something is rotting at the core of this world.
I was supposed to be invisible. I was supposed to walk past the fountain, disrupt a fated meeting between a girl and a villain, and vanish back into the crowd. I was a variable meant to stabilize the script.
Instead, I met him. "Yan Mujin."
The original novel described him as a monster—a man who burned worlds to possess a single woman. But when our eyes met, he didn't look at the Female Lead. He looked at me with a hunger that spanned centuries. He knew my name before I spoke it. He looked at me not as an "Extra," but as a missing piece of himself.
I tell myself it's a glitch. I tell myself the System is just calibrating.
But sometimes, when the room is quiet and Bǎo Bèi is silent, I feel a strange resonance in my bones. I feel the weight of a thousand lives I don't remember living. And far above the clouds, in a space that shouldn't exist, a blue screen flickers with a truth I'm not ready to see.
Yan Mujin is not just a character. He is a prisoner who has lived this nightmare nine hundred and ninety-nine times. He has been waiting for the cycle to break.
And for some reason, I am the crack in the glass.
The "Extra" is no longer watching from the sidelines. The Creator has returned to his garden, but he has forgotten he ever planted the seeds. And the Villain? He isn't interested in the story anymore. He's interested in the one who wrote it.
My name is Lin Xiao. I wanted a retirement. I wanted a family. I wanted peace.
But the world is vibrating. The script is tearing. And the man who was meant to destroy the world is currently standing in the shadows of my street, watching my window, waiting for me to remember why I trapped him here in the first place.
The game hasn't changed. It has finally begun.