At exactly twelve o’clock, Chen Yu’s phone lit up.
No ringtone.
No vibration.
Just a soft glow cutting through the darkness of his room.
Chen Yu lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling, counting cracks he had already memorized. Nights were always like this, quiet, empty, and slightly too long. He reached for his phone out of habit, expecting a notification from an app he barely cared about.
Instead, the screen showed something unfamiliar.
[System initializing…]
Chen Yu blinked.
“System?”
He rubbed his eyes and looked again. The words did not disappear.
Before he could react, another line appeared.
[Error detected.]
[User not found.]
A short laugh escaped his lips.
“Figures.”
That line summed up his life better than anything else. Teachers did not notice him unless attendance was short. Classmates remembered him only when they needed an extra member for group work. He was not invisible, but close enough.
He pressed the power button.
The screen did not turn off.
The text shifted, as if correcting itself.
[Registering temporary user…]
[Name: Chen Yu]
[Role: Extra]
The word Extra stayed on the screen.
Chen Yu slowly sat up.
“Extra?”
The light in his room flickered. The fan above him froze mid spin, blades suspended unnaturally in the air. The ticking clock on his desk stopped at 12:00, its seconds trapped forever between two moments.
The silence pressed down on him, thick and uncomfortable.
His phone vibrated.
[Welcome to the Narrative Layer.]
Chen Yu’s heart began to race.
“This isn’t funny,” he muttered, though there was no one to hear him.
The wall in front of his bed rippled.
Not cracked, peeled, like paper being torn away.
Behind it was white. Endless white pages stacked on pages, stretching farther than his eyes could follow. Words formed and dissolved across them, sentences writing themselves in flowing ink.
Chen Yu stood up, legs unsteady.
“A book?”
He took a step forward, and the floor beneath his feet turned flat and smooth, like the surface of a page. Words slid under his shoes.
The hero raised his blade, standing before fate itself.
Chen Yu froze.
Someone walked past him.
A boy around his age, dressed in worn armor, sword hanging casually at his side. His posture was confident, his eyes sharp and unwavering. Every step he took caused the words beneath him to rearrange, reshaping the story to make room for him.
The hero.
Chen Yu turned toward him instinctively.
“Hey”
The hero walked straight through him.
No resistance.
No reaction.
Chen Yu staggered back, staring at his own hands.
[Notice:]
[Extras cannot be perceived by main characters.]
“So I’m not even real here?”
The pages rustled, like a book being flipped too quickly.
Another message appeared.
[Extras exist to maintain narrative stability.]
[When stability is restored, extras are removed.]
Removed.
Chen Yu swallowed.
Far away, somewhere deep within the pages, a violent tremor ran through the story. Words smeared. Sentences broke apart mid line. The white pages darkened as if soaked in ink.
The hero stopped walking.
For the first time, confusion crossed his face.
The story was no longer following him.
A sentence burned itself into the air.
The hero fell.
Chen Yu felt it, not physically, but deeply, like something fundamental had cracked. The pages screamed as entire paragraphs collapsed into nothingness.
The hero dropped to one knee, blood staining the words beneath him.
Chen Yu stared.
“That’s not supposed to happen,” he whispered.
The world trembled harder.
[Warning:]
[Main narrative failure detected.]
The hero fell completely still.
Time refused to move forward.
Chen Yu looked at the shaking pages, at the frozen sky made of sentences, at the story that no longer knew what to do with itself.
Another message appeared, colder than the rest.
[All extras scheduled for deletion.]
Chen Yu’s breath hitched.
“So that’s it?” he said softly. “I don’t even get an ending?”
The sword lay beside the fallen hero, its blade digging into the text of the world itself.
Chen Yu stared at it.
Extras were not meant to interfere.
Extras were not meant to matter.
But if the story ended here, nothing would exist anymore, not even him.
Slowly, deliberately, Chen Yu stepped forward.
The moment his fingers touched the sword, pain shot up his arm, like the story itself was rejecting him. Words warped and screamed around his hand.
[Error.]
[Unauthorized action detected.]
Chen Yu clenched his teeth and lifted the sword anyway.
“I know,” he said quietly. “I know I don’t belong.”
He stood between broken sentences and unfinished fate, legs shaking, grip unsteady.
“I was never chosen,” he continued. “Never special. Never important.”
The world trembled.
“But if someone like me doesn’t stand up now,” Chen Yu said, raising the blade, “then this story doesn’t deserve an ending.”
The pages went silent.
For a brief moment, nothing existed, not the hero, not the villain, not even the system.
Then the words began to move again.
Not around the hero.
Around Chen Yu.
Ink rewrote itself.
When the chosen fell, the forgotten stepped forward.
The story breathed.
When time finally resumed, the world was whole again.
The hero awoke, the threat gone, the ending secured. He would never remember the boy who stood in his place.
And Chen Yu was gone.
No name.
No role.
No page.
Only a single line remained at the very end of the story, written in ink that refused to fade.
Sometimes, the one who saves the world is the one who was never meant to exist.
