The error message dissolved into static, then reformed as an old CRT monitor floating in the void—its convex screen flickering with green text against black:
**USER PRIVILEGES UPDATED**
**LIN YUHAN: [READ/WRITE ACCESS GRANTED]**
**ZHANG WEI: [READ/WRITE ACCESS GRANTED]**
Zhang's corruption brand pulsed in time with the cursor, now blinking obediently at the bottom of the screen. Lin reached out, her fingers leaving trails of glitching pixels in the air. The moment she touched the monitor, the glass rippled like water, swallowing her hand to the wrist.
"Don't—" Zhang grabbed her shoulder, but the motion dragged him in too, their bodies stretching into elongated streaks of code as the system ingested them whole.
They landed knee-deep in a word processor. Not a metaphor—actual grass underfoot, each blade a serif font swaying in syntax winds. The sky was a dropdown menu, clouds labeled **CHAPTER BREAKS** and **SCENE TRANSITIONS**. Lin's glasses reflected the source code of a bird overhead, its wingspan braced with XML tags.
Zhang flexed his hands. His fingertips left trails of debug commands in the air. "Are we… inside the manuscript?"
Lin crouched, plucking a blade of grass. It unspooled into a sentence fragment: *the male lead's jaw tightened as he—* She dropped it. The words slithered back into the soil. "We're in the source files. Before compilation."
A new window popped into existence midair—**PROPERTIES: CHARACTER_ID #1305 (TRANSMIGRATOR)**—listing his original traits like inventory items. Lin swiped it aside, revealing nested folders beneath: **/plot_armor**, **/tropes**, **/continuity_errors**. One pulsed with a red alert: **/deleted_scenes**.
Zhang touched it.
The ground inverted.
They fell through a graveyard of discarded drafts—Song Yanhui laughing in a café that no longer existed, the male lead's childhood home crumbling into placeholder text, a thousand iterations of themselves dying in margins. Lin grabbed a floating annotation ribbon, its sticky note reading: *Kill off side characters here?*
The fall ended abruptly in a white void. A single line of text hovered at eye level:
**DRAFT STATUS: [CORRUPTED]**
Lin exhaled. Her breath unspooled as raw CSS, styling the emptiness with temporary borders. "We have admin rights," she said. "But the system's still quarantining us."
Zhang pointed to a timestamp flickering in the void's corner: **LAST STABLE BACKUP: 48H PRE-COLLAPSE**. "It's trying to restore from before we interfered."
A new alert flashed:
**WARNING: CONCURRENT USER DETECTED**
The heiress's car materialized midair, its doors hanging open to reveal a figure hunched over the steering wheel—not Song Yanhui, but someone in a black NID uniform, fingers flying across a holographic keyboard. Their visor scrolled text too fast to read, but Zhang caught one phrase looping endlessly:
**[REASSIGN PROTAGONIST STATUS]**
Lin's mouth hardened. She stepped forward, her shadow stretching into a command line. "Time to crash their edit session."
The ground dissolved into a loading bar.
Somewhere beyond the source files, a printer whirred to life.