Ren's mapping project consumed three days.
Not because the work was slow — Ren Lockwood operated at a processing speed that made the academy's Aether-crystal computers look sluggish. Three days because the scope was enormous. Twelve game routes. Forty-seven death flags. Five heroine arcs. Three protagonist trajectories. Eight arc outlines spanning 1,300 chapters. And the gaps — the missing continents, the unrendered details, the places where the game's map ended and reality's map continued into unmapped darkness.
The result filled six notebooks. Not the frantic, seismograph-style notes of concert documentation — these were structured. Clean. Organized into a system that Ren had designed specifically for cross-referencing fictional narratives against observed reality. Each notebook had a color. Each color mapped to a category. Each category contained cross-references to the other notebooks so that pulling on any thread revealed the connections to every related element.
