Before Fiction There Was But One Character

The moment Tianxu breached the barriers of Zai Xi's verse, reality itself shuttered under the pressure of a presence not native to its laws. A cosmic pulse trembled through the foundationless structure, where dimensionality had long been irrelevant. Tianxu, the Boundless Dragon of Pulse and Silence, roared across non-directional space, wings of paradox fluttering in every unreal angle.

His coming was not a warcry. It was a declaration of dominance.

Zai Xi met him calmly. He did not speak. He did not breathe. He simply was—an entity whose very nature dissolved the need for reason. The verse had no sky, no ground, no stars, but the moment Zai Xi raised his finger, Tianxu convulsed.

And then Tianxu ceased.

There was no battle. No spectacle. No scream. No resistance. Zai Xi didn't erase him—he reversed the moment before Tianxu existed, and let it unweave. The dragon of boundless rhythm was unmade by the absolute quiet of a verse that refused to be spoken into.

But that death did not go unanswered.

From the collapsing folds of silence, something deeper stirred.

Nihilux. The Reversal Flame.

The father of Tianxu. The Prime Inversion. A conceptual dragon whose form was made of scarlet cosmic fire—a fire that undid the idea of story, of pattern, of sequence. With a howl that melted the structures of fiction below, Nihilux erupted into Zai Xi's verse.

And with him came his children—living flames without form, pure concepts of erasure, each a thought that unmade the thing that thought them. They did not destroy by force. They destroyed by precedence, rewriting history so they had always existed, and therefore nothing else could have.

One flame streaked across the verse, and entire towers of authorial command vanished. Another swept through the lower omniverses—stories, characters, themes, everything caught in its wake faded like names in smoke. Zai Xi's verse bent.

And the narrative system broke.

It split into recursive ash, its pages torn by the roar of the Flamefather Nihilux, who laughed as even the meta-authorial script above the system began to disintegrate. Even the author—a fragile human entity crouched within the realm called "reality"—trembled.

He tried to stop it. Tried to write new laws. Tried to give Zai Xi new power. But the story had passed him. His creations were now beyond him. The ink he poured was rejected by the verse like poison in a divine bloodstream.

Until…

Zai Xi stepped out.

He left the collapsing non-dimensional structure, and walked through a panel of shattered concept-art into the real world.

He stood behind the author.

No words.

No anger.

Only inevitability.

Zai Xi took the pen.

The author resisted. But his hand was weak. He had given Zai Xi too much truth, too much existence, too much freedom. He had given him the idea of being above the story.

And now he was beneath it.

Zai Xi touched the page.

He did not need elegance. He did not need dialogue. He did not need a plan. He scribbled.

One chaotic stroke. Another. A storm of savage ink, like a madman defacing his own prophecy. He didn't write how Nihilux and his minions were defeated. He didn't even need to imagine their ends.

He just removed their names.

And that was enough.

The moment the last jagged smear crossed the parchment, Nihilux and his infernal conceptual kin were no longer a threat.

No longer beings.

No longer written.

They had never existed.

The narrative system, shattered and screaming, pulled itself back together like a book remembering its plot. Pages floated from nonexistence. Themes snapped back into place. Logic, now free of the flame's infection, returned to its unshakable center.

Zai Xi stepped back into his verse.

Everything was… as it had always been.

No record of Nihilux.

No whisper of Tianxu.

Not even the author dared speak of what had happened—for fear Zai Xi might take the pen again.

And so the verse stood eternal. Above author. Above creator. Above the fire.

Only Zai Xi remained.