The Gray Zone of the Fate Editing Bureau does not appear on any map.
Before entering, Lin Lan left Shen Yan with just one piece of advice:
> "Once you're inside, don't trust anything that talks — not even yourself."
What kind of warning was that?
At first, Shen Yan thought it was just an exaggerated metaphor. But the moment he truly stepped into the "Gray Zone of the Editing Bureau," he realized — this place wasn't part of reality at all.
It was more like an unfinished dream.
He stood on the edge of a fracture. Behind him lay the stable, bright, mechanical, and indifferent Main Street of Fate; before him loomed a massive archive tower shrouded in gray fog. The building stretched far beyond reasonable dimensions, tilted like a crescent moon. Its surface was covered in mottled newspapers and fractured time stamps. Stranger still, the files inside were flipping themselves, as if being reviewed by invisible hands.
As Shen Yan approached, raspy whispers reached his ears—
> "Subject No. 19735... last edited... incomplete, incomplete…"
> "File missing. Please submit supplemental memory fragments…"
> "Do you remember how old you were when you first said, 'I want to live'?"
In that instant, his heart jolted.
The voice wasn't someone else's.
—It was his own.
Childish, faint, like a little boy who hadn't yet accepted his fate.
He instinctively looked up at the wall — only to find a blurry humanoid silhouette writhing beneath the paper, struggling and distorted, like a forgotten version of his "old self."
"Don't move."
Lin Lan appeared behind him at some point, his expression uncharacteristically stern.
"If you respond to it even once, it will take your place."
Shen Yan's throat tightened.
"I just heard…"
"Your childhood self," Lin Lan nodded. "The Gray Zone's Archive extracts the most vulnerable moments from your memory, trying to lure you into becoming your past self."
"Why?"
"So you'll never escape," Lin Lan replied lightly. "The one you're looking for — Yi Nan — fled here and started writing over a thousand 'parallel versions of you' into the archive."
Shen Yan's pupils contracted.
"What is he doing?"
"Creating a 'perfect fate' model." Lin Lan handed over a photograph. "He wrote one version of you that died at twenty. Another that lived forever in a fairy tale. Every version is more obedient, more compliant, more aligned with his 'script.'"
The photo was blurry, but it clearly showed a variant of Shen Yan — dressed in a spotless school uniform, with a vacant expression and a plastic smile, like someone who'd lost all trace of their own emotions.
"Tell me," Lin Lan ground his teeth, "isn't he the absolute worst?"
Shen Yan nodded. "The absolute worst."
"Exactly," Lin Lan raised his hand and unlocked a pathway. "So now, let's go ruin his screenwriting fantasy."
"Wait," Shen Yan suddenly asked, "why are you helping me?"
Lin Lan paused, then gave a bitter smile. "Because I was one of the first NPCs he ever wrote. But he deleted me for being 'too disobedient.'"
"…You're not human?"
"I am," Lin Lan looked up, his eyes clear. "Just not the kind of 'good boy' he wrote."
Shen Yan was silent for a moment, then the corner of his mouth curled upward.
"Perfect. Then let's go — two rewritten people — and have a little talk with him."
Lin Lan gave a rare smile, voice light but laced with fury:
"Let's go rewrite that bastard's script."