This wasn’t just a Node.
It was The Syntax Bleed—a glitched wound in the Codex Ladder where broken systems leaked out into the narrative continuum.
[Alert: Temporal Heuristic Collapse Detected]
[Causal Priority Disintegrating]
[Memory Desynchronization: 22.4% and rising]
His thoughts began to echo in reverse. Then in future tense. Then in null tense—a language with no verbs, only states of could-have-been.
And then, the bleeding started.
Not from his skin. From his identity.
“Name?”
“Kai.”
“Error. Conflict Detected. Kai is a retrojected echo from Subnarrative Pathway D-3.”
“I… am real!”
“Irrelevant. You have bled beyond your boundaries.”
His memories—fractured snapshots of Earth, the pain, the loss, the void—flashed out of order. His father’s hand. The empty hospital bed. The girl with the broken violin. The blood-slick floor. The broken promise.
He tried to focus, but his Rewrite Core pulsed erratically. Something was pulling at his Absolute Invocation like a loose thread. Reality unraveled when he looked too closely.
One word scrawled itself across the inner surface of the Node:
Doubt.
A presence rose from the syntax wound—an anti-entity, glitch-born and built from contradiction itself.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Name: Ruin Schema
Codex Rank: Unknown
Class: Unwritten
She had no face, only shifting equations of self-erasure. Her voice was synthetic lullaby and binary trauma stitched together.
“You rewrote too much, Kai. This Ladder wasn’t built for a protagonist who doesn’t believe in resolution.”
“Who says I don’t believe?”
“You. Every time you chose pain over healing. Every time you rewrote yourself further from human.”
Kai clenched his fists. His fingers phased into code, then dissolved, then returned—rewritten from metaphor.
“Then what do you want?”
“To prove you’re real. In the one place where logic doesn’t exist.”
She unsheathed her blade—a syntax ripper woven from obsolete authorial intent. One strike, and belief systems collapsed.
[Commencing Trial: Recursive Null-Solving Protocol]
Objective: Survive Meaninglessness
Kai was dropped into a chamber with no floor. No ceiling. Just endless scrolls of contradictory laws.
“The moment you observe this sentence, it is untrue.”
“Gravity is a suggestion written in pencil.”
“Love is the variable used to calculate entropy.”
He laughed. Not from humor. From insanity. The kind that comes when you realize the world was always a bad draft.
“If logic is dead, then I’ll become the new syntax.”
His Edge pulsed—warping into something unspeakable.
Not a sword. Not a quill. Not a gun.
A possibility.
He no longer fought with moves.
He fought with editing styles.
He deleted her weapon.
He italicized her presence.
He struck through her accusations.
Ruin Schema hesitated.
“What are you doing?”
“Becoming what this world can’t correct.”
The Syntax Bleed screamed—an entire Node trying to reject Kai’s presence. The Ladder twisted in agony. The Codex tried to eject him.
But he held.
He anchored to a single truth.
“I am the outcome you didn’t plan for.”
Ruin Schema lunged. Kai didn’t dodge. He deconstructed the moment.
He rewrote the action itself.
[Action Line: Ruin strikes Kai with final blow.]
→ [Revision: Kai absorbs Ruin into himself.]
And just like that—
She became part of him.
The glitch. The unbelief. The wound.
All part of Kai.
Not healed.
Harnessed.
leaking stories—old, forbidden, heretical.
was the rungs.