Chapter 11: The Birth of a New Story
Sumi's body was dragged through the collapsing void left by Sung Ki's final ability. There was no resistance. There couldn't be. For she was being woven not into death, but into something worse: a story. A primordial, unfinished narrative birthed by a thought without the Book, without the Pen, without a Writer. A raw fiction held together by sheer will.
She awoke.
Her eyes opened to whiteness.
It was not light.
It was uncreated.
It was the blank stage of the "Unknown Verse," a realm that existed beyond the concept of stories as traditionally understood. This was the birthplace of all inapplicable narratives, beyond thought, imagination, written or unwritten. It wasn't merely an empty plane; it was a layered paradox: an infinite white void that was simultaneously nothing and everything. Here, Sung Ki had forged a reality using the logic of impossibility.
Sumi stood, alone. There was no air. No gravity. No time. Yet she stood. And she knew. For knowledge here was not learned, but embedded. The metaphysical structure of this nascent cosmology unraveled itself before her mind.
Then came creation.
The white became black. The black became void.
And from that void, structure.
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Within this story that Sung Ki imagined, a single universe bloomed—infinite in size and density—divided into three great realms:
The Mortal Realm, where inapplicable dimensionality reigned: every timeline held within it a complete replica of this cosmology. Each decision, possibility, and impossibility created new stories within this one.
Heaven, transcendent and layered in inaccessible ways, where time, space, imagination, and logic did not exist. Each layer above transcended all beneath it.
The Underworld, a reflection of the mortal realm without the flow of time, its infinite layers mirroring but surpassing the one below.
These three realms existed within a single universe. But even this universe was but an atom within the Multiverse, whose numbers could not be applied or grasped. The multiverse existed in the Voidspace, a domain with no sense of conceptuality—a framework of Platonic hierarchies based on the aleph numbers, reaching beyond all inaccessible cardinals.
All of it contained in The Box of Existence, a boundless cube housing inapplicable layers and planes, arranged infinitely, alphabetically, symbolically. And within this new story, Sung Ki envisioned the Box as the letter S.
Each alphabet—each letter or number—was an entire cosmology, housing worlds like grains of sand.
The Invisible Line between them bore the concepts of duality and nonduality—Yin and Yang, balance and imbalance, cause and effect, zero and infinity.
Yet this was merely the infrastructure.
The black plane, the empty dark behind all things, was the supreme layer. It wasn't a place. It was a metaphysical principle. It didn't exist to hold reality, it was the reason reality could be imagined.
It was the philosophical code and discarded theories, the alchemical potential, the abandoned stories and the breath of unborn thoughts. It was feeling, idea, and equation. It was everything imagined and never imagined.
In this state, Sumi saw it all. The cosmology layered into her mind like burning symbols. She understood.
Sung Ki had created a complete inaccessible cosmology, using only the knowledge of atoms from Jin-Young Zheng's tournament story.
He had bent the principle of "reality equals fiction" to construct a branch.
A new story.
And it was unidentified but known as Unknown Verse.
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Sumi floated within that first-born universe, her presence resonating with the void.
"I see," she whispered. "So this is the cage... you locked me in a thought. A reality crafted from the same metaphysical dust as that of the 'Tournament World,' yet folded infinitely until even its atoms have weight."
She could not move. Not until she obeyed the laws of this story. Not until she understood the logic of its narrative.
She looked up. The sky was forming.
A sun was being born, not from hydrogen, but from syllables. Letters forming light. Heat birthed from grammar. Worlds spawning from syntax.
This was not just a story.
This was a weaponized narrative.
And she, the first to witness it.
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Elsewhere, in the stadium of the Lower World, Jin-Young Zheng opened her eyes, sensing something shift. Something branch. She looked toward the screen. The signal from Sumi's tracking was gone.
A single ripple on the edge of narrative detection.
"So," she muttered. "You finally made your own story."
Saito, sitting beside her, looked over. "Huh?"
She smiled slightly. "Sung Ki just committed a taboo. He created a verse."
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The story of the unidentified, Unknown Verse had begun. And its first word was Exile.
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To be continued