Chapter 254: Meet Your Creator

Reid could already tell something was happening, something he did not like, something he could not handle.

"No... no, no, no!" Reid panicked, his eyes wide with horror as he felt the warmth draining from my touch, my hands becoming translucent against his skin. "Kain, don’t go! Stay with me! Fight it!"

"I love you," I whispered, my voice echoing with a soft, ethereal resonance as the gravitational pull of the gate began drawing me backward. "I love you so much, Reid. Take care of our Sarah. Tell her... tell her her papa loves her every single day."

I didn’t want to leave him. Every fiber of my soul fought against the tether pulling me backward, but the pull was absolute.

I leaned forward, using every last drop of my fading spiritual energy to press my lips against Reid’s. It was a soft, desperate, feather-light kiss, tasting of phantom warmth and bitter tears. As a single tear rolled down my cheek, my form dissolved completely, leaving his lips touching nothing but the cold night air. I became invisible to him once again.

"KAIN!" Reid screamed into the empty corridor, his voice breaking as his arms clutched at the air where I had just been standing.

My chest ached with a crushing, suffocating guilt as I was drawn step-by-step toward the glowing archway. My regret is having to make you face the pain of losing me a second time, I thought, staring back at his devastated face. I am sorry, Reid. Maybe it was because I was selfish...

Just as I took another step toward the towering gate, Sarah let out a sharp, piercing cry, her tiny wails echoing off the walls.

My selfishness kept me by your side all this time, I thought, tears flowing endlessly as I listened to my daughter cry for the mother she would never know. But once my wish to see you and be held by you was fulfilled, that was the end of the road for me... Now, I have to leave. I love you, Reid. I pray that in our next lives...

I closed my eyes, letting the blinding white light of the gate engulf me completely as I stepped over the threshold.

...we will once again be lovers.

I braced myself for the final fade, waiting for my mind to dissolve into nothingness or be swept into whatever judgment awaited a departed soul.

Instead, the blinding light settled into a steady, sterile brightness.

When I opened my eyes again, I wasn’t in heaven, hell, or a foggy realm of spirits. I was standing in a vast, utterly boundless white space. A few yards away, tucked into a corner of the endless void, sat an absolute mess of a workstation: a cluttered wooden desk overflowing with towering stacks of paper, scattered reference books, and at least four empty, stained coffee mugs.

In the middle of the mess sat a woman, hunched over a laptop and typing at a frantic, violent speed.

"...cliché plot hole... need to finish this damn arc... sleeping is for the weak..." she muttered, her fingers slapping the keyboard like gunfire as she cursed under her breath.

I stood frozen, completely bewildered. Was this the afterlife? Was this what waited beyond the gates? It was definitely not what I expected.

Slowly, my legs carried me toward the desk. "Um, hello. Is this... the afterlife?" I asked softly.

She didn’t answer. She didn’t even pause. She just kept muttering under her breath about deadlines, Chapter counts, and editor emails, her eyes glued to the glowing screen while her hands flew across the keys.

I took a few more steps, stepping around a pile of printed manuscript pages and eyeing the mountain of empty coffee cups on her desk.

"Excuse me," I called out properly, my voice echoing in the vast white room.

The woman flinched violently, her fingers freezing mid-stroke over the keyboard.

"Is this the afterlife?" I asked again, my brow furrowed in confusion.

She slowly turned her head toward me, finally stopping her furious typing. She blinked twice, her bloodshot eyes wide, before reaching up to rub at the heavy, dark purple circles bruised under her eyes.

She stared at me for three long seconds. Then, her eyes snapped wide open, and she gasped, violently shoving her chair back so hard it nearly tipped over.

"What are you doing here?!" she exclaimed, pointing a trembling finger straight at my chest. "Is the story over already?!"

But then she looked past my shoulder, craning her neck to search the left, then the right. There was literally nowhere to hide in this infinite, blinding void, but her eyes kept darting back and forth in total confusion.

"Wait... where’s your other half?" she asked, her brow furrowing as she squinted past me into the empty white space. "The initial plan was for you and Reid to grow old and die together, so... why are you here alone?"

"Ah, I died during delivery," I said simply, my voice calm and even.

She gasped, her bloodshot eyes snapping wide open. "What?!"

She shrieked, slapping both hands against her forehead so hard it made a loud smack that echoed across the empty space. "You died during delivery?! No! No, no, no! You were supposed to have a slight complication, a dramatic high-fever fainting spell, a coma moment, a dramatic recovery, and then live happily ever after with Reid, raise your baby and then live till your nineties!"

"Well," I said mildly, glancing down at her chaotic desk. "My body gave out. My core was already damaged from the season, and the strain was too much."

"Because I wrote the injury arc too heavy?!" she yelled, throwing her arms in the air.

Then, without warning, she dropped flat onto her knees, slamming her forehead straight onto the floor of the void in a full-fledged, desperate kowtow.

"I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! I was running on two hours of sleep and four cold espresso shots, I didn’t mean to kill you! Forgive me, Cap! The readers are literally going to firebomb my comment section, they’re ging to send me death threats in the paragraph comments!"

She paused and went, "Ah, wait. I think they already are." she rubbed her chin. "Hmm, now the knife threats seem to make more sense," she said as if she had just made sense to what she had been seeing for the last few days.

She kowtowed again, "forgive meeee!"

I blinked, taking a small step back as I watched her grovel at my feet.

"You... don’t need to bow. I don’t really blame anyone for my death. It was my choice to push through." I paused, looking around the endless white space before looking back down at her mess of dark hair. "So... who are you, exactly?"

She peeked up from the floor, her dark circles making her look like a frantic panda, a stray sticky note stuck to her cheek.

"Well... I’m an underpaid webnovel writer. But in this realm? You can just refer to me as your god. I created you, you know. I gave you that jawline. I gave you that stubborn hockey captain personality, huhu."

"My god?" I repeated, a faint, skeptical eyebrow raising. I didn’t dwell on the existential crisis of it—I had far more important things on my mind. "If you’re the one who writes my fate, then... can I go back?"

Instead of answering directly, she scrambled back to her feet, abruptly pacing back and forth in front of her desk like a caged animal. She started mumbling aloud, her hands making wild gestures in the air as the sheer volume of caffeine in her system clearly took full control.

"Okay, okay, think! If I send you back now, do I make it a time-loop? No, time-loops are so overdone. Or maybe a secret twin brother arc? Wait, no, your parents only had two sets of twins, a secret twin would ruin the family lore... Oh! What if I write an alien abduction twist?! No, the sports genre tag would reject it... Tsk."

I stared at her, watching her march three steps left, spin around, and march three steps right while aggressively chewing on the cap of a gel pen.

"...Are you okay?" I asked cautiously.

"I’m thriving!" she barked out, spinning to face me with wide, unblinking eyes before immediately turning back to her desk. "I just need to fix the timeline before my editor logs on!"

She dove back into her squeaky desk chair, her fingers flying across the trackpad at blinding speed as she clicked through file after file. "Let me check... let me see where the current Chapter timeline is..."

Suddenly, her face instantly paled, the manic energy vanishing into sheer awkwardness as she stared at the glowing laptop screen.

"Okay, bad news," she winced, looking up at me carefully. "Your original body is... well, it’s been months in the story timeline. It’s already buried. Decayed. We can’t do a simple wake-up-from-a-coma miracle unless you want to come back as a zombie, and I don’t think Reid’s romance arc supports necrophilia."

My chest tightened, the image of Reid’s devastated face and Sarah’s tiny, crying frame rushing back to hit me like a physical blow.

"Then what about reincarnation? Or a new body? Can I put you into someone else? That seems like the only way possible now," she muttered.

"Can you do that?" I asked.

The author stopped scrolling. She picked up a stray gel pen from the clutter on her desk, twirling it deftly between her fingers as a confident, mischievous smirk slowly replaced her panicked expression.

"Duh," she said, leaning back in her chair and tapping the pen against her chin. "I’m the author of your fate. There’s nothing I can’t do."