I froze.
Then Hải Đông reached out and touched the silver thread on my wrist. It snapped.
I remembered dying.
Not heroically. Not even villainously. Just... forgotten. xuyen thanh nam the phao hoi cua nhan vat phan dien ebook
When I sat up from the rain-soaked stage, I felt a crack in my chest where my heart should be. Not pain. A gap. And through that gap, I could see something I never saw before:
Then a thousand new threads burst from my skin, thicker, angrier, pulsing with red light. A system notification blazed in the air: WARNING: CANNON FODDER INTEGRITY COMPROMISED. DEPLOYING EMERGENCY NARRATIVE CORRECTION. The stage cracked. The sky turned into pages—pages of the ebook, flying like locusts, wrapping around us. I grabbed Hải Đông’s hand.
“We burn it,” I said. “All of it.” I froze
I looked down at my palm. A glowing line of text appeared, burned into my skin: "You are the villain. You have died 6 times. Survival probability this loop: 0.3%. Would you like to read comments from the previous timeline?" I pressed my thumb to the text.
Thin, silver, luminous threads stretched from my wrists, my ankles, my throat—disappearing into the darkness above. Puppet strings. And at the end of each string… a hand.
Each time, I tried to change the ending. Tried to be kind. Tried to be invisible. Tried to betray the hero earlier, later, never. But the plot—like a black hole—always bent my actions back toward destruction. I was the cannon fodder. The narrative needed my ashes to pave the hero’s golden road. I remembered dying
This is not my first return. This is my .
Then the stage lights blazed on. And standing at the edge of the spotlight was – the hero, Hải Đông. Young, golden, righteous. His sword pointed at my throat, but his eyes… his eyes were wet.
“The first time,” he said quietly, “I killed you because the script said ‘the hero must overcome his greatest temptation.’ You were the temptation. I hated myself. But the readers loved it.”
Not an author’s hand. Not a god’s. A reader’s.