A Writer's Transmigration With A System

The first door shattered like a struck tooth, and the White Prison began to drown.

White tide poured down from hairline cracks in a ceiling that had never been there before, not water, but liquid blankness, the color of nothing about to become less than nothing.

Where it touched, a door’s carved name simply stopped having ever been written. Where it touched a spilled memory thing, the thing forgot its own shape mid scream and smoothed out into the floor like a spilled drink drying.

"They’re erasing the room," Li Jiwen shouted over the rising roar, backing away from the creeping tide line with the faceless figure pacing him on silent feet. "The whole library! That’s not warden behavior, that’s arson!"

"His floor," said a rough voice by his wrist. "He will flood it before he lets a single page walk out of here."

The ring had found him. It came screaming down out of the flickering dark as a red streak and clamped onto his finger hard enough to bruise, black metal, one red eye open and furious.

Li Ming, Grand God of Slaughter, was back, and he sounded exactly like a man who had spent eternity in prison hearing his jailer start a fire.

Across the pale floor, all thousand doors burst open at once.

Memory things spilled out in a tide of their own. A wedding general in twelve layered banners of mourning silk marched past with twin braziers for a heart. A funeral choir of fat crows in clerical collars flapped by, singing a name no one alive remembered. An iron ox cavalry the size of houses thundered from a door somewhere left of infinity, ridden by things made of stacked letters.

And then the tide reached them, and everything became three overlapping wars.

Baal’s white flood ate whatever it caught. The memory things fought it, fought each other, and hunted trespassers, because to be seen was to be validated and to be touched was to be consumed. A regret lantern monk drifted at Li Jiwen trailing eighty feet of prayer flags, each one embroidered with an apology, when Li Jiwen ducked its sweeping lamp arm, the monk’s lamp flame bent toward him hungrily.

’Everything in here wants to be carried out,’ he thought, severing the lantern arm with one edge of the hand chop hardened by his speed. ’Books, memories, monsters. This whole prison is a rumor that refuses to die quietly.’

"Slaughter Verse: Line Break," Li Ming said, almost bored.

Red light scythed off the ring in a straight line and cut the monk, the brazier general bearing down behind it, and a hundred foot lane of advancing tide into one clean geometry of absence. The gap sealed itself with soft hisses within two breaths. The gap was enough.

They ran through it, and the war rearranged itself around them like water around a stone.

"How many doors?" Li Jiwen gasped, vaulting a wave that crested twelve feet tall and broke into sheets of pale page shadows.

"You felt them rattle? Nine hundred ninety nine still locked." The red eye swiveled. "One open. His. He’s herding us toward it."

Li Jiwen looked back. The tide wasn’t chasing them so much as folding the floor in half around them, walls of white rising port and starboard, an extinguishing funnel narrowing ahead. Any direction they turned offered only doors already spewing hostiles or silence already turning blank.

"He wants us in something," Li Jiwen said. "I hate being steered more than I hate dying, and I have died enough to have opinions."

"Then pick faster," said Li Ming.

The Twelve Banner Wedding General chose that moment to arrive in front of them, silk layers opening like a carnivorous flower, braziers roaring. Its voice was the sound of every toast ever given at funerals: "BE CARRIED. BE REMEMBERED. JOIN THE PROCESSION."

"With respect, fellow Taoist," Li Jiwen said, twisting aside as banner folds snapped where his head had been, "the bride would object."

The figure did not argue. The small white being walked directly into the general’s shadow, and the general, mountain legged, brazier hearted, mad with memory flinched backward as if scalded. Whatever weight lived inside that faceless little shape, even incarnate longing declined to touch it.

In the flinch’s gap, Li Ming fired the line break slash again, low this time, shearing the general’s legs below the third banner fold. The mountain of silk toppled majestically forward into the tide, which took it the way paper takes flame, silently, totally, without comment.

"Note," Li Jiwen panted, leaping the collapse, "your sword is now a finger. A whole army once fit in my hand and now I fight with jewelry."

"When you were a novelist," the ring rasped, "did you also complain this much at your desk?"

"Constantly. It’s called drafting."

Ahead, the funnel walls closed to fifty feet. Thirty.

Doors in the shrinking corridor stood open on scenes of strangers’ lives, a fishing village at dawn, a war tent full of weeping officers, a nursery, while the flood rose around their sills like a tide coming for a sandcastle city.

Then the floor tipped.

It was subtle at first, a slope dressed as flatness. Li Jiwen’s boots skidded an inch against unblemished marble, and his stomach understood before his mind did: they were standing inside a mouth being shaped...

The whole prison floor was curling upward around them, funnels and halls and doors, all folding into a single point of destination somewhere in the converging distance, one door that stood wider than all the rest, open onto darkness that was not the same darkness as everywhere else.

"There," the figure said. The small arm pointed down the throat of the fold.

"No!" Li Ming snapped. "That door leads—"

A wall of white taller than any previous rose behind them and executed a single massive push, and the argument ended. They went down the slope like leaves down a rain gutter, sliding through screams and torn banners and door after open door after open door.

Falling upward into the widening dark, Li Jiwen glimpsed the carving above the frame, letters in some language older than language, sharp as scars.

Light swallowed them whole, then spat them out somewhere else entirely. Cold ash settled under his boots. Above him churned an ocean of black clouds where a sky should hang, seething slow and heavy as oil in a pan.

Millions of people knelt across the ash plain below those clouds, faces upturned, whispering one plea in a chorus worn smooth as river stone.

And far across the plain, a young man stood with blood sheeting down his bare back, holding a sword drawn fresh from his own spine.

The ring on Li Jiwen’s finger went very quiet.

Then, so softly he almost missed it: "...Me."

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