A Writer's Transmigration With A System

It was the size of a fortress and dressed like a quarantine gone wrong.

The Warden of Doors came across the pale floor at a walker’s pace, which was somehow worse than running in Li Jiwen’s mind.

Thousands of bodies had been stitched into one outline, torsos quilted into a mountain, limbs grafted from a hundred different schools of martial anatomy, and everywhere, from every seam, hung pale pouches like the cheeks of things that swallow existence.

Its head was merely the largest pouch. When it spoke, every mouth on its body spoke, in ways stolen from the dead.

"All knowledge in this prison," said the Warden of Doors, "belongs to Baal. You are trespassers and one dog ring of overdue inventory. Please return to being confiscated."

"Inventory," Li Jiwen repeated. "I have never been so insulted by accurate bookkeeping."

’And I’ve fought giant patchwork horrors before,’ he thought, backing up a step as its shadow crawled over them, ’but this one comes with a warranty.’

"Baal builds his tools from failures," Li Ming said. Red light kindled along the ring. "Every stitch is somebody who tried to steal a door and stayed."

"Then let’s admire the collection," Li Jiwen said, "and then deplete it."

He planted his feet, spread both hands, and unfolded.

Clones poured out of him like a manuscript hemorrhaging drafts: fifty, two hundred, eight hundred, more, and more ranked and drilled across half a mile of floor, each carrying a fraction of his senses whenever he chose to look through them all at once. The limit was three thousand and he had never once met a need for the ceiling.

"Wide formation!" he called down ranks he could feel like fingers. "Touch every door! If a carving answers your hand with warmth, scream coordinates!"

The clone legions flooded outward. The Warden’s response was immediate and industrial: it *exhaled*, and from the pouches burst swarms of its own confiscated small ones, stitchmen, knee high knots of grasping hands and borrowed knuckles, pouring toward the doors to re-lock them ahead of discovery.

The grinding war began. It would not be elegant, wars across floors never are.

Li Jiwen’s central body anchored the field while projections carried technique and damage alike. He watched through forty eyes as stitchman swarms washed over doors nine, ten, eleven, as he watched clone lines brace against each flood and grind it backward tooth by tooth.

He felt death flashes stutter through his shared senses like dropped stitches each time a projection got unraveled into yarn. Beyond the battle, the white figure drifted door to door with terrible patience, laying two fingers on each carving and listening for something only faceless creatures can hear.

The Warden learned fast. Its third counter wave didn’t chase clones, it ate ground, swallowing whole avenues of sealed doors into its mass to deny them forever.

Its confiscation touch reached across twenty feet and stripped techniques right off his soldiers: one clone swung a God Speed charge and arrived simply walking, another wound up for an authority strike that forgot itself mid motion, palm opening empty, wearing the perplexed expression of a man who has walked into a room and lost the reason.

"Pest," remarked seventeen of its mouths in his own voice, freshly confiscated along with six hours of his shouts. "Pest. Pest. Pest."

"Return my voice," Li Jiwen called back, "or keep it. The pacing’s rough anyway."

They traded districts for an hour. He paid for information with projections: two doors warm, screaming of it, no, three, a cold wedge east where the Warden massed too thick to crack, somewhere south the constant sound, faint and horrible, of men who’d been thimbles for centuries dreaming they were still thieves.

Through a thousand shared eyes he began to see the pattern beneath the horror, the way you see story structure under any monster:

An archive does not guard itself evenly. It guards where the reading lamps burn brightest.

"South quarter," Li Jiwen said. "Baal keeps watch there. That’s where the good names are filed."

Which was when one of the Warden’s patches screamed at him in Earth accented Mandarin: "*Deadline!*"

The word went through him colder than the black wind had. He knew that slang, he knew the Specific despair compressed inside it, desks and dim screens and deliverables.

Somewhere sewn into this mountain were the seams of someone translated before him, maybe decades before, maybe eras.

"You aren’t all cultivators," he heard himself say, very quietly, mid battle, while thirty clones died holding a lane.

"We are whatever Baal needed when he found us," the Warden answered cheerfully, in every stolen accent it owned. "We are his filing system. Files do not leave."

’So that’s the shape of the thing,’ Li Jiwen thought, fury arriving calm and organized, which was always how his worst fury worked. ’Fine. Then the file gets deleted.’

The original face was the tell. Deep in the mass, jutting from the great pouch head like a talisman on a festival pole, hung a single mask of flesh, an actual human face, serene and half lidded, the first thief ever caught, worn as the control seal of everything stitched beneath it.

Where that mask looked, the confiscation touch followed. Kill the witness, kill the archive’s index.

He built the trap the way he’d once plotted heists for weekly cliffhangers: cheap, sincere, dependent entirely on the villain’s appetite.

Clone Number 2213 walked deliberately alone up the south avenue carrying himself like a person, breathing fear he genuinely had, fear shared straight down the sensory link until it became true in every fiber. Bait for a filing system hungry for intruders. The Warden bent over that tasty little morsel the way libraries bend over overdue accounts.

It swallowed Clone 2213 whole, pouch stretching wide and 2213 detonated inside the vault of it, a full charge of stockpiled authority tuned to a single point: the hanging face. Serene and half lidded, the original mask crisped, curled, and burned off its pole.

One heartbeat of perfect stillness rolled through ten thousand stolen mouths.

Then the mountain unravelled. Without its index, the stitches slackened; bodies sloughed free in slippery armfuls, most crumbling to blown glass ash as their long sentence finally commuted. What remained collapsed inward with a last chorus of voices, gratitude in some of them, which sat poorly in any stomach.

The floor shook. Of course it did. In Li Jiwen’s experience, no victory anywhere in the multiverse concluded without the bill for seismic damage arriving within minutes.

South quarter, eight hundred clones sang to him at once, ragged and triumphant. Warmth. A carving answering every hand. One door, chains upon i

t, name straightening letter by letter as if being freshly inked.

LI JIWEN!

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