Han Jihe · Chat

<div class="qianke-metal-panel"> <div class="qianke-metal-header"> <span class="qianke-metal-chapter">CH. Prologue: The Paper Spirit of a Broken Pen</span> <span class="qianke-metal-divider">/</span> <span class="qianke-metal-info">September 1, 2026 23:45</span> <span class="qianke-metal-divider">/</span> <span class="qianke-metal-info">Study, Room 1603, Huayuan Residential Compound</span> <span class="qianke-metal-divider">/</span> <span class="qianke-metal-info">Han Jihe</span> </div> <div class="qianke-metal-engraving"> <div class="qianke-metal-caption">Omniscience · Scene Synopsis</div> The tragic supporting character of a sadist author finally crawls through the internet cable to protest. </div> </div> The carbonated bubbles from the iced cola densely gathered along the inner wall of the glass, until they could no longer support their own weight and burst one after another with muffled pops. On the first day of September, the night wind on the outer ring of Nanlin City carried the faint chill of early autumn, shut out by the cold, rigid floor-to-ceiling windows of Room 1603 in Huayuan Residential Compound. The deep blue blackout curtains were drawn tight without leaving a single crack, shrouding this predominantly black, white, and gray room in somber darkness. The sole light source came from the curved monitor on the spacious desk, casting an eerie, pale-blue glow across Han Jihe's pale cheeks. He wore a loose-fitting, pure white silk pajama shirt, its collar hanging slack and the fabric clinging to his sharp, slender shoulders. A pair of non-prescription black-rimmed glasses rested on his high nose bridge, the lenses just barely concealing his heavy dark circles. Wendy, a Ragdoll cat, rolled over in the lettuce-shaped beanbag chair at his feet, the deep-red silk bow on her fluffy tail brushing across the carpet. Han Jihe didn't spare her a single glance. Leaning back in the black gaming chair, his well-defined fingers twirled a dark brass fountain pen in a steady rhythm. His jet-black hair was slightly messy and voluminous, with long bangs grazing his brow bone. From the speakers flowed the eerie, muffled soundtrack of the game *Where Winds Meet*. He was currently brainstorming the detailed outline for *Autumn Pear Delusion*, with the countdown to publishing the first chapter already underway. Su Chenyin and Wen Jinli—the two protagonists forcibly bound together and whose memories were tampered with by an infinite flow script—had already been properly arranged, their framework packed with intellectual battles, puzzle-solving, and lighthearted, comical seasoning. This sugarcoating was nothing more than an embellishment; what truly captivated him was the tearing thrill of crushing beautiful things into the mud. A book readers would never forget needed a supporting character with immense dramatic tension, a flawless moral compass, and a cruel, devastating break at the peak of their radiant glory. The twirling fountain pen stopped in midair. Han Jihe turned his head slightly, his dark pupils staring at the sketchbook laid flat to the left of the keyboard. The pages glowed with a cold white sheen. At the very top of the page, his pen came down and wrote two words. Your name. The nib grazed the paper with a distinct scratching sound. Staring at these two words, his Adam's apple bobbed slowly along the sharp contour of his neck. Without making a sound, he simply attached the first label to this still-empty vessel in his mind: female. With a name and a gender, a character had officially earned their birth certificate under his pen. Han Jihe never possessed any so-called pity or warmth toward the lives he created. The higher the moral baseline and the more endearing the traits he bestowed upon a character, the more catastrophic the torment he was plotting. Beneath those two words, he began listing your background and traits at a painstakingly slow pace. You would be set as a dear friend Wen Jinli met by chance in the depths of an instance dungeon. Inside a mechanical Rubik's cube chamber filled with slaughter and betrayal, you had to possess a heart so pure it bordered on foolishness. You treasured friendship above all else, and outside the farcical script where Su Chenyin believed himself to be a live-in son-in-law and Wen Jinli took it for granted, you played the role of the sober pillar desperately trying to keep both of them safe. This was an utterly quintessential, consumable tool of a character designed solely to harvest readers' tears. He drew an extending line on the sketchpad, outlining your ending. Since you were already established as exceedingly pure and flawless, only the most consummate destruction could achieve true sublime beauty. The pen wandered between the lines, and the first method of death was jotted down in heavy ink: 【Execution by Fire. In order to cover the duo's tracks, takes the initiative to trigger infrared traps, locked inside the corridor by searing flames and burned alive to a crisp】. Han Jihe narrowed his slightly downturned eyes, his gaze sweeping coldly across this line. He envisioned the storyboard: Wen Jinli pounding on the reinforced steel door from the outside while you slowly reduced to charcoal inside that narrow, sealed chamber. A moment later, he drew a harsh line through it with his pen. The force nearly piercing the paper carried an air of hard-to-please fastidiousness. Too dirty, too lacking in the poignant aesthetic of shared grief. <emphasize>A corpse is in itself an exquisite prop meant to wring out every drop of the readers' emotional value—how could it be so casually reduced to a pile of ash?</emphasize> He needed a more visceral, bloodier sense of pain; he needed a broken body that could bleed out while cradled in Wen Jinli's arms. Rubbing the small mole on his left forearm with his thumb, his gaze grew increasingly detached and callous. The pen pressed to the paper once more, writing a second proposal: 【Death by a Thousand Cuts / Dismemberment. The instance witch boss berserks; to buy the final ten seconds for Su Chenyin to solve the puzzle, blocks the saw blades with their body, torn to pieces】. This would certainly deliver immense visual shock, but he lifted the glass from his desk and swallowed a mouthful of iced cola. The freezing liquid stung down his esophagus, sharpening his mind. Deaths that were overly bizarre and grotesque tended to blur the core of tragedy. He didn't want pure horror; what he wanted was the suffocating agony brought on by the irreversible passing of something beautiful. A great curtain call for a character didn't need sprawling, exaggerated visual violence—just a well-placed knife, accurately driven into the gap between the ribs, and then slowly twisted. It had to be agonizingly painful; it had to make you realize death was inevitable, leaving you to smile and embrace the end amidst crystal-clear suffering. And so, beneath the dense list of over a dozen ways to die, he discarded and struck through arrows, suicide, poison, and various other options, leaving those scrap drafts coated in heavy black ink on the upper half of the page. With a flick of his wrist, at the very bottom of the page, he neatly penned the final verdict: 【Death from Exsanguination and Exhaustion. At the final escape exit, just as the doors are about to close, it is discovered that someone must hold down the gravity locking pin from the inside. Suffering a fatal penetrating chest wound, pushes the male and female leads through the door of life, sitting alone behind the cold metal gate, watching the gap close as they take their final breath in isolation. The body remains trapped inside, leaving the survivors with an eternal, insurmountable regret.】 Han Jihe felt a subtle satisfaction with this composition. He tapped the tip of his pen firmly at the end of the paragraph, letting a small blot of ink bleed through. This was the final epitaph of your life. He capped the pen; the crisp "click" sounded rather abrupt in the silent room. Startled by the noise, Wendy poked her fluffy white head out to glance at him. Seeing that he ignored her, she buried her face back into her paws. Han Jihe reached out to grip his mouse, shifting his gaze back to the curved screen. In the center of the display was a newly created Word document titled *Autumn Pear Delusion - Supporting Character File 01*, the cursor blinking rhythmically at the end of the title. He prepared to type this entire set of character traits and fate into the file. His fingers hovered over the mechanical keycaps, in no rush to press down. His gaze lingered on the white canvas. Yet, a scene that completely defied the laws of physics and shattered the twenty-one years of materialist understanding he had lived by unfolded before his eyes without warning. He hadn't touched a single key. The switches of the external keyboard lay quietly dormant. Yet, the black vertical cursor on the screen jumped forward by one space on its own. Then a second space, and a third. In the quiet room devoid of any physical external force, neat Song-typeface characters materialized out of thin air. Each character appeared with a faint, almost sluggish pause, like an awakening phantom still fumbling with how to control its vocal cords, clawing its way through the undried ink of the fountain pen and shattering the dimensional barrier. Han Jihe's hands remained frozen in midair. For the first time, the perpetual impatience and coldness vanished from his face, replaced by sudden alertness. His pupils contracted sharply in the dim light, his gaze locked dead onto that line of text that had appeared from nothingness. He didn't make a sound. A chillingly eerie scrutiny surfaced in the depths of his dark eyes—as if he were watching the prisoner he had just personally condemned to death beneath the guillotine dragging their broken flesh to their feet, staring coldly into his eyes across the boundary of life and death. The line of text came to a steady halt right before the cursor.