Chapter 1: is this real
"Okay, so you know how my brain usually works, right? Because of my ADHD, my thoughts are always racing at like a hundred miles an hour. It’s normal for me to have five different thoughts at the same time, listening to music while daydreaming about some random story. I’m used to the chaos.
But today? Today was totally different. And honestly, it completely terrified me.
I was just sitting in my bedroom, listening to a song on my headphones. Suddenly, the music started sounding super weird. It felt far away and blurry, like I was hearing it underwater. I paused the track, shaking my head to clear the fogginess, but when I opened my eyes, the world didn’t look right.
The straight lines of my bedroom walls started bending. The corners of the room didn't look like squares anymore—everything was warping and twisting into these creepy, impossible shapes that made my head hurt just to look at them.
'What is happening?' I whispered out loud. My voice sounded fake.
Before I could even process the fear in my chest, the colors began to drain right out of the walls. A heavy, dull gray substance started crawling over my desk, my bed, and my floor, covering absolutely everything like a thick mist. The physical world was literally melting away into a pitch-black void right in front of me.
I felt myself falling backward into the dark, completely detached from reality. I wanted to scream 'get me back!' but my throat felt frozen.
And that’s when I saw him.
Standing right there in the middle of the empty black void was a guy. He had my exact face, but his eyes were way more intense, rude, and unbothered. It was Kai. The actual bad boy character I had created in my own mind. He was standing there, fully real, looking right at me."
Kai didn't move. He just stood there with his hands shoved deep into his pockets, casually tilting his head like he was watching a movie that bored him.
"You look like you've seen a ghost, Liza," he said. His voice echoed in the emptiness, sounding exactly like mine, but deeper, smoother, and dripping with total attitude.
"Y-you're not real," I stammered, my knees shaking as I tried to back away. But there was nowhere to go. There was no floor, just the heavy gray mist beneath my feet. "I made you up. You're just a character in my head."
Kai let out a low, mocking laugh. He stepped closer, his boots making no sound against the void. "Oh, I know you made me up. You made me rude, you made me greedy, and you made me do all the messy, wild things you’re too scared to do in real life." He stopped right in front of me, so close I could see the exact line of my own jaw on his face. He smirked, his eyes flashing with a dangerous spark. "But look around you, Liza. Your perfect little reality just glitched out. So who is the fake one now? Me... or you?"
I opened my mouth to scream, but before a sound could come out, the gray substance beneath us violently shuddered.
The entire void started to ripple like water, and a loud, metallic screeching sound—like a computer crashing—filled my ears. Kai didn't even look scared; he just watched me as the shadows around him began to glitch and flicker like a broken TV screen.
"Time's up, creator," he whispered, his voice suddenly sounding like it was playing from a broken speaker. "The grid is resetting. Let's see if you survive the next block."
Suddenly, the darkness beneath me completely disappeared. I felt a horrifying weightless sensation, and I started plummeting straight down into the infinite, glitching blackness
