The ghost village wasn't on any map in the journal. Nor in the system.
But it was there: half-sunken houses, torches burning without fire, and statues of people… split in half, as if they'd been interrupted during creation.
No animals. No wind. No sounds.
Only a whisper that didn't come from the air, but from the broken code of the world.
"Are you sure you saw someone here?" Sera asked, her staff wrapped in faintly glowing runes.
I nodded, though I doubted myself.
But then we saw it.
A hunched figure, draped in layers of dust and cobwebs, seated on a chair with no legs, staring at a fire that offered no heat.
It had no name. No status window.
And yet, it was alive.
"Ryouhei," it whispered, without visible lips. "You shouldn't exist anymore."
I tensed.
"Neither should you, apparently."
The old man didn't move. But the air quivered, like our words were stones falling onto a frozen lake.
"I am an echo… from the first story," he said, voice crackling like burnt paper. "Back when the world was written by a single pen. Before the gods began rewriting with borrowed hands. Before the heroes. Before the system."
Sera took a step back. I leaned closer.
"What do you know about the Shadowless Man?"
Silence.
Then, one word:
"Rebound."
"What?"
"He wasn't created. He wasn't summoned. He wasn't written.
He is the cost of rewriting a story without erasing the previous versions."
His eyes (if he had any) glinted like shattered screens.
"Every time someone like you changes what's been foretold, the world tries to adapt. But some things don't fully disappear. Scars… remnants of lines never published.
And sometimes, those remnants… take shape."
I swallowed hard.
"So it's my fault?"
"No," the old man replied. "Not just yours.
Every hero who reset the world, every corrected decision, every edited ending.
The Shadowless Man is the sum of all that. An accumulation of errors with no checkbox.
An open parenthesis that was never closed."
Sera whispered:
"Then why attack now?"
The old man laughed. A sound like deflating parchment.
"Because you and Ryouhei broke something important: the script of redemption.
And now the system has sent its final corrector. Not to kill... but to restore the canon."
I stepped on a crack that spread like a spiderweb under my feet.
"Can we destroy it?"
"You can't destroy an error… without creating another."
The old man slowly began to dissolve, as if the system itself realized he'd said too much.
And in that moment, I felt it:
A chill. An absence.
Sera's shadow flickered.
The Shadowless Man was near.