People in the Book

The ear-piercing alarm was still echoing.

The Minister's eyes were fixed on the massive book behind him.

Then, he felt the space around him begin to change.

The massive book rapidly shrank in his field of vision.

The Minister immediately realized it wasn't the book getting smaller, but himself getting larger.

A second later, the sensation of solid ground returned.

He was standing in an empty, bright room.

The room was extremely spacious. The floor and walls were made of a smooth, seamless light-gray material. There were no windows on the walls, only several alloy doors.

He wasn't alone in the room.

Scattered around him were dozens of people, their faces a mix of shock, confusion, and the daze of having narrowly escaped death.

He recognized a few of them; they were headquarters high-level executives who had been hooked away earlier.

Everyone instinctively looked around, scanning the completely unfamiliar environment with eyes full of vigilance and confusion.

In the center of the room stood a man in a white researcher's uniform, tightly gripping a peculiar-looking metal fishing rod. The line was slowly reeling itself back in.

He stared wide-eyed in disbelief. “How? Why are there so many living people coming out this time?”

The mysterious book rested in the center of the room. The line in the man's hand reached into it, and many tiny motes of light drifted out from the pages.

As soon as these motes left the book's vicinity, they rapidly expanded and transformed into normal-sized people. All shared the same dazed expression as they landed with thuds on the room's floor.

They kept coming, one after another, until over a hundred people had been reeled out.

The number of people in the room grew rapidly.

The once-empty space filled up, and the crowd became packed. Gasps, questions, and curses began to ring out.

The researcher with the fishing rod looked increasingly grim. Watching the people pour out, he glanced up at the red alarm light flashing in the corner of the ceiling, cold sweat breaking out on his forehead.

“Damn it, it's out of control! Completely out of control!”

Seeing that the room was so crowded people could barely turn around, and fearing a stampede, the researcher quickly pressed several buttons on a controller.

An alloy door on one side of the room made a sound of releasing pressure and slowly slid open, revealing a wide corridor outside.

“Out! Everyone out to the corridor, now!” the researcher urged loudly.

The crowded mass of people surged toward the door like a floodgate being opened.

Swept along by the crowd, the Minister also exited the room and entered the even wider corridor.

The Minister found his footing and carefully surveyed his surroundings.

The corridor was high and long, lined on both sides with heavy alloy doors, each featuring a serial number and an observation window.

The ceiling was high, covered in various pipes, vents, and surveillance equipment.

The walls were made of the same smooth, light-gray material.

Uniformed personnel were quickly converging from both ends of the corridor.

Their uniforms were mostly dark gray with chest badges—a uniform, practical style the Minister had never seen before.

These people stopped at a distance, forming a loose encirclement. They scrutinized the hundreds of suddenly appearing strangers in the corridor, talking in low voices.

“Hell, it's 005 losing control again. This is a massive mess.”

“So many abnormal entities leaked out? But they just feel like ordinary humans to me.”

“Humans walking out of a containment object are definitely not normal.”

“This is a huge problem. How do we handle it?”

“Control the situation first and assess the hazard level. Notify the High-level Council.”

The Minister could understand their language and gathered some fragmented information from their talk.

So this was the place behind the vortex?

His world was actually just a book, and it was being contained by these people!

More importantly, the Minister discovered that his power was gone.

The Authority of Oblivion had vanished without a trace, and his body felt weaker than ever before.

The Minister was now just a powerless old man with a bit of high blood pressure.

“My power is gone,” one of the headquarters executives said with a trembling voice.

“Me too. I can't sense anything supernatural,” another said, terror in his eyes.

After years of holding high positions and wielding great authority, suddenly becoming an ordinary person again—this drop and the sense of powerlessness were truly hard to accept.

They exchanged looks, seeing the shock and helplessness in each other's eyes.

This place was too strange; the situation was completely unclear.

Just then, a low, steady voice came through the corridor's broadcast system.

“Attention all personnel: immediately re-stabilize and contain the out-of-control 005. Concentrated custody of the leaked abnormal entities in the backup containment corridor for now. Follow-up disposal plans are pending. Repeat: prioritize the containment of 005.”

As the voice faded, a team of fully armed personnel followed the researcher with the fishing rod and quickly entered the room from before.

They herded the remaining people from the room into the corridor.

The Minister took a deep breath. Seeing someone who looked like a squad commander pass by, he hurriedly stepped forward. “Excuse me, what is this place? Why are we here?”

“Just wait. There'll be a general briefing later,” the man said impatiently.

The Minister's face darkened. Having been a superior for so many years, when had he ever been treated like this? How dare he speak to him with such an attitude!

He instinctively wanted to snap back, but the words died in his throat.

He remembered that he had no power now; his status and wealth had all turned into nothing.

“Alright, we will certainly cooperate,” the Minister said, forcing a smile while his fists were clenched tight.

The others reeled in from the world—whether they were headquarters executives or powerful independent transcendents—had all grasped the situation by now.

No matter how arrogant or reckless they had been, none dared to say much; they had all discovered their powers were gone.

The crowd was roughly herded to one side of the corridor, clearing space for the staff to handle the containment breach in the room.

Then, the researcher with the fishing rod scanned the dense crowd and shouted, “Current rotating monitor for 005, step forward immediately.”

A slight stir went through the crowd as they looked at one another.

A figure slowly stepped out from the mass of people.

The Minister looked closely; it was actually Mr. A!

However, Mr. A's attire had completely changed. He wore a dark-colored jumpsuit with the serial number A-9527 clearly printed on his chest.

The researcher's eyes sharpened when he saw Mr. A. “9527, come with me. You need to undergo a full briefing and isolation check.”

“The rest of you, stay where you are. Do not move around.”

Mr. A was led away obediently. He walked through the crowd without casting a single glance at the Minister or anyone else.

The Minister watched this in silence.

Mr. A had been considered a secret weapon by the Bureau headquarters. But here, Mr. A seemed to be nothing more than a very low-level tester.

The Minister looked away, his gaze involuntarily drifting back toward the room.

The book known as 005 was inside that room.

That was their world. Their breath, their growth, their loves and hates, their struggles, prosperity, and collapse...

In the end, it was just a book.

...

Project Number: 005

Project Name: Book of Creation

Project Grade: SSS

Containment Procedures: 005 must be contained within a special containment unit. Unauthorized personnel are strictly forbidden from direct contact with the 005 entity.

Observation of 005's internal narrative world must be conducted via remote viewing windows and performed by at least two personnel simultaneously.

Description: 005 appears as a dark, untitled book with a cover of unknown material. The book cannot be destroyed by any physical means. Its primary abnormal characteristic is "Automatic Narrative Generation."

When in a stable containment state, 005 will automatically generate and play out a fictional narrative world with basic logical consistency at irregular intervals.

This novel world possesses complete physical rules as well as mystical supernatural rules, including settings like spiritual energy, magic potions, or spells. It has an independent flow of time and characters derived from the book's own logic.

Each individual novel world undergoes a process from birth and development to its conclusion.

The manner of conclusion varies; it may end through natural evolution or non-naturally due to internal logical contradictions, commonly referred to as a "rotten ending."

Once a novel concludes, the internal world of 005 will be cleared and reset, beginning the generation of a completely new story. The new story may be entirely unrelated to the previous one, or there may be connections.

Personnel who make physical contact with 005's cover will be pulled into the current novel world and typically assigned a role that fits the logic of that world.

When the novel world concludes, those who entered it will vanish along with it.

Appendix: On [Date], Project Researcher X discovered that specific items from the Book of Creation could be brought out of the book through special means—usually powerful individuals or key objects within the story.

These extracted items are all derivatives of 005 and retain their original setting effects.

Consequently, the organization initiated the Shepherd Plan.

Upon monitoring the appearance of qualified abnormal entities within the novel world, and with Council approval, harvesting tools can be deployed into 005 to perform targeted recovery of the qualifying supernatural individuals.

Recovered entities can be used for research, resource extraction, or as materials for other projects.

To ensure continuous monitoring of 005's internal novel worlds and serve as a prerequisite for triggering the Shepherd Plan, the organization long-term assigns a strictly screened agent implanted with specific cognitive memes (currently A-9527) as 005's internal monitor.

This individual is sent into the current narrative's novel world, their very existence constituting a living detector.

When the monitor perceives that the convergence of abnormal rules within the world has reached a preset threshold, an alarm is automatically sent, providing initial positioning for the Shepherd Plan.

The monitor is typically recovered alongside the abnormal entities from the book at the end of the plan's execution. After undergoing memory adjustment, a decision is made on whether to deploy them into the next cycle.

Incident Report 005-███-Δ: During the most recent execution of the Shepherd Plan, a large-scale unintended overflow event occurred within the Book of Creation.

Over ███ living people in the book escaped the book and appeared in the containment room, triggering a containment breach alarm.

The cause may be that A-9527's identity was once uncovered by characters in the book. At the time, the project supervisor took emergency measures, modifying and blotting out text in the Book of Creation to make the people in the book forget A-9527's identity in a logical manner and prevent further investigation, while also clearing A-9527's memory.

Relevant entities have been temporarily controlled, and the incident is under evaluation. A-9527 has returned to reality and is awaiting review.

Note 1: The value of the 005 Book of Creation lies in its nearly infinite creative capacity and the various abnormal entities and potential resources derived from it.

Note 2: We once obtained a complete supernatural cultivation system from the Book of Creation.

...

Standing in the crowded corridor, the Minister slowly unclenched his fists.

His palms stung slightly—the only reality he could be certain of right now.

Combining the series of events—being hooked into the vortex, encountering those words inside, and flying out of the book—he had roughly guessed what was going on.

They were all characters in a book, and Mr. A was a book-traveler deliberately placed into the world by this organization.

Although he wasn't sure where Mr. A's Blind Folly ability came from, Blind Folly could invalidate mystical supernatural powers.

But when the strength of the supernatural exceeded Blind Folly, Mr. A would become aware of its existence—like seeing an apple turn red and give off a fragrance. At that moment, he would automatically trigger the alarm: the fruit was ready for harvest.

Having been a superior for so many years, the Minister could piece together the gist of the schemes and conspiracies in an instant.

There were still many details the Minister couldn't fathom, but his general line of reasoning was likely correct.

At this thought, he couldn't help but feel dejected.

His colleagues, who had once commanded the winds and rains, all wore similar looks of bewilderment.

What the Minister could deduce, others could naturally sense to some degree—at the very least, they had just flown out of a book; that much was indisputable.

“Are we really just characters in a book?” someone finally asked with a trembling voice.

“Our memories are so long, our lives so real...”

“Those battles, those sacrifices, those loves and hates... were they all just pre-written plot points?”

A cacophony of voices mixed together.

The Minister scanned the scene, a sense of absurdity rising in his heart.

In their original world, which of these people hadn't been a person of iron will?

Yet once stripped of their supernatural cloaks and exposed to completely unfamiliar rules, they behaved no differently from ordinary mortals.

He took a deep breath, forcing himself to analyze the current situation calmly.

First: their powers were indeed gone, with no sign of them returning for now.

Second: this organization seemed to handle similar incidents frequently; it was likely a local official agency.

Third: Mr. A—or rather, A-9527—was an insider here, meaning their world had been under constant surveillance.

Fourth, and most importantly: they were still alive, and the other party showed no intention of immediate execution.

As long as they were alive, they had value, and there was room to maneuver.

“Silence.”

Just then, a voice came from the end of the corridor.

The crowd gradually fell silent as everyone looked toward the source of the voice.

A middle-aged man in a dark-gray uniform approached, escorted by four armed personnel.

“I know you have many questions, but don't be in a hurry...”