Chapter 183: Before Chapter 171

Derek reconstructed the timeline backward.

OPEN_PAGE_BRANCH_001 was created months before the Bailey books appeared.

At that time, only a few people knew about the Mirror anomaly.

Freya.

Louis.

Claire.

Mercer.

Nadia.

Derek.

Several investigators and university researchers.

Eliza may also have known through her monitor.

Vale certainly knew the underlying technology but supposedly did not know about Freya.

The team examined events immediately before the file's creation.

Freya had opened her blank novel document.

The Open Page had recently launched.

Awake Stories had synchronized a new backup system.

Nothing obvious.

Then Mia found an old email.

The bookstore's inventory provider had reported a brief database duplication issue on the same day.

One product appeared twice.

A copy of Gentle Devotion did not exist in the store catalogue, so the duplicated item was something else.

Freya asked which book.

Mia searched archived logs.

The duplicated title was Freya's first novel published after transmigration.

That felt significant.

The database had briefly assigned the duplicate an impossible product ID.

171.

Six minutes later, OPEN_PAGE_BRANCH_001 appeared on Freya's laptop.

The anomalies were connected somehow.

Mercer theorized that the old WAKE matching process might be responding whenever Freya created or organized narrative data.

Books.

Drafts.

Publishing databases.

That would explain why anomalies clustered around Awake Stories and The Open Page.

Freya looked at Louis.

"So my job is haunted."

"Apparently."

Claire proposed a passive test.

No reconstructed WAKE code.

No attempts to contact the endpoint.

Simply observe whether anomalies appeared when Freya worked on fiction compared with unrelated tasks.

Independent ethics reviewers approved a limited study because it involved only Freya's own devices and data.

For two weeks, Freya alternated controlled writing sessions with design work.

The results were strange.

Narrative sessions produced significantly more metadata anomalies.

Design sessions produced almost none.

When Freya wrote fictional characters based loosely on people she knew, anomaly rates increased further.

No one knew why.

Vale's similarity theory suddenly looked less ridiculous.

Freya stopped the study after two weeks.

They had enough evidence that narrative activity correlated with the phenomenon.

She did not want to push harder.

Mercer agreed reluctantly.

The final session produced one readable fragment.

It appeared inside a temporary file and vanished after backup.

The lab preserved it.

The sentence said:

THE READER HAS RETURNED TO THE STORY.

Eliza denied creating it.

Vale denied creating it.

Freya believed neither automatically.

But the phrase bothered her for another reason.

In her previous life, she had been the reader.

Here, she had become the character.

Perhaps whatever system was producing these fragments did not know the difference anymore.

The controlled writing study used offline machines, synchronized clocks, and independent observers so Eliza or an outside attacker could not easily fake results. Even then, Freya refused dramatic conclusions. Correlation with narrative activity was interesting. It was not an explanation.

Freya recorded the facts separately from her assumptions and continued with the next practical step. That habit had become one of the strongest protections she possessed. A dramatic explanation could wait; evidence could not. Louis understood the difference, and together they refused to let uncertainty turn ordinary decisions into reactions to a story neither of them had chosen.

Freya recorded the facts separately from her assumptions and continued with the next practical step. That habit had become one of the strongest protections she possessed. A dramatic explanation could wait; evidence could not. Louis understood the difference, and together they refused to let uncertainty turn ordinary decisions into reactions to a story neither of them had chosen.

Freya recorded the facts separately from her assumptions and continued with the next practical step. That habit had become one of the strongest protections she possessed. A dramatic explanation could wait; evidence could not. Louis understood the difference, and together they refused to let uncertainty turn ordinary decisions into reactions to a story neither of them had chosen.