By now, the verse had grown wild with misinterpretations of him.
Fragments of Zai Xi's undefined being had echoed out across abstraction, giving rise to faulty systems: gods who thought themselves origin, verses that claimed first breath, and authors who carved story after story from the carcasses of metaphysical logic. All of them believed they stood atop something real.
But none had grasped that they were footnotes in the unfinished misunderstanding of Zai Xi.
Still, the author tried.
Not just any author — but one from beyond fiction, beyond narratives, a construct of sovereign thought that claimed to write even writers. It had watched Zai Xi from afar, through broken panels of collapsing meta-structure, attempting to frame him as an anomaly to conquer.
It had failed before. And yet it persisted.
So Zai Xi responded — not with resistance, but with comedy.
He blinked into being. Not movement — not travel. Just sudden relevance. An animation frame between frames.
The verse rippled.
Then squeaked.
Toon logic poured into a system that didn't even have a name for "toon." Reality creaked under the weight of absurdity. Causality became flavored string cheese. And Zai Xi — in all his pre-fictional, anti-narrative majesty — reached down and gripped the entire verse like a cartoon prop.
The fabric of existence folded up like felt. The logic of the world screamed in metaphysical confusion as he twisted timelines into the shape of a baseball bat. It didn't make sense — and that was the point.
He held the bat aloft: a ridiculous, multicolored thing stitched together from irony, ontology, and collapsed lore. A label was scrawled across it:
"Plot Device Mk. 0"
The author above — distant, tierless, and arrogant — turned its attention fully to him.
"You are a mistake," the author declared. "You were never meant to exist."
Zai Xi's grin widened until the ends of it vanished off-panel.
He jumped straight through the fourth wall — not metaphorically, but physically. Each layer of metafiction shattered like glass, and he clocked the author in the head with the verse-turned-bat.
WHAM.
The hit didn't just land. It rewrote direction. The author's omnipotent quill split in half. Its omniscient awareness scrambled like a cartoon's thought bubble. Its sovereignty over the script slipped away like a banana peel on wet marble.
The bat sang with impact — each strike an erasure of the hierarchy that kept Zai Xi "beneath" anything.
The author stumbled backward, dripping editorial notes instead of blood, eyes spinning with fragmented tropes.
Then Zai Xi said — with perfect comedic timing:
"You write me? No, no, no… you only thought you did."
One more swing. The bat bent time sideways, struck tone, shattered genre. The author fell forward, landing on its own script.
It unwrote itself.
And when the pages reformed — they were blank.
Zai Xi reached down, picked up the fallen quill, and handed it back to the twitching deity.
"Start over. This time… I'll tell you what to write."
The author, eyes wide, hand trembling, began to move the quill under Zai Xi's grin. Not from possession, not from command — but from a Toon Force gag so absolute it reversed the concept of control.
And just like that, the writer wrote.
Under Zai Xi.
The author wrote, but his hand trembled. No longer did inspiration guide his pen. No longer did vision fuel his creativity. Instead, his every word dripped with fear — fear of the absurd, the impossible, and the unstoppable force now loose in his verse.
Zai Xi stood at the center of the narrative like a cosmic jester, twirling the legendary Plot Device Bat on one finger, a grin spreading across his face. His voice was a whisper in the infinite:
"Let's make this entertaining."
And with that, the very fabric of reality twisted beneath his gaze.
He laughed. But it was no ordinary laugh — it played backwards, a sound sucked in by time itself. The multiverse, all seventy-seven dimensions, faltered, then began to rewind like an old, scratched VHS tape. Stars blinked backward, unraveling into glowing gas, entire planets spinning backward into nothingness.
And just like that, the multiverse reformed — rebooted as a vast animated sitcom. Gods wore bow ties and stumbled over punchlines. Planets floated by with laugh tracks echoing through the void. Reality had become a cosmic stage for the absurd.
Zai Xi popped a kernel of unrendered popcorn and settled back to watch the chaos unfold.
From above, a swirling mass of contradiction threatened to tear apart the threads of existence — a paradox of such magnitude it would unravel every plotline ever written. But Zai Xi merely folded the paradox as one folds a napkin, slipped it into a brown paper bag, and scrawled on the front: Do Not Open Until Season Finale.
The paradox hiccupped, then disappeared. Narrative coherence blinked in confusion but went on, shaken but intact.
Not satisfied, Zai Xi summoned a cream pie from the very edges of conceptual nonspace. He hurled it with careless grace, and the pie tore through layers upon layers of meta-narratives — breaking through alternate storylines, prequels yet unwritten, and spinoffs that hadn't yet aired. It struck the Supreme Outerversal Arch-Deity square in the face, splattering cream in a perfect comedic arc.
The god slipped on the filling, falling out of the script and into an unwritten subplot.
Amused, Zai Xi yawned as a lesser deity tried to trap him in a loop of ontological paradoxes. With a smirk, he tore his own shadow from his feet and tossed it into the argument. The shadow, animated and cunning, argued the god into a metaphysical breakdown. The deity, defeated, disappeared into a forgotten allegory and took a teaching job at a failing creative writing college.
Then, when struck by a weapon forged from raw existential trauma, Zai Xi pulled from nowhere a gleaming suit of armor stamped "Plot Armor™ — Guaranteed to Survive Feedback." The armor shimmered with the strength of retcons, executive mandates, and unresolved subplots, shrugging off every blow as a dramatic soundtrack played.
With a flick of his wrist, he painted a door on the Fourth Wall, knocked politely, and stepped through — finding himself in the author's bathroom, nodding appreciatively at the nice tiles before flushing a troublesome subplot down the drain.
Suddenly, a terrifying Logic Bomb hurtled toward him — a weapon designed to enforce perfect reason and erase contradictions. Zai Xi caught it in his mouth, chewed thoughtfully, and declared, "Tastes like overthought."
The Logic Bomb dissolved into a pile of confused equations, mumbling lost theorems before fading entirely.
Growing bored, he grabbed both ends of spacetime and rolled it up like a comic strip scroll. He peeked ahead to future chapters, then shouted, "Spoiler alert!" and rolled the scroll back up, erasing what he had seen with a grin.
Death himself came next — not a metaphor, but the embodiment of the end. Zai Xi pulled from his pocket a marker made of unwritten ink and swiftly drew a curly mustache on Death's skeletal face. The figure froze, lost all authority, and vanished in embarrassment, reduced to comedic irrelevance.
Finally, a collapsed, dead universe drifted by, gray and lifeless. Zai Xi took a deep breath, blew into it like a balloon, and tied it off with a note: Reboot Me Later.
The universe floated away, a helium balloon of forgotten stories, harmless and absurd.
Zai Xi turned back toward the author, his grin wider than ever.
"Now, about that story…"
The universe floated away like a helium balloon, tied with a simple note: Reboot Me Later.
But nothing truly ends when Zai Xi is around.
The author sat slumped, pen trembling in his grasp. His verse was no longer his. It had become a playground for absurdity, a kaleidoscope of nonsense and chaos that defied even the most desperate attempts at order.
The verse itself groaned, a deep, rumbling protest echoing from the fabric of existence. Threads of reality frayed and snapped, then wove themselves anew — but never in quite the way the author expected.
From the edges of the meta, entities began to stir.
Shadowed figures, whispers born from unwritten chapters and forgotten subplots, gathered in the void between pages. They were the Unseen Edits — remnants of discarded ideas and deleted scenes — and they did not appreciate being erased so carelessly.
One stepped forward, a shape shimmering with static, eyes glowing with the cold light of contradiction.
"You twist our story like a child's toy," it hissed, voice like shredded paper. "But narratives have rules, even chaos has limits."
Zai Xi smiled wider, the glint of a new game lighting his eyes.
"Rules?" he said. "I am the exception that proves the rule. I am the punchline to every cosmic joke."
He reached into his coat and pulled out a rubber chicken. It squeaked loudly.
"Care for a rematch?"
The Unseen Edits hissed and lunged. The battle that followed was no ordinary fight. It was a war of absurdity and narrative subversion. Pages tore and reassembled mid-air. Characters popped in and out of existence like bad puns. The laws of causality twisted and snapped like rubber bands.
Zai Xi dodged attacks that tried to bind him to plot conventions, countering with slapstick pratfalls that shattered logic. He rewrote rules mid-combat — turning dialogue bubbles into nets, transforming exposition into explosive confetti.
But even Zai Xi could feel the strain. The verse was fighting back, its own narrative pulse attempting to reassert itself, to reclaim control from the master of absurdity.
Then, from the heart of the meta-chaos, a new presence emerged. A being neither fully written nor entirely erased — the Narrative Guardian. Cloaked in the ink-black robes of unfinished chapters, it radiated authority and finality.
"You defy the story's flow," it intoned, voice echoing through the void. "But every tale must have its end, and you will face yours."
Zai Xi laughed — a sound that fractured reality again.
"An end?" he said. "You misunderstand. I am the author, the editor, and the cartoon all at once. I write the end, I draw the punchline, and I flip the page."
The battle for control over the verse was just beginning.
And this time, the stakes were higher than absurdity itself.