I'm no writer.
Seriously.
If there were an AI that could actually weave a soul into text, I would have dumped this rotten job on it in a heartbeat—even if it meant being cursed by every author on the planet.
Damn it all.
The air in this room feels thicker than in my old, claustrophobic college dorm.
Shadows dance across the rough parchment in front of me under the dim lamplight, flickering as if intentionally mocking my writer's block.
I let out a harsh breath.
Massaging my temples as I glare at the stack of papers shoved into the corner of the desk. Those pages are bloated with thousands of words I just bled out, piecing them together until my skull felt like it was going to crack open.
Honestly?
Staring at my own writing makes me physically sick.
It's disgusting.
I'm just an observer, sick to my stomach at how ridiculously uniform modern human imagination has become. But ironically, that exact uniformity is what's going to save this slice of reality.
Yeah... I need a story.
A handful of stories pulled straight from that homogenized imagination.
Not some idealistic piece of literature destined to gather dust on a shelf, but a recycled masterpiece. Something so utterly cliché, so painfully mainstream, that even the laziest, most exhausted human brain will swallow it whole without chewing.
Why?
Because in today's fiction industry, the trend is God.
You see it everywhere—bookstore shelves, web novel platforms, comic adaptations, anime.
They all regurgitate the exact same monotonous formula on an endless loop: the protagonist kicked out of the hero's party, reincarnated as a noble, absurd cheat systems, time regressions, endless cultivation.
The industry churns like a fast-food factory, and here I am, getting ready to brew the exact same sweet poison for them to swallow.
I press the ink to the page, scratching out a new paragraph.
I'm splitting the main stage between the two most marketable pillars of cliché.
First, the Prince.
I need the archetype of the banished noble—hated, branded a disgrace, and tossed aside.
Someone who looks flawlessly flawed on the surface, yet secretly harbors a power or a destiny that will make him absolutely indispensable later on.
He is the perfect reflection of the 'banished character' trope that readers eat up to satisfy their cravings for social revenge.
I remember it well.
This kind of story blew up back when I was still busy fudging research data just to scrape together an approval from that bastard professor. If I hadn't needed his signature for my scholarship, I probably would've shattered his life into pieces, just like I did to the other students.
Second, the Hero.
The golden boy of isekai, dragged kicking and screaming from the modern world.
Unlike the prince, who has to claw his way out of the political muck, this hero is a vessel of pure wish-fulfillment for pathetic readers.
I'll have him build a harem, let him cheat openly, and trample over every moral boundary with that cheap, flimsy excuse: "I love you all."
Imagine if that kind of selfish morality was applied in the real world?
The guy would be nothing more than a perverted, manipulative emotional criminal.
A scumbag.
But because the narrative slaps the 'Main Character' label on his forehead, his degenerate behavior gets played off as a gag by the system. The readers will normalize it.
They'll laugh, they'll cheer him on—treating those women as nothing more than trophies for his status as the Chosen One.
Then, to balance them out, I need a Demon King.
But please. I am so sick of the handsome Demon King trend—the one who secretly has a tragic backstory, was shunned by humanity, and is actually a softie at heart.
What kind of melodramatic bullshit is that?
No.
I'm going to write a real Devil.
The Defier of God.
An arrogant entity forged from pure, absolute malice and an ego that could burn down heaven, exactly like the rebel from the holy scriptures.
A true demon doesn't need to be sugarcoated with childhood trauma to be a terrifying tyrant.
I pause, my eyes locked on the ink-stained tip of my pen.
A frustrated smile tugs at the corner of my mouth.
Oh, writers and readers... we are all just a bunch of hypocritical monsters, conspiring together to cheat our own sanity.
We are two-faced entities swallowing a doctrine called 'double standards'.
In the real world, we would curse these bastards to the core.
But on this piece of paper?
We worship an egotistical prince who plays with lives, we excuse a womanizing hero masquerading as a savior, and we forgive a demon king just because he has a sob story.
But, I suppose... that's where the true beauty lies.
If I had to chain this imaginary world to the rigid morality of real life, this manuscript would just be a nauseating civics textbook.
It's our hypocrisy that makes the fictional world so incredibly vast.
It's our selective blindness that gives creativity the room to breathe, to run wild.
We tolerate these fictional sins because the real world is already too suffocating, too demanding, and far too boring.
From that space, you and I will build a labyrinth of clichés, observed by the hypocritical eyes of readers and writers alike.
And in the end, we will guide those three characters to their respective roles.
If that fails, then I'll turn you into the final monster and force them to walk the path I've written... So, get ready.