Sinbound: The Reincarnated Tyrant of Valkyrion Academy
Chapter 20 - 4: The Question of Ink

Chapter 20: Chapter 4: The Question of Ink

Some inherit power.

Others are chosen by what was lost.

The morning after the Reflection Hall collapsed, Aren Kael stood before the Delegation Council.

The chamber was quiet.

Too quiet.

Seria sat at the center, dressed in black and crimson. Kaela leaned against a wall, arms folded. Mira was pale. Lysara, for once, looked worried.

"Tell us what you saw," Seria said.

Aren told them everything.

The mirrors.

The lost author.

The Null Proxy.

The page.

He handed the gold-folded parchment to Mira. She touched it—then gasped.

"It’s still alive. The thread... it’s evolving."

Kaela frowned. "That’s not supposed to happen."

Lysara stood. "Then the question is no longer ’What did Aren find?’"

She looked at him directly.

"It’s ’Why him?’"

System Broadcast: Secret Narrative Flag Identified

Multiple carriers now active

Aren turned as the doors opened.

Three other students entered the hall.

All from Class F.

All holding blank pages.

All blinking in confusion.

Seria exhaled.

"Then it’s begun again."

Lysara nodded.

"The legacy isn’t in the ink. It’s in the questions we failed to ask the first time."

She turned to Aren.

"And now... we ask them again. Together."

Day Four.

The golden thread Aren carried now pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat.

It didn’t glow. It didn’t talk.

But it watched.

He could feel it.

Just beneath the surface of his thoughts, like a memory that didn’t belong to him.

He wasn’t the only one.

Three others had been summoned to the Delegation Council.

Three others from Class F.

Each with a blank page.

Each showing signs of something quietly rewriting their future.

The Delegation Council issued a new order.

Directive:

Formation of Task Group F-0: "Children of the Blank Page"

Purpose: Investigate narrative corruption in active student population

Members: Aren Kael, Kairen Vale, Tenno Asha, Yuli Graves

Supervisor: Lysara (Designated Watcher)

Their meeting began inside Archive Room Theta, a location sealed since the days of the Tyrant Rewrite.

The room itself was alive.

Books whispered. Scripts floated in ink clouds. The walls pulsed with quiet history.

Lysara entered last.

Barefoot.

Silent.

But not smiling.

"You’re not heroes," she began.

"You’re questions. Each of you carries a piece of something forgotten."

She gestured to a rotating sphere in the center.

It displayed names.

Events.

But many were blurred out.

"These are the narrative gaps. Things that were once written, then erased—but left ripples. And lately... those ripples are writing back."

Kairen tilted her head. "You mean the past is fighting us?"

"No," Lysara said.

"Something that lives outside the story is writing us in."

Aren’s page pulsed.

So did the others.

All four blank sheets hovered off the table.

And burned a single glyph into the air:

?

Tenno—the ink-tattooed boy with memory slippage—stood first.

"What do we do?"

Lysara sighed.

"We start at the only place where erased content still bleeds through. The Veil Grove."

Mira, entering the chamber, froze.

"That grove’s cursed."

Kaela—now acting external advisor to Class F—grinned. "Good. That means it’s real."

They left that afternoon.

Aren and his team rode wind-skates down the mountain spire.

The grove lay two hours beyond the old version border, a space that once hosted training fields from Version 1.0—now marked as "abandoned terrain."

On approach, the sky darkened.

The system flickered in their minds.

Zone Alert:

You are entering a Deleted Layer Fragment

Active supervision suspended

The trees were tall.

Too tall.

And wrong.

Their leaves whispered names.

Their shadows did not match the sun.

Kairen pressed her hand to a trunk.

"This place remembers me."

Tenno turned slowly.

"Something’s waking up."

The ground split.

A glyph exploded beneath them.

They fell.

Not far.

But far enough to land in a new place:

A glass-bottomed chamber built inside the root system.

In its center sat a stone desk.

On it?

Another page.

But not blank.

Written in living ink.

Aren stepped forward.

It said:

"Hello, Children. I’ve missed you."

"Let’s begin a new game."

The ink bled sideways, forming five chairs.

Each one bore a name.

Aren.

Kairen.

Tenno.

Yuli.

And one more.

"Riven."

Yuli—silent until now—spoke.

"That’s impossible. He passed the pen."

Aren shook his head.

"What if the pen didn’t stop writing? What if someone—or something—picked it up?"

Kairen turned slowly.

"Or what if it never left us at all?"

Tenno backed away.

His tattoos glowed.

The room shifted.

The walls laughed.

Entity Detected: Unaligned Author Thread

Status: Parasitic

Hosts: Multiple

Active Node: Yuli Graves

Yuli collapsed.

Her eyes turned white.

And she spoke in two voices.

"Children. Not chosen. Not born. Just pages waiting to be filled."

The others circled her.

Lysara arrived through a blink-step.

"Don’t touch her. That’s not possession. That’s a test."

Yuli—still speaking in echo—whispered:

"This story needs a villain. Who wants to volunteer?"

Aren stepped forward.

"Not you. Not this time."

He lifted his page.

It flared.

And absorbed the echo.

Yuli collapsed.

Unconscious. Breathing. Free.

Trait Gained: Inkwall Shield

Aren can now absorb one instance of corrupted author thread per cycle

Lysara looked at him.

Eyes glowing faintly.

"You just rewrote a command without a quill."

He nodded slowly.

"The story’s writing me back. But I think I can reply."

That night, as Yuli rested, Aren and Kairen sat under the stars.

She looked at her page.

Still blank.

"Do you think it’ll ever write something?"

Aren smiled.

"Maybe it’s waiting for you to decide what to say."

Far below the academy, the author thread slithered through layers of ink and root.

Not angry.

Not defeated.

Curious.

Because for the first time...

a child had replied.

And the pen trembled.

Search the lightnovelworld.cc website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.