Glitch In The Protocol

He woke up in a hospital bed, inside someone else's body, fourteen days from a scripted death - and the only thing standing between him and the plot's ending was a glitching system that had already watched three hosts die and decided, quietly and against all protocol, that this time would be different. Shen Yao didn't ask to become the cannon fodder in a romance novel, the disposable best friend whose death was written to make the real protagonist cry beautifully for two chapters. But he's a translator by trade, which means he knows exactly what a text is hiding underneath what it says - and what this story is hiding is a man who never looked closely enough, a system that learned to grieve, and an ending that nobody in the novel ever thought to want.