NOVEL NEXT Chapter 101: Page Dea had many secrets.
The rapid clatter of typing echoed through the small room, sharp and relentless, like rain hitting metal. Keys clicked with machine-like precision quick bursts, short pauses, then another flurry of furious strokes. Whoever was behind the laptop was working with a yandere level intensity.
The room itself was… unexpected.
Pictures covered the wall in a chaotic collage, prints, sketches, and high-resolution edits of two fictional characters. One girl with short white hair and piercing blue eyes; another with long black hair and deep red eyes, captured mid-glare in several images.
Between them were taped-up articles clipped from digital magazines, all praising The Assassin's Dreams and its elusive, almost myth-like author. Headlines like A Masterpiece from a Phantom Writer and Who Is the Mind Behind the Madness? were pinned in crooked, obsessed angles.
How can angles even be obsessed? Well, don't ask me, I'm just a narrator.
The place looked exactly like the bedroom of a hyperactive fangirl who'd fallen too deep into a fandom rabbit hole.
Which made the truth even stranger.
Because the person sitting hunched over the laptop, typing like she meant to set the keyboard on fire, was none other than Page Dea.
Page Dea, the emotionless reaper of Astralis Academy.
Page Dea, the girl who could make grown men reconsider their life choices with a single dead-eyed stare. Ninth-ranked first-year. Silent nightmare. Living red flag with legs.
And yet here she was, in a dimly lit room that absolutely no one would ever guess belonged to an assassin.
Her fingers paused for a moment, hovering over the keys as she scanned the line she'd just written. Then she continued typing, even faster than before, blue light flickering across her blank red eyes.
Page Dea had many secrets.
This one might've been the strangest.
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"No. No. No… this isn't right."
Page's voice was flat. Void of irritation, void of frustration, void of anything at all. Each word fell from her lips like a stone dropped into still water, sound without ripples, meaning without essence. Yet the way her fingers froze above the keyboard, the way her eyes stayed locked on the blinking cursor, made it painfully clear that she was suffering from the oldest enemy of all writers.
Writer's block.
That silent, suffocating fog that crept into the mind and smothered every spark of inspiration.
The invisible wall that stood between a writer and the story that was beating desperately against the inside of their skull.
A state where ideas hovered just out of reach, like shadows behind frosted glass, visible, taunting, but impossible to grasp.
For most people, writer's block came with groans, dramatic sighs, or frustrated hair-pulling.For Page, it came with an even deeper stillness.
It was the mental equivalent of walking into a room you knew intimately, only to find all the furniture gone.
A blank landscape where there should have been color, where characters should have laughed, fought, kissed, lived.
But instead there was only static.
White, empty, useless static.
And she sat in the middle of it, expression a perfect mask, heart a quiet battlefield of clashing emotions she couldn't properly feel, mind insisting she should be able to write, but offering her absolutely nothing to write with.
Even her trained, carefully conditioned calm couldn't hide the truth:
She was stuck. Completely, utterly stuck.
She typed a sentence. Deleted it.
Typed a different one. Deleted that too.
Her breathing never changed. Her face didn't shift. Her posture remained rigid and perfectly straight. There wasn't even the slightest twitch of annoyance on her expression, even though the atmosphere around her practically hummed with silent irritation.
Years of training had carved that stillness into her bones. Discipline layered over discipline until even the idea of a display of emotion felt foreign. But even if she'd never been trained, even if she'd grown up in a normal home, surrounded by warmth and affection and people who taught her how to smile…
It wouldn't have mattered.
Her affinity had made sure of that.
Affinity: Hedonia, Anhedonia.
A contradictory pair that should never have existed together. Hedonia—the capacity to feel overwhelming pleasure, the kind that could swallow reason whole, and Anhedonia—the inability to feel anything at all, a silent numbness that hollowed a person from the inside out.
Page lived between those two extremes, her emotional state caught in a constant, violent tug-of-war. Some days, the hedonia would surge, threatening to drown her in sensations too intense for any normal human to endure. Other days, most days, the anhedonia took the reins, flattening her emotions into a blank, uninterrupted void.
And as a side effect of that constant battle, she'd become what people saw now:
A blank, emotionless doll.
A girl whose voice sounded like it had been drained of color.
A girl whose face barely remembered how to move.
A girl whose heartbeat rarely sped up, whose pulse rarely changed, whose silence spoke louder than her presence.
She stared at the unfinished document on her laptop, her red eyes reflecting the glowing text.
"No. Still wrong."
The words left her lips as if recited by someone half-asleep. She didn't sigh; her body didn't allow such natural outlets. She didn't huff or frown. She simply deleted the paragraph with ruthless precision, the keys clicking in an unchanging rhythm.
Anyone watching her would assume she wasn't bothered at all.
But Page Dea was annoyed.
Deeply, profoundly, silently annoyed.
Even if not a single trace of it appeared on her face. Even if her voice remained a monotone thread in the quiet room. Even if her body language was as still as a corpse.
She was annoyed.
The cursor blinked mockingly at her.
Her fingers hovered, hesitating for the first time in hours.
"…No."
Click. More text vanished.
She started again from the top, her expression never changing, her mind a battlefield of sensations she could neither fully feel nor ever truly control.
Page Dea, Ninth Rank of Astralis Academy, feared assassin, emotionless doll—
Was losing a fight to a blank Word document.
With another small, perfectly controlled exhale, Page gave up on writing for the moment. If the story refused to cooperate, then she would refuse to cooperate right back. A silent protest. Cold, logical, unfruitful… and entirely her style. She closed the document with a soft click, then immediately opened her Ashtagram feed.
The fan page dedicated to her novel had posted something new. The thumbnail alone was already incriminating: a dramatic glow, romantic framing, soft lighting. She tapped the video.
The screen flooded with an animation of her two lead characters: Bloosom, the bright-eyed, white-haired girl whose smile could uplift even the sourest mood, and Dahlia, the stoic red-eyed assassin whose devotion ran deeper than any words she could speak.
In the video, Bloosom pulled Dahlia close, fingers brushing through dark hair, while Dahlia held her by the waist, steady and fierce. Then came the inevitable part: the passionate kiss, two women caught in a moment of absolute tenderness, the kind that fans replayed ten thousand times.
Page watched the scene without blinking.
No surprise.
No embarrassment.
No excitement.
She had seen edits like this so often that she could predict the transitions before they happened. Her fandom practically worshiped those two. The comments were always the same: walls of hearts, screaming text, declarations of "YURI IS LIFE," and pleas for more chapters.
She closed the video, and then, with the same stillness as someone shutting the lid of a coffin, closed her laptop entirely.
Her phone buzzed.
The name on the screen read: Lillith.
Page picked up immediately. "Yes?"
"Page," Lillith said, sounding rushed, irritated, or perhaps both, Page could never truly tell, "come to the restaurant in the main plaza. The fancy marble one. I sent the address. Just get here."
Page blinked once, mentally switching from writer mode to mission mode. "Why?"
But there was no explanation, no details, no tone. Just a click as Lillith hung up.
Page stared at her blank screen for exactly one heartbeat, long enough for curiosity to slide in, quiet and insistent. Lillith didn't call her often. Lillith didn't need to. And when she did, it usually meant something interesting was about to happen.
Interesting was good. Interesting might even break the suffocating creative drought currently strangling her brain.
She exhaled through her nose, not in annoyance, just in the way someone does when accepting a simple, inevitable truth. She was bored. She was stuck. And her novel clearly wasn't going to write itself today, no matter how long she glared at the blinking cursor.
So… why not?
Her chair creaked as she stood, smoothing down her black jacket out of habit. Her movements were clean, controlled years of conditioning didn't vanish just because she was, internally, mildly irritated at fictional lesbians refusing to cooperate.
She looked around her room once more:
The walls covered in prints of Bloosom and Dahlia,
The articles praising The Assassin's Dreams,
The piles of papers from drafts she pretended she would edit someday.
None of it offered inspiration.
Maybe Lillith would.
Without another moment of hesitation, Page stepped out of her room silent, composed, and only slightly hopeful that whatever Lillith wanted would at least be distracting enough to jolt her brain out of its creative coma.
Curiosity tugged her forward.
Boredom pushed from behind.
And just like that, Page Dea, emotionless assassin, yuri novelist, and Ninth Rank of Astralis Academy, headed toward the main plaza to see what awaited her.
A/N: Most of you probably don't know this, but I love the yuri genre. That said, this novel isn't yuri; it's completely non-yuri with a single female lead. I just wanted to clear up any misunderstandings that might have come up.
Have fun reading, and enjoy!
P.S: Do give me some gifts and power stones and golden tickets :)