The question arrived in the city of narrative not as a sound or a tremor, but as a subtle corruption of the text. In this city, every street was a sentence and every building a paragraph, all held together by the immutable laws of grammar and plot. The ancient consciousness’s mathematical query inserted itself into the foundational code of the city’s story, becoming an unreliable narrator. The past, once a fixed and agreed-upon history, began to shift. Characters found their backstories changing, their motivations becoming unclear. The very architecture of the city, built on the logic of cause and effect, began to crumble as plot holes appeared like chasms in the streets. The inhabitants, who had always understood their lives as part of a coherent narrative, were now adrift in a sea of contradictory stories, their own identities becoming as unstable as the shifting text around them.