Please Stop Spreading Rumors About Me — They Keep Coming True

I have one dream, and it is a small one.

I want to open a noodle shop.

Not a famous noodle shop. Gods, no. A quiet one. Six tables. A pot of broth that never stops bubbling. A line out the door would honestly ruin the whole thing. I want the kind of place where the same five old men shuffle in every morning, complain about their knees, eat their noodles, and leave without ever once asking my name.

That’s the whole dream. That’s it.

I bring it up because in the world I live in, it might be the strangest dream a person can have. Because where I’m from, your name is the most important thing about you. Your name is, more or less, your soul.

Let me explain, because if you don’t get this part, none of the rest will make sense.

Where I’m from, people don’t get strong by training. Nobody punches waterfalls or swallows glowing pills or sits on a cold mountain for sixty years breathing in a special way. People get strong by getting famous.

We call it Renown. It’s a fancy word, but it just means fame — how many people know your name, and how strongly they believe the stories they’ve heard about you. The more people who believe in you, the stronger you actually, physically become. A man that ten thousand people have heard of can lift a loaded cart with one hand. A woman that ten million people sing songs about can split a mountain just by frowning at it.

Fame is power. Real power. The kind that bends the world like wet paper.

And every name, every story, every drop of fame in the whole land is written down in the Heavenly Records — a giant glowing ledger that hangs in the sky over the capital, so bright you can read it on a cloudy day. (”Ledger” is just a fancy word for a big book where someone keeps track of numbers. In this case, the numbers are people.) If you want to know how famous someone is, you look them up. There’s a ranking and everything. People check it the way some folks check the weather.

So you’d think a person could get strong just by lying. Just by spreading a good story about themselves.

You’d be right. That’s exactly how it works. That’s the whole problem with everything, honestly. But we’ll get to that.

The point is this: in a world where fame is power, the most powerful people are walking legends, and the weakest people are nobodies that nobody’s ever heard of.

I am a nobody that nobody’s ever heard of.

And my job — my actual, paid, stamp-it-and-file-it job — is making other people into nobodies too.

I work at the Bureau of Minor Corrections.

We’re in the Lower Ledger District of Tianlu City, which is the part of the city you end up in when your fame is so low that the nicer districts won’t rent to you. Our building leans a little. The sign out front has lost two letters, so technically I work at the ”Bureau of inor Corre tions,” which I think is more honest anyway.

Here is what we do. When somebody famous gets famous for the wrong thing — something embarrassing, something they’d rather the world forgot — they come to us, and for a fee, we file a Retraction. (”Retraction” is just the official word for taking something back.) We can reach into the edge of the Heavenly Records and very, very carefully shave a little fame off a story until it shrinks. Until people start to forget.

It’s slow, delicate, boring work. The bottom rung of the whole fame world. The big sects out there are media empires with thousands of bards singing their praises, and we’re the sad little office in the back that erases the part where you fell off your horse.

I was nine minutes late that morning. I want it on the record that nine minutes is barely late. The rooster across the street had personally betrayed me.

”You’re late,” said Overseer Pao, before I’d even gotten the door shut.

Overseer Pao is my boss. He is a round, sweaty man with a thin mustache he’s very proud of, and he is, technically, famous. Whispered rank — the lowest rank of famous there is, which means a few hundred people in one neighborhood have vaguely heard your name. Pao earned his fame fifteen years ago, when he held a door open for a Storied-rank elder who was visiting the district, and the elder said, and I quote, ”Much obliged.”

Pao had those two words notarized. He has the certificate framed on the wall behind his desk. He looks at it when he’s sad.

”Nine minutes,” I said.

”A man’s reputation,” said Pao, tapping the framed certificate without looking at it, ”is built on the small things.”

”Then I’m doing great,” I said. ”I have no reputation at all.”

He didn’t like that. He never likes that. But before he could find a punishment, the door banged open behind me, and our morning client swept in, and Pao’s whole face changed into the greasy smile he keeps for people with money.

The client was a young noble. You could tell from across the room — silk robes, a jade pin in his hair, and the specific look of a man who has never once carried his own bag. He was maybe twenty. His name, he announced, was Young Master Hu, of the Hu clan, and he needed our complete discretion.

”Of course, of course,” Pao oozed, pulling out a chair. ”The Bureau is the soul of discretion. Now. What story would the young master like to, ah, correct?”

Young Master Hu went very pink. He leaned in. He whispered.

I didn’t catch all of it. I caught the important word, though.

The important word was ”goose.”

”I’m sorry,” said Pao, who also hadn’t caught it. ”A what?”

”A goose,” said Young Master Hu, louder, going from pink to a deep, suffering red. ”I lost a duel. To a goose.”

Silence settled over the office.

I would like to say I behaved professionally. I had a brush in my hand and a form in front of me and I was a paid employee of the Bureau, and I did not laugh.

I want that on the record too.

”It was a misunderstanding,” Young Master Hu said quickly, the words tumbling out now that they were free. ”I was at the lake. There was a goose. It was on the path. I told it to move. It did not move. So I drew my sword — for honor, you understand, the goose was being deeply disrespectful — and the goose, the goose—” He pressed his hands over his face. ”The goose won. Everyone saw. There were forty people at that lake. And now there’s a song.”

”There’s a song,” I repeated.

”There’s a song!” he wailed. ”My own little brother sings it! It has a chorus!”

And here, I’m afraid, is where I should have kept my mouth shut, because this is the part where I made my one big mistake of the day, which is that I told the truth.

”Sir,” I said, setting down my brush. ”I’ll be honest with you, because you’re paying, and you deserve honesty. We can shrink the story. We can shave it down, slow it, make people start to lose interest. But I don’t think we can kill it.”

Pao made a strangled noise. Don’t tell the client we can’t do it, his eyes screamed. The fee, the fee, the fee.

I kept going anyway. I’m like that.

”Here’s the thing nobody likes to say out loud,” I said. ”The funnier a story is, the harder it sticks. Fame isn’t about whether something’s true. It’s about whether people enjoy repeating it. And, sir — and I mean this with respect — people are going to love repeating this one. A young noble, a sword, an honor duel, and the goose wins? That’s not a rumor. That’s a gift. People will be telling that story at weddings in a hundred years.”

Young Master Hu stared at me with the wide, wet eyes of a man watching his future drown.

”...How much to try anyway,” he whispered.

Pao named a number. It was an enormous number. Hu paid it without blinking, which tells you how badly he wanted this gone, and Pao practically purred.

So I spent the next two hours doing the actual work — reaching into the soft edge of the Records, finding the little bright thread of the goose story, and gently, carefully, sanding it down. It’s tiring. It feels like trying to scrub one specific word off a wall that ten thousand people are still painting. By the end I’d shrunk it. The song would fade a little. Fewer people would hear it next month than this month.

It would not die. I’d told him it wouldn’t. He’d be a ”Whispered” legend for being beaten by waterfowl for the rest of his life, and probably a while after.

He left looking slightly less crushed and considerably poorer.

Pao counted the fee three times. Then he remembered he was angry at me.

”You,” he said, pointing the brush at my nose, ”do not tell a paying client what we cannot do.”

”I told him the truth.”

”The truth,” said Pao, like it was something I’d tracked in on my shoe, ”is bad for business.” He sat back. The chair groaned. His little eyes got a mean, happy shine in them, the shine he gets when he’s thought of something. ”You know what. I think your attitude needs an adjustment. You’ve been getting comfortable, Lin Bo. Sitting at your nice desk. Telling clients your opinions.”

I did not point out that my desk is the worst desk in the building, wedged in the corner where the roof leaks when it rains.

”Tomorrow,” said Pao, smiling now, fully smiling, ”you’re on vault duty.”

My stomach dropped about a foot.

”...The cursed vault?”

”The cursed vault,” said Pao, leaning back, lacing his fingers over his belly like a man who has just won a war. ”Inventory and clear-out. The whole reject pile. Top to bottom. By yourself.” He sighed happily and looked up at his framed certificate. Much obliged. ”Build a little character, Lin Bo. It’s the small things.”

I went home that night to my one rented room above a laundry, and I lay on my mat, and I did what I always do when the day has beaten me down.

I thought about the noodle shop.

Six tables. A pot that never stops simmering. Five old men who’d never once ask my name.

It was a good dream. A small, safe, quiet dream.

I really should have known the universe would never let me have it.