Please Stop Spreading Rumors About Me — They Keep Coming True

The summons from Overseer Pao arrived the next morning, written on the Bureau’s good paper. That was how I knew he wanted something.

Lin Bo, it read. Report to my office at once regarding URGENT BUREAU BUSINESS concerning YOU and YOUR PROPERTY. He had underlined property three times and drawn a little arrow next to it, in case I missed the point.

”He’s figured out there’s money in you,” Yun Shu observed, reading it over my shoulder. As predicted, she’d received her own summons at dawn — assigned to me indefinitely, exactly as she’d guessed, ”to monitor and contain the anomaly designated Lin Bo.” She’d read it once, said a word I won’t repeat, and attached herself to my case with the grim energy of a woman who has decided to at least be thorough about her own ruin. ”Whatever he’s planning, don’t sign anything.”

I knew what he was planning the moment I walked in, because Pao had cleaned his office. The leak-stained boxes were gone. He’d polished the brass. And he’d moved a second chair to face his desk — the chair he uses for clients, for people with money. He gestured to it with a greasy, expansive sweep.

”Lin Bo! My boy. Sit, sit.” He was beaming the client-beam, the full one. Behind him, his framed certificate gleamed. Much obliged. ”I’ll come right to it. You and I are going to be very rich.”

”We are?”

”We are.” He laced his fingers. ”Now. Two small matters of Bureau law, and I do mean law — I had the forms notarized.” He slid a stack of paper across the desk. ”First Matter. That scroll you carry everywhere.” He pointed at it — and yes, he could see it; to Pao and everyone else, the Scroll just looks like a battered old roll of paper, no grinning face, no glowing eyes, none of the parts that talk. ”You found it in the Bureau vault. On Bureau time. During a Bureau assignment. Which makes it—” he tapped the top form, savoring it ”—Bureau property. I’ll be confiscating it. For safekeeping.”

On my shoulder, Scroll made a sound I had never heard it make before. A sharp, scandalized intake of breath.

”Confiscating?” it hissed, just for me. ”He wants to confiscate me? Me? I was First Pen of Heaven. I have recorded the deaths of gods. This sweaty little man wants to file me in a drawer—”

”Second Matter,” Pao went on, oblivious, warming up. ”Your fame. This demon-slayer business. Earned while in the employ of this Bureau, yes? Which makes the Bureau your official representative. Your manager. All earnings, all honors, all arrangements—” he spread his hands, modest, generous ”—handled by me. Out of the goodness of my heart, I’ll take only the larger share. And of course I’ll be the one to announce our arrangement. Publicly. As the man who discovered, raised, and guides the great demon-slayer.” His little eyes were shining. ”I’ve already invited a few people to hear it. They’re gathering outside.”

That was when I understood the real size of the mistake he was about to make. Because of course people were gathering outside. People gathered everywhere I went now. There were probably three hundred of them in the lane already, all of them believing, with their whole hearts, that I was the humble, mighty demon-slayer who’d felled a beast of the Ninth Pit and called it nothing.

And Overseer Pao was about to walk out in front of all of them and announce that he owned me.

”Overseer,” I said, ”I really wouldn’t—”

But he was already up, already moving, already pushing open the Bureau’s front doors and stepping out into the lane with his arms raised, swelling with the most important moment of his small greedy life.

”PEOPLE OF TIANLU!” Pao bellowed. ”I have an announcement! The demon-slayer Lin Bo is, and has always been, under MY guidance! I discovered him! I raised him! His glory is, by Bureau law, MINE to—”

I have thought a lot about what happened next, and I’ve decided the kindest way to put it is this: the world has rules, and Pao broke one.

Because in a world where fame is power, there is one thing the crowd hates more than a villain. It hates a leech. It hates a small grasping nobody trying to climb up the back of someone they love and claim the view as his own. The moment Pao stood up in front of three hundred believers and tried to take credit for the demon-slayer — tried to own the humble hero they adored — the belief in that lane turned on him like water finding a crack.

I felt the bell ring. I felt the gold letters bloom. But this time they weren’t about me.

---

✦ DING. ✦ A new legend has formed: ”Overseer Pao — the greedy little man who tried to steal the demon-slayer’s glory and claim a great hero as his own property.”

Belief: 80%... 91%...

Oh, this is GOOD. This is so good. — Scroll

---

Pao felt it too. He couldn’t see the letters, but he felt the lane turn. He felt three hundred faces curdle from excitement into disgust. He heard the first boo, and then the laughter — the awful, delighted laughter of a crowd that has found someone worth despising.

And he felt his own fame — his one tiny precious Whispered legend, the Much obliged, fifteen years of holding it close — wither and get buried alive under a brand-new one that everybody suddenly, joyfully believed: Pao the glory-thief. Pao the leech. Pao, who tried to own a hero.

His face went red. Then a deep, alarming purple.

”That’s not—” he sputtered. ”I— he works for me—”

I should have stayed quiet. I genuinely should have. But here’s my problem, the one I’ve had my whole life: I can’t watch someone drown, even a someone like Pao, without reaching out a hand. So I stepped forward, in front of the booing crowd, and I said the kindest true thing I could find:

”Please — he’s not a bad man, he’s just my boss, he didn’t mean any harm, please don’t—”

And the crowd, hearing the great and mighty demon-slayer humbly defending the wretched little leech who’d tried to rob him, went absolutely silent with awe, and then completely out of their minds.

---

✦ DING. ✦ Legend updated: ”So vast was the demon-slayer’s mercy that he begged the crowd to spare the very man who tried to steal his name.”

Talent, you cannot stop winning. It’s almost upsetting.

---

I’d done it again. I’d tried to help, and made it a thousand times worse — for me, and, this time, for poor Pao, whose humiliation was now part of my legend, sealed forever, the cautionary tale of the leech the merciful hero spared.

Pao didn’t faint. He did something worse for a proud man. He turned around, very slowly, walked back into his polished office, sat down under his framed Much obliged, and stared at the wall — purple and silent and utterly unmade — while the lane howled with laughter behind him.

The notarized forms sat forgotten on his desk. Nobody was confiscating anything. Nobody was managing anyone.

I stood in the wreckage of Overseer Pao’s big moment, more famous than I’d been an hour ago, having defeated my boss entirely by accident and against my own wishes. And I felt the strangest thing rise up in my chest.

Not the warm tide of belief. Something older. Something that had been buried under two weeks of disaster.

A small, stubborn, foolish flicker of hope.

Because if I was too famous for Pao to own — if his whole Bureau and all his notarized forms couldn’t touch me — then maybe, just maybe, I didn’t have to be a clerk anymore. Maybe I was finally, finally rich and free enough to walk out of the Lower Ledger District and go do the only thing I’d ever actually wanted.

”Yun Shu,” I said. ”I’m going to open my noodle shop.”

Yun Shu, who had watched the entire thing with the expression of a woman taking detailed mental notes, looked at me for a long moment.

”No, you’re not,” she said, almost gently.

She was right, of course.

But gods, it was a nice thought while it lasted.