Please Stop Spreading Rumors About Me — They Keep Coming True

Yun Shu said the offers would start by nightfall.

The first one was waiting outside my door before I’d even finished breakfast.

I’d like to tell you I handled it with dignity. The truth is I opened my door to fetch water and walked face-first into a man in robes so expensive they probably cost more than my entire life, holding a lacquered box and a scroll of his own, who bowed so low and so fast that his hat fell off.

”Master Lin Bo!” he cried, scooping the hat back up without breaking the bow. ”Esteemed demon-slayer! I represent the Golden Voice Pavilion, the premier legend-amplification house on the eastern seaboard, and I am here to discuss the single greatest opportunity of your—”

”He’s not interested,” said Yun Shu, from behind me.

She’d appeared the way she always appears now — silently, already there, a cup of tea in one hand and her black ledger in the other, dressed and composed at an hour when I was still in yesterday’s robe. As my assigned Records observer, she had apparently decided that ”observing” me included standing between me and every lunatic who wanted a piece of my fame. I have never been so grateful for anything.

The Golden Voice man was not deterred. They never are. Over the next two days I learned that a famous man does not get visitors. He gets a siege.

Let me give you the highlights, because they tell you everything about how this world actually works.

The Golden Voice Pavilion wanted to ”manage my narrative.” That was the phrase the man kept using — ”narrative,” along with ”reach” and ”synergy” and ”belief-conversion funnel” — talking less like a cultivator and more like a fellow who sells you a horse and then explains why the horse is an investment. ”We have four thousand bards under contract,” he said. ”We could triple your Renown in a season. Imagine it — a coordinated legend campaign. Cross-province. Merchandising. A signature catchphrase. We tested some. Our favorite is ’Behold — and breathe.’” He beamed. ”It tested very well.”

”That’s horrifying,” I said.

”That’s engagement,” he said, exactly like Scroll, and I had to sit down.

The Iron Lotus Sect sent a giant of a man in black armor who didn’t bow at all. He looked me up and down — taking in the tired clerk in the rumpled robe — with the expression of someone who has been sent to buy a warhorse and been handed a goat. ”You don’t look like much,” he said.

”I’m aware.”

”Doesn’t matter. The Sect doesn’t need you to be much. We need a face. Our enrollment’s down. A demon-slayer on our banners, a few public appearances, stand here, look mighty, sign these—” he thrust forward a stack of contracts ”—and you’ll never lift a finger. We do the fighting. You do the being famous. Half your earnings, a seat at the high table, and a very nice cloak.”

It was, I admit, the most honest pitch I got. He didn’t pretend to admire me. He just wanted to rent my name. I almost respected it.

The Thousand Blossoms Court was worse, and I’m going to be brief about it because I’m still embarrassed. They sent a delegation. There was incense. There was music. There was a scroll listing — in detail — the palace they would build me, the hundred disciples who would attend my every word, the gardens, the banquets, and several other offerings that made me turn the color of a cooked shrimp and made Yun Shu’s eyebrow climb so high I thought it might leave her face entirely.

”I just want a noodle shop,” I told them.

The head of the delegation looked at me with enormous pity, the way you’d look at a man who’s been offered the sky and asked for a stick. ”...A noodle shop,” she repeated.

”Six tables.”

She left a very confused report, I’m sure.

There were more. A desperate little sect from up the river that couldn’t offer me anything but begged me to visit, just once, so they could say I had. A slippery man in grey who offered me ”a small loan of belief” on terms he wouldn’t write down, and whom Yun Shu removed personally, by the ear. A poet who didn’t want to recruit me at all, just to fight me, for the fame of having lost.

Through all of it I did what Yun Shu told me. I smiled. I said almost nothing. I signed nothing.

And of course — of course — that made it worse. Because a man who turns down the Golden Voice Pavilion and the Iron Lotus Sect and a literal palace, who can’t be bought, who only wants a noodle shop, is the most desirable prize a sect could possibly chase. By the second evening there was a new verse going around: ”Every house in the land knelt before the demon-slayer, and he turned them all away, for his heart could not be purchased.”

”Talent,” Scroll sighed happily, watching my number tick up off the back of my own refusals, ”you are so good at this and you don’t even know it. Just sign with the biggest one. The Iron Lotus. No — the Golden Voice. Think of the reach.”

”I’m not signing with anyone.”

”That’s what I mean. It’s perfect. Keep doing that.”

And then, on the third day, the siege stopped.

Not tapered off. Stopped, all at once, like a room going quiet when someone important walks in. The recruiters who’d been camped outside my door packed up and left, fast, without a word, and the lane went still.

A single figure came up the empty road.

She wasn’t loud. She didn’t bow, or beam, or thrust contracts at me. She was a tall woman in plain, perfect grey — not poor-plain like mine, but the kind of plain that costs a fortune to look that simple — and she carried nothing at all, and she walked like the street belonged to her and always had.

She stopped in front of me. Looked at me for a long, unhurried moment, the way you read a document you’ve been told is important and have already decided is fake.

”So,” she said. ”You’re the anomaly.”

Behind me, I felt Yun Shu go very still. Beside me, even Scroll said nothing.

”I represent the Empire of a Thousand Verses,” the woman said. Quiet. Pleasant. Cold all the way down. ”You may have heard of us. Ten thousand bards. We don’t amplify legends, Master Lin Bo. We don’t manage narratives.” A small, precise smile. ”We decide them. We decide who the world remembers, and who it forgets. We have done so for a very long time, and we are extremely good at it.”

”...That’s nice,” I said.

”It is.” She tilted her head, and her eyes moved over me — not with the others’ greed, not sizing up a warhorse or a face. Something colder. Something measuring. ”We are not here to recruit you. The Empire does not recruit. I’m here because in forty years of watching this sky, no name has ever climbed the way yours is climbing, and that means one of two things. Either you are doing something no one has ever done—” the smile sharpened, just slightly ”—or something is doing it for you. A backer. A trick. A ghost in your ledger.”

I heard Yun Shu’s breath catch. Ghost. Her word. The exact word.

The woman saw it too. Of course she did. She saw everything.

”We’ll find out which,” she said, as pleasant as ever. She didn’t leave a contract. She didn’t leave a box of treasures. She left, instead, a single black calling card, which she set on my doorstep without touching me, and which bore no name — only a small symbol, a quill crossed through with a line, like a word being struck out. ”When we do,” she said, ”we’ll be in touch. The Empire is always interested in a story it doesn’t yet control.” She turned to go, then paused. ”A word of advice, demon-slayer, free of charge. Everyone you’ve met this week wants to use your legend.” She glanced back, and for just a second the pleasantness was gone and there was only that cold, ancient measuring underneath. ”We’re the only ones who know how to end one.”

She walked back down the empty road. The siege did not resume. For a long time none of us said anything at all.

I picked up the black card. The struck-out quill seemed to drink the morning light.

”Yun Shu,” I said quietly. ”That symbol. What does it mean?”

Yun Shu was staring after the woman with an expression I’d never seen on her before — not the dry skepticism, not the tired patience. Something closer to fear.

”It means a retraction,” she said. ”Not a small one. Not the kind I file.” She took the card from my hand, carefully, by the edge, the way you’d hold something sharp. ”It’s the mark they put on a name when they’ve decided to erase it. Completely. From every song. Every record. Every memory.” She looked up at me. ”I’ve only seen it three times in eleven years, Lin Bo. And every name that wore it—”

She stopped.

”—is gone now,” she finished. ”Like it never was.”

Up at the top of the sky, very far away, I thought of a scorched dark gap where a name should be.