Please Stop Spreading Rumors About Me — They Keep Coming True

I did it anyway.

Of course I did. Yun Shu told me it wouldn’t work, and she was right, she’s always right, but I had been saving for this dream since before I knew the word for despair, and there was a small heavy purse of coins under a loose board in my room — three years of two-copper days, every coin a noodle bowl not bought, every coin a small no said to myself — and now I was famous and free and finally able to spend it.

So I spent it.

There’s a narrow empty storefront at the quiet end of the canal, far from Cinder Lane, far from the market, far — I hoped — from anyone who’d heard the name Lin Bo. The rent was cheap because the roof sagged and the previous tenant had sold pickled things that nobody wanted. I took it. I scrubbed it for two days. I bought a big iron pot, and good bones, and ginger, and scallions, and I built — with my own hands, badly, but with love — six small tables.

Six. The exact number from the dream.

Yun Shu watched me do all of it with her arms folded and her brush still, saying nothing, which from Yun Shu is a kind of mercy. Once, when I was wrestling a table leg that wouldn’t sit straight, she crouched down without a word and held it steady while I hammered. We didn’t talk about it. But I noticed.

"You know this ends badly," she said, the night before I opened, watching me stir the first test pot. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

"I know."

"You’re going to do it anyway."

"I’m going to do it anyway."

She was quiet a moment. "Why?"

I thought about how to say it. "Because for three years this was the thing that got me out of bed," I said finally. "Even if I only get it for a day. Even if it gets taken. I want to have had it. Just once. I want to stand behind that pot and hand a stranger a bowl and have them not know my name." I tasted the broth. It needed salt. "Is that stupid?"

Yun Shu looked at me for a long moment, and something moved behind her tired eyes that I didn’t have a name for yet.

"No," she said. "It’s not stupid."

I opened at dawn.

And for one hour — one whole, perfect, golden hour — I had it.

I want to tell you about that hour, because it’s the best hour of this entire story and I’m never getting it back. The first customer was an old bargeman with a bad cough who didn’t look up from his net the whole time. He grunted at me, pointed at the pot, put down two coppers, ate his bowl in silence, grunted again, and left. He had no idea who I was. He thought I was a man who sold noodles.

I nearly wept into the broth.

Two more came. A washerwoman. A boy running an errand. They sat at my crooked tables in the morning light, and they ate, and they complained about the weather, and not one of them knew my name, and the pot bubbled, and the steam rose, and Yun Shu sat in the corner with a bowl I’d made her, eating slowly, and for sixty whole minutes I was nobody at all, and it was everything.

Then the boy running the errand finished his noodles, and his eyes went strange and dreamy, and he said, to no one, in a small wondering voice:

"...this is the best thing I’ve ever eaten. I feel like I understand my grandfather now."

And his bowl, the empty bowl in his hands, was glowing faintly gold.

The Blessing of the Reluctant Cook. I’d forgotten. I’d let myself forget. My noodles hold the Way of Heaven now — that’s a real legend, believed by a continent, and belief makes things true — and the boy had just felt it, and he ran out the door to tell everyone he knew that the demon-slayer’s noodle shop was real, and the food made you understand your grandfather, and —

You know how this goes. You’ve watched it happen four times now. So have I.

It took less than an hour for the dream to become its exact opposite.

They came in a flood. Not customers — pilgrims. Hundreds, then it looked like thousands, packed down the quiet canal road that had been so beautifully empty an hour before, shoving, shouting my name, weeping, holding up bowls they’d brought from home, begging for a single noodle, a drop of broth, a chance to understand their grandfathers. My six little tables were swallowed in the first thirty seconds. Someone climbed in through the window. Someone offered me a month’s wages for the water I’d boiled the bones in. The old bargeman, my first and best customer, got swept right out the door on the tide of bodies, still clutching his net, looking deeply annoyed.

I sold out — everything, the whole pot, the bones, the scallions, the ginger — in eleven minutes, to people who didn’t want noodles. They wanted a piece of the legend. And when the food was gone they didn’t leave. They knelt. On the canal road. Outside my sagging little shop. And they began, softly, to pray.

I stood behind my pot — my empty pot, in my mobbed shop, six broken tables, a man on his knees praying at my doorway — and I understood, finally and completely, the shape of the curse I was under.

I hadn’t wanted to be a god who fed thousands.

I’d wanted to be a nobody who fed five.

The world had looked at the one small quiet thing I loved, and it had given me the biggest, loudest, most glorious version of it imaginable, which is to say it had given me the one thing I could not stand.

"Talent," Scroll said. Quietly. And here is the thing I noticed, the thing that stuck with me: it didn’t crow. It didn’t say numbers. It had been so smug about Pao, so delighted about Gorrthak, so proud of every disaster — and now, looking at me standing wrecked behind my empty pot, it said nothing about engagement at all. Its voice had gone to that old, quiet place, the one it went to when it skipped over what had happened to its last main character. "...I’m sorry," it said. "I didn’t think about the shop. I should have thought about the shop."

It was the first time it had ever apologized to me. I didn’t have it in me to answer.

It was Yun Shu who saved what could be saved.

She stood up from her corner, and she pulled out her jade Records token, and she walked to the door, and she held it high, and in the flat, certain, carrying voice of an official of the Heavenly Records she announced that the premises were now under formal Accuracy inquiry, all persons were to disperse immediately, and any unauthorized worship on the canal road was a documentable offense.

It was nonsense. There’s no such offense. But she said it like there was, and the crowd — who believe in the Records the way they believe in the sky — believed her, and they went.

When the road was empty again, she came back inside, righted one of my broken tables, and sat down at it.

"I’m not hungry," she said. "But I’d take a bowl. If there were one."

There wasn’t. I’d sold it all.

But there’s always a little kept back, in any kitchen worth the name — a small private pot, the cook’s own. I’d been saving it for myself, for after, for the end of my one perfect day. I brought it out, and I made one bowl, and I set it down in front of the one person in the world who knew exactly what I was and exactly what I wasn’t, who had eaten my noodles that morning and complained about nothing and asked me for nothing, and who had just emptied my shop of strangers so I could have it quiet, one last time.

She ate it slowly. She didn’t say it was holy. She didn’t say it made her understand her grandfather. She said, "It needs a little more salt," and I laughed, and it came out cracked and wet, and she pretended not to notice.

I closed the noodle shop that night. I gave the pot to Granny Fen, whose stall the crowds had also eaten, so at least the two of us could be ruined together. The dream went back into the box under the loose board, smaller now, but not gone.

Not gone. I want to be clear about that. I put it away. I didn’t throw it out.

But I understood, walking home with Yun Shu in the dark, both of us quiet, that I wasn’t going to get it by hiding. The fame was too big now, and getting bigger, and there was nowhere left to hide a quiet life. If I ever wanted that pot and those six tables back, I wasn’t going to find them by running.

I was going to have to understand the thing I’d become. All the way up.

"Yun Shu," I said. "I think I need you to show me. The Records. How big this actually is. What I’m — what I’m turning into."

She nodded slowly, like she’d been waiting for me to ask.

"Tomorrow," she said. "There’s a place you can see the whole thing from. I’ll warn you now, though." She glanced sideways at me, and for once there was something almost like worry in it. "Once you see how far up your name is climbing, you’re not going to be able to un-see it. And neither will the people at the top."