Please Stop Spreading Rumors About Me — They Keep Coming True

The Empire’s woman left a chill on the whole city for about a day.

Then Ji Lan arrived, and the chill caught fire.

I should explain who Ji Lan is, because if you don’t understand her, you won’t understand why she hated me so much, so fast, before we’d even met.

Ji Lan is famous. Properly, gloriously, correctly famous. She’s one of the brightest names on the whole continent — high Storied, climbing toward Legendary, a real cultivator with real power, and she earned every drop of it the hard way, over thirty years. She did genuine deeds. She crossed the burning steppes. She broke a siege at Quell. And then — and this is the part that matters — she came home and built her legend like a master craftsman, with her own hands. She courted the bards. She shaped every story. She chose which deeds the songs remembered and how. She turned herself, deliberately and brilliantly, into a name the world adored.

She respects fame the way a great chef respects a kitchen. It’s a craft to her. A discipline. A thing you earn, slowly, with skill and sweat and decades of care.

And then a tired clerk who’d been famous for three weeks, who couldn’t fight, who didn’t want any of it, came rocketing up the sky behind her — gaining in a single afternoon what had cost her years — by sneezing, and eating noodles, and denying everything.

To Ji Lan, I wasn’t a rival. I was an insult. I was proof that the craft she’d given her life to could be skipped by an idiot who fell into it backwards. And she had come, all the way across the continent, to find out how.

She didn’t knock either. The famous never knock. She simply was, suddenly, in the little courtyard outside my room — and where the Empire’s woman had been cold and still, Ji Lan was a storm, sweeping in, beautiful and furious and crackling with the kind of presence that real Renown gives you, the air itself seeming to lean toward her.

She looked at me. The tired man in the rumpled robe, holding a water bucket, again. (I am always, somehow, holding a water bucket when these people arrive. I think the universe does it on purpose.)

Her gorgeous face did something complicated.

"No," she said.

"...Hello?"

"No. Absolutely not." She circled me slowly, studying me, and the fury in her was building, not fading. "I crossed the burning steppes. Do you understand? I held the wall at Quell for nine days. I have given thirty years to my name. Thirty years of choosing every word, every verse, every story, building it stone by stone like a cathedral—" she stopped in front of me, and she was nearly vibrating "—and you. You. Three weeks. You can’t even hold your own breath properly, you smell faintly of broth, and you are about to pass me on the Records. By accident."

"I really don’t want to," I offered. "If that helps. You can have my spot. Please. Take it."

It did not help. Her eyes flashed.

"That," she hissed, "is the most insulting thing anyone has ever said to me. You don’t even want it. People kill for what you’re throwing away. I bled for it." She drew herself up, and the whole courtyard seemed to brighten with her. "So here is what’s going to happen, demon-slayer. I have studied your rise. Every legend. Every surge. And I know — I know, the way only a true craftsman knows — that nobody climbs like this on accident. It’s not possible. There’s a method. A trick. A system you’re hiding." She leaned in, and despite everything, despite the fury, there was a terrible bright curiosity burning under it, the hunger of an artist who has seen something she can’t explain. "And I’m going to find out what it is. I’m going to take you apart, piece by piece, until I understand exactly how a nobody became a legend overnight. And then—"

She stopped.

"—then I don’t know," she admitted, and for one flicker the fury cracked and there was just a tired, brilliant woman who’d given her life to something and watched it look easy in someone else’s hands. "Maybe I’ll expose you. Maybe I’ll learn it. I haven’t decided. But I am not leaving until I know."

Behind me, Scroll — which had been so quiet since the Empire’s woman, so subdued — spoke up for the first time in two days, and it sounded, of all things, delighted. Not the greedy delight it had over Pao. Something warmer. Almost like respect.

"Oh," it murmured, just for me, gazing at Ji Lan the way it had gazed at Yun Shu’s careful ledger, the way it must once have gazed at me across a reject bin. "Talent. Her. She understands it. She built her whole legend on purpose, with her own two hands — do you know how rare that is? Most people just happen. She chose." A long, fond pause. "Keep this one close. She’s going to be magnificent."

I looked at Ji Lan — furious, glorious, certain I was a fraud, absolutely correct that there was a method, completely wrong about whose method it was — and then at Yun Shu, who had appeared in the doorway with her ledger and was watching this second investigator arrive to chase the exact same ghost, with the weary expression of a woman whose strange little case was getting more crowded by the day.

Two women now. Both certain there was a trick. Both right. Both hunting a scroll they couldn’t see, that was sitting on my shoulder, falling a little bit in love with one of them.

"Ms. Ji," I said wearily, setting down the water bucket. "Would you like some tea? It’s going to be a long investigation, and I’ve found these usually go better with tea."

Ji Lan blinked, thrown for the first time.

"...Fine," she said, suspicious. "But I take it without sugar. And I’m watching you the whole time."

"Everyone does," I sighed, and went to put the kettle on.