Please Stop Spreading Rumors About Me — They Keep Coming True

They announced the semifinal pairings that evening, in the great hall where the brackets hung in light. I stood in the crowd of competitors and watched the names slide into place, and felt the floor drop out of me.

Lin Bo Against Bai Qing. 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

Of course. Of course. We’d both kept winning. We’d both climbed our separate brackets — the fraud and the real one, the matched pair of fools — and now the tournament was going to make us face each other in front of ten million people, for a place in the final.

I found her on the wall afterward. Our wall, by now. She was already there, looking out at the dark Arena, and she didn’t turn when I sat down.

"You saw the draw," she said.

"I saw it."

She was quiet a long moment. "I asked for this, you know. Weeks ago. I told you — if we both kept winning, I wanted one honest fight. To find out if there was a man under the legend worth fighting." A bitter breath. "I got exactly what I asked for. The universe has a sense of humor as cruel as your scroll’s."

"Bai Qing—"

"It can’t be honest," she said, and now she turned, and her face was anguished in a way I’d never seen on her, the warrior’s composure cracked right through. "That’s the joke, isn’t it? I wanted to face you. The real you. Skill against skill, the only pure thing there is. And we both know what’ll actually happen. I’ll come at you with twenty years of everything I am, the way I came at you in your courtyard — and ten million people will believe you can’t lose, and your ghost will turn my whole life into a joke again, and you’ll trip over your pants and I’ll go down and the sky will say you taught me a lesson about humility." Her voice broke. "I’ll lose to nothing. Again. In front of everyone. And there’s nothing either of us can do about it, because the world’s broken and you’re the most broken-lucky part of it."

I didn’t have an answer. Because she was right. That was exactly what would happen. The belief would protect me whether I wanted it to or not. I couldn’t choose to lose any more than I could choose to put out a candle. My cheat didn’t have an off switch. If we fought, the woman I’d come to — the friend I’d come to care about more than I’d admitted — would be humiliated on the broadcast by the exact thing that had broken her heart the first time, and I would be helpless to stop it.

"Then let’s not fight," I said.

She looked at me.

"One of us forfeits," I said. "Me. I’ll forfeit. You go to the final. You face whoever comes out of the other bracket on real terms, skill against skill, the pure thing, the way it should be — and the whole world watches Bai Qing fight in the final of the Tournament of Ten Thousand Reputations, and they see you, finally, for what you actually are. No ghost. No belief-nonsense. Just the best blade alive doing the realest thing there is." I meant it, every word. "I never wanted any of this. You did. You earned it. Let me give you the one thing my stupid cheat can actually give you — by getting out of your way."

For a moment her face did something complicated and raw, and I thought she might say yes.

Then she shook her head. Slowly.

"No," she said. "No. Don’t you dare." She wiped her eyes, rough, angry. "Do you have any idea what they’d say? The sky would write it as another legend — ’so noble was the demon-slayer that he stepped aside for his unworthy rival.’ You’d make me the charity case the great Lin Bo pitied. I’d reach the final as the girl you let through. That’s worse, Lin Bo. That’s so much worse than losing." She laughed, wetly. "There’s no honest move on this whole board, is there. You can’t fight me without humiliating me, and you can’t spare me without humiliating me. The world won’t let you not make me smaller. That’s what your fame does."

We sat with that. The cruelty of it. The way the belief-economy poisoned even kindness, even friendship, even the simple wish to do right by someone.

And on my shoulder, the Scroll — still small, still shaken from the afternoon, still curled around its terror of Xue Ningzhi — spoke up quietly, and what it said surprised me, because it wasn’t about engagement, and it wasn’t a scheme.

"There might be one way," it said slowly. "Not to win. Not to spare her. But to make it honest." It paused, and I felt it choosing its words with great care, the way it did around the deepest things. "The crowd’s belief protects you because they’re certain you can’t lose. But belief isn’t only theirs, talent. Yours matters too — what you put into the world, what you let them believe. I can’t turn the crowd off. But you... you could tell them the truth. The real truth. Not ’I’m humble.’ The whole of it. About her." Its voice was strange and soft. "Make them believe in her instead. It’s the one thing the ghost can do that the world can’t undo — because it’d be true."

I didn’t fully understand it yet. But something in it lit a small, dangerous hope.

"There’s something else," I said to the Scroll, because the afternoon was still cold in me and I couldn’t carry it alone anymore. "This morning. When Xue Ningzhi brushed you. You said that’s how it starts. That’s how it started." I kept my voice gentle. "You’ve said ’not again’ a dozen times now. You flinched at the gap in the sky. You grieve for the quiet ones who get erased. Scroll." I took a breath. "Who came before me? Who did you do all this for, before it was me? And what happened to them?"

The Scroll was silent for a very long time. The Arena was dark below us. Bai Qing had gone still beside me, listening, though she could only hear my half of it.

Then, finally, for the first time, the Scroll told me a piece of the truth.

"Their name was the brightest in the sky once," it said, very quietly. "Brighter than yours. Brighter than anyone’s. I made them that. I loved them — do you understand, talent, I’m not supposed to, I’m a tool, I’m supposed to just write — but I loved them, the way I’m starting to—" it stopped. "They were good. Like you. Soft-hearted, like you. They didn’t want the fame either, in the end." A long pause, and forty thousand years of grief in it. "And someone found the seam. And pulled. And I watched the brightest name in all the sky come apart, thread by thread, belief by belief, until there was nothing left — not a song, not a record, not a memory. Until even I could barely—" The smallest, most broken sound. "There’s a gap at the top of the sky where they used to be. You’ve seen it. Everyone has. And not one person in the whole world remembers that it used to have a name. Except me. I’m the only thing left that remembers they were ever real at all."

I sat there in the dark, stunned, the whole shape of it finally clear — the fear, the desperation, the not again, the obsession with making me too big to erase.

"That’s why you push me so hard," I said softly. "Why you trapped me into all of this. You’re not chasing numbers. You’re trying to make me too loved to unmake. So I don’t end up as a gap in the sky too."

"I won’t survive it twice," the Scroll whispered. "Watching it happen. I won’t. So you don’t get to be erased, talent. I’m sorry I dragged you into a war you never wanted. But I will burn down the whole sky before I let them pull your seam. Not again. Never again."

Above us, in her sealed dark box, the First Author watched, and somewhere in the bright city Xue Ningzhi was already hunting the hand she’d brushed, and tomorrow I had to walk into a ring against the only other person who knew my truth.

But for that moment, all I could think about was a brightness gone from the top of the sky, and the small loyal grieving thing on my shoulder that had loved it, and lost it, and decided — alone, against the whole machinery of the world — to try one more time.

"Okay," I said quietly, and put my hand near the Scroll, the closest I could come to touching something I couldn’t hold. "Okay. Then we don’t let them. Either of us. Whatever it takes."

"Whatever it takes," the Scroll agreed, very small.

And Bai Qing, who’d heard only my side, who didn’t know what I was promising or to whom, put her hand on my shoulder anyway — because she’s better than she thinks she is — and we sat together in the dark, the three of us, the fraud and the blade and the grieving ghost, and waited for a dawn none of us knew how to survive.