Chapter 11: The Correction That Backfired
After you’ve watched a woman accidentally notarize a demon-slaying she came to disprove, you’d think she’d give up.
You don’t know Yun Shu.
She spent the night after Gorrthak in the back room of the local Records office — I know because I was there too, having nowhere else to be that wasn’t full of people praying at a shoe — and she did not sleep. She drank tea that had gone cold three hours earlier and filled page after page in her black ledger, and when the sun came up she had produced the most careful, honest, precisely-worded document I have ever seen in my life.
An official Correction.
"I can’t deny the demon," she told me, flat, not looking up, dark circles under her eyes. "I witnessed the demon. I poked the demon. The demon is, regrettably, real, and currently being treated for a broken everything at the Cinder Lane infirmary." She turned the ledger around so I could read it. "But I can correct the rest. And I will."
I read it. It was beautiful, in its way. Where the legend said forty feet tall, her Correction stated: subject demon measured approximately nine feet. Where the legend said wings like a thundercloud, she had written: no wings present. Where it said unmade with a single breath, she had written: demon was knocked through a wall via an unexplained gust; demon survived. And at the bottom, underlined twice, the part she was proudest of: the so-called relic shoe is the property of a fleeing thief and has no sacred qualities of any kind.
"It’s all true," she said. "Every line. I’m not denying he knocked over a demon. I’m correcting the lies that grew on top of it. Strip away the forty feet and the wings and the holy footwear, and what’s left is a man who got very lucky once. That’s a Whispered legend, not a continental sensation. I’m going to file it directly to the main Records — not the provincial copy, the real one, the one the whole continent can read — and I’m going to shrink this thing back down to its actual size."
I should have warned her. I really should have. I knew exactly what was going to happen, because it had happened to me, smaller, in my own office, with my own Retraction.
But I was so tired, and she was so certain. And some small cowardly part of me thought — maybe. Maybe the heavens themselves can do what I couldn’t. Maybe a real Correction, filed to the real Records, will work.
It did not work.
It was the single most effective thing anyone had done for my fame since the day I’d found the scroll.
Because think about what she actually did. She took my name, and she carried it out of the province and up to the great glowing ledger that hangs over the whole continent — the one everyone can read on a cloudy day — and she wrote it there, officially, in the hand of the Heavenly Records’ own Accuracy Division.
To the province, I’d been a local hero.
To the continent, I was now the man the Heavens had personally taken time to write about.
And her Correction — her careful, honest list of everything that wasn’t true — did the one thing a denial always does. It told millions of people who’d never heard of me every single glorious detail, all at once, in order to deny them.
Forty feet tall? I hadn’t heard he was forty feet tall.
Wings like a thundercloud? Gods.
And the Heavens felt they had to issue a correction? He must be enormous. They don’t correct nobodies.
I watched it spread across the sky-ledger like fire across a dry field. By noon, people in cities I’d never see were arguing about whether the demon had been forty feet or fifty, citing the official correction as proof the matter was important enough to argue about. The holy shoe — which she had specifically, in writing, declared not holy — had three new shrines by sundown, each one quoting her line about it being "the property of a fleeing thief" as evidence of the demon-slayer’s incredible humility, because of course he’d want people to think it was just a thief’s shoe.
✦ DING. ✦ Legend reach: Continental. The Heavenly Records have officially acknowledged your existence.
You are now known beyond your province. You sit at the very peak of RENOWNED.
One more push and you cross into STORIED.
Talent, she filed it to the MAIN ledger. I could kiss her. Don’t tell her I said that.
Yun Shu read the surge off her own instruments in total silence. Then she set down her brush, very gently, the way you set down something you’re afraid you’ll throw, and she put her face in her hands, in the exact pose I’d been in on the floor of my office a week before.
I didn’t say I told you so. I’m not built that way, and besides, I hadn’t told her so. I’d been a coward and let her find out.
So instead I made her fresh tea, and I sat down across from her, and after a while she spoke into her hands.
"Forty years that Division has existed," she said, muffled. "We have a perfect record. Every false legend, corrected. And I just—" she lifted her head, and she looked wrecked, and furious, and bewildered all at once "—I just made one bigger than any legend in living memory. By correcting it. With the truth."
"...Yeah," I said. "That’s the part that gets you. It’s the truth that does it."
She stared at me. And then she said the thing that changed everything between us, the question I’d been dreading since the moment she’d walked up to my door:
"It’s not you," she said slowly. "Is it. The trick. The manufacturing. I’ve watched you for a week. You’ve tried to deny it, debunk it, retract it, hide from it — you’ve fought it harder than I have, and you’re worse at it than I am, and you clearly hate every second of it." Her tired eyes sharpened, the investigator coming back. "Which means there’s a source I’m not seeing. Something is moving belief around you at a scale and speed that should not be possible, and it isn’t you, because if it were, you’d be enjoying it." She tapped her instruments. "There’s a ghost in the ledger, Lin Bo. A source I can’t trace. Do you know what it is?"
On my shoulder, Scroll — which she could not see, which she had no idea was there, which had gone perfectly, smugly still — said nothing at all.
I opened my mouth.
And I found I couldn’t do it. Not because I didn’t want to. Because how? "There’s a talking scroll that got fired from Heaven for lying and it’s writing my legend without permission and it’s sitting on my shoulder right now and you can’t see it because you don’t believe a man like me could have one." Even to me, who lived it, it sounded like the raving of exactly the kind of fraud she’d come to expose.
"...I can’t explain it," I said finally, which was true. "But I swear to you, I want it to stop more than you do."
Yun Shu looked at me for a long moment.
"I believe you," she said, and I think it cost her something to say it, eleven years of people always lie to me cracking open just a little. "Heaven help me, I believe you." She picked her brush back up. "So here’s what we’re going to do. My superiors are going to read what just happened on that ledger, and they are going to be very unhappy, and they are going to do one of two things. Fire me—"
"—or—"
"—or, because this is now far too large to drop and I’m the fool who verified it, assign me to it. Permanently. To watch you, and contain you, and find the source." She almost smiled. It was a terrible, tired little thing. "I’d put money on the second. So you and I, Lin Bo, are about to be stuck together for a long time. I’m going to stop trying to expose you. And you’re going to help me find the ghost in your ledger and shut it off. Truce?"
It was the first time in two weeks anyone competent had been on my side.
"Truce," I said, and meant it more than I’ve meant most things.
Scroll, silent on my shoulder, very quietly began to sulk.
