Chapter 22: Three Women, One Tired Man
Here is the situation I found myself in, eight days before the most important day of my life.
I was a man who had spent twenty-six years perfecting the art of being left completely alone. I had built my whole life — my job, my room, my dream of six quiet tables — around the goal of being a nobody no one ever noticed.
And I was now sharing my tiny courtyard with four women who would not, under any circumstances, leave me alone, and who could not, under any circumstances, stand each other.
Let me introduce the cast, as Scroll keeps insisting on calling them.
Yun Shu was there because it was her job. My assigned Records observer, still hunting the invisible "ghost" that powered me, now also functioning as the only person actually organizing our journey to the capital — which she did with grim efficiency, making lists, arranging passage, and quietly keeping me alive.
Bai Qing was there because she’d lost to a sneeze and it had broken her brain. She’d set up a bedroll in the corner of the yard and announced she was "guarding" me until the tournament. What this mostly meant was glaring at me with unsettling intensity and occasionally, without any warning at all, swinging her sword at my head "to test if it was real." It was always real. The belief always saved me. This drove her further out of her mind each time.
Tao Tao was there because she was my disciple and the happiest girl in the world, surrounded at last by so many important people. She had appointed herself, without being asked, the keeper of group morale, and spent her days trying desperately to make everyone be friends. It was like trying to make a fire be friends with a flood.
And then on the third day, just to complete my suffering, Ji Lan came back.
She swept into the courtyard exactly as glorious as she’d left, except now she was radiating fury. She pointed one perfect finger at me across the yard and said: "You stole the Thunder Court’s trousers."
"It was an accident—"
"Do you have ANY idea," Ji Lan said, advancing, "what that’s done to the rankings? I spent thirty years building toward Legendary stroke by careful stroke, and you’ve just leapt half a rank by removing a man’s pants. I went to the capital to prepare. I lasted four days. Four days, knowing you were out here, climbing, by accident, unsupervised." She stopped in front of me, and there was something almost panicked underneath the anger. "I’m not letting you out of my sight again. If I’m going to understand how you do this — and I AM — I have to watch every single step. So I’m escorting you to the capital. Personally. And don’t you dare steal anyone else’s clothing on the way."
So that was my entourage. The tax inspector, the broken swordswoman, the joyful disciple, and the furious artist. Four formidable women, each one of them brilliant and dangerous in a completely different way, each orbiting me for a completely different reason — to study me, to fight me, to worship me, to expose me — and not one of them willing to be in a room with the other three for more than a few minutes without it turning into a war.
That first dinner is burned into my memory.
It started when Tao Tao, beaming, tried to get everyone to share "their favorite Master Lin Bo legend." Yun Shu said her favorite was "none of them, because they’re all false." Ji Lan said that was a philistine thing to say and that the craft of a legend was worth admiring even if the facts weren’t. Yun Shu said admiring a beautiful lie was how the world ended up full of frauds. Bai Qing said they were both missing the point, that the only thing worth respecting was an honest fight — and then she stood up and swung her sword at my head to make a point about something, and the belief deflected it into the soup, which exploded, and Tao Tao wrote down "and the demon-slayer’s mere presence caused the very soup to ascend," and Ji Lan and Yun Shu, for one beautiful moment, stopped fighting each other to unite in glaring at Bai Qing, who glared back, while I sat in the middle wearing soup. Scroll murmured in my ear, delighted beyond words, "This is the best dinner I have ever attended."
I should have been miserable. I want to tell you I was miserable.
But here’s the thing I noticed, sitting there covered in soup with four impossible women arguing across me into the night.
For the first time in my entire life, my room was loud, and full, and warm.
Twenty-six years of wanting to be a nobody so no one would bother me. And the terrible, confusing truth — the one I couldn’t say out loud — was that no one had ever bothered me because no one had ever cared to. I’d been alone so long I’d called it a dream. And now here were four people, for all the wrong reasons, fighting the whole time, none of them even sure they liked me, who had each in their own impossible way decided not to leave.
It wasn’t the quiet I’d wanted. It was the opposite of it.
I looked around that loud, warm, soup-splattered room, and I thought: I would burn the noodle shop to the ground before I’d lose this. And then I got scared, because that wasn’t a thing the old Lin Bo would ever have thought, and I didn’t know yet who the new one was.
"You’re getting attached," Scroll observed quietly, reading my face the way it does. It didn’t sound smug. It sounded careful. Almost worried. "To the cast. That’s good for the story, talent. The audience loves a found family." A pause, and then softer, that old grief stirring underneath it: "Just... hold them lightly. That’s all. The bigger your legend gets, the more the world will want to take things from you. And it always takes the people Dear to you first." The faraway quiet. "Hold them lightly. Not again."
I didn’t hold them lightly. I’m not built that way, you know that by now.
Across the room, Bai Qing swung her sword at my head one more time, the belief knocked it into a wall, and Tao Tao cheered, and Ji Lan told Yun Shu her ledger was "aesthetically depressing," and Yun Shu told Ji Lan she’d "never met a problem she couldn’t make louder," and the lamp guttered warm and golden light over all of us.
Eight days to the capital.
Eight days until I carried every single one of them straight into the brightest, most dangerous light in the world.
I wouldn’t have left a single one behind.
That was going to cost me. I just didn’t know how much yet.
