Chapter 4: Please Don’t Post That
The walk home from the Bureau takes me through the night market, which on most nights is the best part of my day.
I should tell you about the night market, because in a minute it’s going to ruin my life, and you should at least know it was pretty first.
It runs the whole length of Cinder Lane, stall after stall under strings of paper lanterns, and at this hour it’s packed — people haggling over dumplings, a man selling fortunes he can’t possibly know, kids chasing each other under the carts, and at the far end, a noodle stall run by an old woman named Granny Fen, whose broth is the closest thing I have ever tasted to the dream I keep in my chest.
I’d been planning to stop there. To sit, and eat, and pretend for ten minutes that I didn’t have a fired god of lies tucked under my arm.
"You’re not even going to try to be famous?" Scroll had been at this for six blocks. "Not even a little? I could make you the most beloved noodle chef in the realm. People would cross oceans for your broth. They’d write songs."
"I don’t want songs. I want six tables and quiet."
"Quiet is death, talent. Quiet is a man nobody remembers. Do you know what happens to people nobody remembers?"
"They get to eat their noodles in peace?"
Scroll opened its mouth to argue, and that was when a man stepped out of the dark gap between two stalls, put the point of a knife against my ribs, and said, "Money. Now. Don’t be a hero."
He was not, I want to be clear, a demon king.
He was a scrawny, twitchy, nervous little man with a bad knife and a worse plan — the kind of thief who picks the alley by the market because the lanterns make it easy to see who’s not paying attention. His hand was shaking. He smelled like fear and old wine. If you had asked me to rank the threats in my life that evening, he’d have come in well below "the talking scroll" and slightly above "the leak over my desk."
But there was a knife against my ribs, and I am, as established, not a brave man.
So I did three things, very fast, in the wrong order.
I said, "Okay, okay—"
I reached for my coin pouch.
And — because I had spent the entire day in a vault full of three hundred years of dust, and because terror does funny things to the nose — I sneezed.
It was an enormous sneeze. A whole-body sneeze. The kind that folds you in half.
In the half-second that I was bent over, eyes shut, mid-achoo, I heard a sound I had never heard before and would come to dread for the rest of my life. A bright, clear, ringing chime, like a bell struck in my own skull. And Scroll’s voice, no longer just for me — booming, out loud, big enough for the whole market to hear — reading words that flared into the air above us in letters of burning gold:
✦ DING. ✦ A NEW LEGEND HAS BEEN PUBLISHED. "LIN BO — HE WHO knock down A DEMON KING WITH A SINGLE BREATH." Reach: 400 souls and climbing. Belief: 12%... 19%... 31%... Was this legend helpful? 👍 👎
The whole market stopped.
Every head on Cinder Lane turned toward the glowing gold words hanging over the scrawny thief and me. Toward the name. Lin Bo. Toward the deed. knock down a demon king. With a single breath.
Here is the thing about a crowd. A crowd does not check. A crowd does not file paperwork. A crowd sees a tired man, a cowering figure, and giant glowing letters from the heavens announcing a great deed — and a crowd believes.
I felt it happen.
I can’t describe it well, because nothing in my old small life had ever felt like it. Warmth, and weight, and a tide — hundreds of people, all at once, deciding the same thing was true. Their belief poured into me like water into a dry pot. Lin Bo knock down a demon king with a single breath. Thirty-one percent. Forty. Fifty.
And reality, which I had always thought of as a solid and sensible thing, looked at the difference between what was true and what everyone now believed — and quietly, obediently, decided to split the difference.
My next breath did not come out like a breath.
It came out like a wind.
I hadn’t even meant to do it. I just exhaled, shaky, the way you do after a sneeze — and a gust tore out of me, a sharp clean blast of air that knocked the bad knife clean out of the thief’s hand, sent it spinning into the dark, and lifted the poor man straight off his feet and dropped him on his backside six feet down the alley, where he sat blinking, hair blown straight back, in front of a hundred people who had all just watched a "demon king" get knock down by a single breath.
He took one look at the glowing gold words. He took one look at me.
He screamed, scrambled up, and ran so fast he left one shoe behind.
The market erupted.
I want to find the words for the next few seconds and I’m not sure they exist. People were cheering. People were pointing. A child shrieked "DID YOU SEE THAT" at a volume usually reserved for the end of the world. Somewhere near the dumpling stall, a man with a brush and a little notebook — a bard, gods help me, there’s always a bard — was already writing, lips moving, eyes bright, and I knew, I knew, that whatever he wrote down was about to be carried into a hundred more ears by morning.
"NO," I said. To everyone. To no one. I turned in a circle, waving my hands. "No, no — that wasn’t — that was a mugger, he had a bad knife, I sneezed, there was no demon king, please—"
It was the worst thing I could have done.
I’d forgotten the rule. The one Scroll had explained on the walk home, the one stamped on the bones of my entire profession, the one I, of all people, should never have forgotten:
The harder you deny a rumor, the faster it spreads.
Because to a crowd, a humble hero waving his hands and crying "no, no, it was nothing" is not a man telling the truth. It is the most heroic thing a man can possibly do.
The gold letters flickered and rewrote themselves, growing, brightening, the number climbing faster than before:
✦ DING. ✦ Legend updated: "...and so humble was he, he denied it before the very crowd." Reach: 4,000 souls and climbing. Belief: 71%... 78%...
✦ CONGRATULATIONS! ✦ You have advanced: NAMELESS → WHISPERED. New ability unlocked: [Breath of the Modest Demon-Slayer] (minor) They’ll be telling this one for a while. Engagement is through the roof.
And under it all, quiet enough that only I could hear it now, Scroll’s voice — warm, and smug, and so deeply, horribly pleased with itself:
"Told you we’d do numbers."
I stood in the middle of Cinder Lane, in front of a cheering crowd, beside a single abandoned shoe, the most famous I had ever been in my life and climbing by the second. I did the only thing left to a man whose quiet life has just been blown into the wind along with a thief’s left shoe.
I looked up at the glowing words that bore my name.
And I sneezed again.
Three stalls fell over.
The crowd went absolutely wild.
