Please Stop Spreading Rumors About Me — They Keep Coming True

I had thought the capital was big from the hill.

Inside it, the capital was a country pretending to be a city, and the Tournament had swallowed the whole thing.

Every wall wore a banner. Every square held a stage where lesser bards performed the legends of the competitors to warm up the crowds. The streets were a single slow river of people — millions of them, come from across the continent, not to compete but just to be near it, to breathe the same air as the famous, because in a world where belief is power, standing close to a legend makes you feel, for a moment, like you matter too. There were food stalls selling ”demon-slayer noodles” (I tried one out of morbid curiosity; it was terrible; I wept a little, professionally). There were vendors selling tiny replica scrolls and tiny replica thunder-trousers. A child ran past me wearing a paper hat shaped like a sneeze. I don’t know how you make a paper hat shaped like a sneeze. They had managed it.

And over it all, filling half the sky, was the Arena.

I want you to understand the Arena, because it is the whole point. It wasn’t built for fighting. Oh, there was fighting in it — but it was built for watching. A vast ring of white stone open to the heavens, and above it, where the Heavenly Records hung thickest and brightest over the capital, the sky itself served as the screen. When a match happened in that ring, the Records broadcast it — every blow, every word, every face — up across the sky for the entire continent to see at once. Ten million people. Watching together. Believing together.

”This is the largest gathering of belief in the world,” Yun Shu said quietly, beside me, and she didn’t sound impressed. She sounded afraid. ”Once a year, in one place, the whole continent points its faith at the same stage. Do you understand what that means, for you?”

”That I’m going to die in front of everyone I’ve ever heard of?”

”Possibly. But also—” she nodded up at the blinding fold of the sky over the Arena ”—that’s an ocean of belief, Lin Bo. And your ghost drinks belief. Whatever it’s been doing to you in markets and courtyards, on tiny sips—” she didn’t finish. She didn’t have to. In there, it’s going to drink the sea.

Registration was, mercifully, the one part I understood, because it was paperwork, and I am a clerk in my bones. We queued (the demon-slayer queuing for registration caused a small riot of delight; people could not believe I waited in line; the Scroll informed me my ”humble willingness to queue” had added four thousand believers before I’d even reached the desk). I signed the rolls. I received a token — a jade disc with my name and a number, my place in the bracket.

And while I queued, I got my first look at what I’d be up against, and it cured me of any last shred of hope.

Because the Tournament of Ten Thousand Reputations is where the real ones come.

Ji Lan, of course, walked the grounds like she owned them, and half of them she practically did — a high Storied name, a true draw, signing things, trailing admirers, utterly in her element. (”This,” she told me, gesturing at the spectacle with fierce pride, ”is the craft, Lin Bo. This. Decades of it. Try not to embarrass it.”) But she wasn’t the top of the field. Not close.

There was the Iron Sovereign — eight feet of a man, Legendary-tier, who’d conquered three provinces and whose mere walk through the grounds made the cobblestones crack. There was the Frost-Widow, ancient and beautiful and unaging, sixty years famous, who drifted through the crowds in a bubble of cold that made people’s breath fog in summer. There was a young man in white the heralds called the Verse-Blade, a prodigy from the Empire of a Thousand Verses itself — barely older than Tao Tao, already Storied, sponsored and shaped by the Empire into a perfect, gleaming weapon, and looking at the whole tournament like a chore he’d already finished.

These were people who had crossed deserts and broken armies and earned every scrap of their terrible power. Real cultivators. Real strength.

And then there was me. A clerk who couldn’t punch, whose entire ability was a sneeze that worked only when people were watching, wearing a pair of stolen pants that announced him with thunder every time he shifted his weight.

”We are going to do incredible numbers,” Scroll breathed, gazing around at the ocean of belief like a starving man at a feast.

”We’re going to die,” I said.

”Those two things,” said Scroll, ”have never once been in conflict for us, talent.”

Bai Qing was studying the Iron Sovereign with naked hunger — there’s an honest fight, her whole body said. Tao Tao was so overwhelmed by being at the actual Tournament that she’d gone quiet for the first time since I’d met her, just clutching her notebook to her chest, eyes shining. And Yun Shu kept scanning the high tiers of the Arena, the shadowed boxes ringing the top, looking for something. Or someone.

”She’s here,” Yun Shu said finally, very low, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach. ”The First Author. They’ve opened the High Box. It’s been sealed for thirty years and they’ve opened it.” She didn’t look away from it — a single dark box, high above all the others, draped and shadowed, impossible to see into. ”She came. For you.”

I looked up at that one dark box over the ocean of light, and I couldn’t see anything in it at all, and somehow that was worse.

”Come on,” Ji Lan said briskly, sweeping us toward the competitors’ quarter. ”Opening ceremony’s at dawn. Every competitor presents themselves to the crowd — first impressions set your belief for the whole tournament. It’s the single most important entrance of your life.” She gave me a sharp, appraising look, the craftsman sizing up the disaster. ”So for the love of every god, Lin Bo. Whatever you do tomorrow. Do not trip.”