City Gate Avenue did not care how hot it was.
The sun that had been wringing Nalan City dry for twenty days hung directly over the great southern gate, and beneath it the avenue ran north in one long, straight, shimmering throat of stone—wide enough for four carriages abreast, packed so tight with bodies that no carriage could have moved through it at all. Heat came up off the paving in visible ripples. It came down off the glazed eaves. It came sideways off the shoulders of the crowd, a moist animal heat of sweat and breath and unwashed cotton, so that walking down the avenue felt less like walking through air and more like wading through warm broth.
And the broth was loud.
Pawnshops stood on both sides with their counters built shoulder-high, the old trick of the trade, so that a man pawning his grandfather's jade had to stand on his toes and lift it up like an offering while the clerk peered down at him from behind the bars. Their black-lacquered signboards hung limp in the windless heat. Between them squeezed the stalls: an oil seller ladling sesame oil from clay jars into customers' bottles, the dark-gold stream glossy in the sun, the smell of it nutty and thick enough to coat the tongue; a butcher swatting flies off a slab of pork with a horsetail whisk; a fortune teller asleep under his own banner. Food carriers threaded through the gaps at a jog, shoulder poles bowing under baskets of steamed buns and lotus-leaf rice, shouting make way, make way, hot food, hot food! in a rhythm worn smooth by a thousand repetitions. Stray dogs lay flat in the slivers of shade with their tongues out on the stone, too cooked even to beg.
Above it all, on the upper balconies of the painted houses, the women leaned.
They draped themselves over the red railings in thin summer gauze, fanning slowly, the fabric gone half-sheer where sweat pasted it to their collarbones. Their voices floated down sweet and lazy—Young master, come up and rest, it's cool upstairs, we have iced plum wine—and every so often one would drop a perfumed handkerchief over the rail and watch, laughing behind her fan, as some flushed merchant fumbled to catch it.
There were a great many merchants.
Nalan City sat on the only road from the southern provinces to the capital, a single stone knot tied in the middle of the trade route, and every caravan heading north had to pass through its gate and pay its tax. The merchants came in from weeks of dust and bandit country with their purses fat and their patience thin, and Nalan City was very happy to help them lighten both. They lingered in the wine houses with waitresses perched on their knees, on the balconies, in the gambling dens behind the bead curtains, and the money flowed off them into the city like sweat.
Threaded through the common crowd, like silver needles through coarse cloth, were the others.
A trio of disciples from one of the cultivation sects in the nearby hills walked abreast down the center of the avenue in pale blue robes, swords on their backs. The crowd parted before them without being asked. They did not sweat. A faint film of Qi clung to their skin, cool and even, turning the heat away from them the way oiled paper turns away rain—and anyone who brushed too close felt it as a prickle along the arm, a tiny, polite warning: I am not the same kind of creature as you. Behind them rode two young officials on glossy horses, their black gauze caps tilted at a fashionable angle, their servants running alongside to hold parasols over their heads.
Noise. Smell. Heat. Color. Money.
And in the exact middle of it, standing perfectly still while the current of bodies broke and flowed around him, was a young man of about twenty with his mouth hanging open.
It was a remarkable mouth. It was open wide enough to fit a fist. His eyes above it were dull, glassy, unfocused, the pupils shrunk down to two tiny points like red beans, and they were moving very slowly from one thing to the next—the pawnshop counter, the oil jar, the balcony, the disciples, the horses, the gate—as if each one were a word in a language he had once spoken fluently and was now trying, with great effort, to remember.
His name was Liu Mang.
A moment ago—or a lifetime ago, or both—he had been drowning.
He could still feel it. That was the strangest part. His skin was slick with sweat, the sun was hammering the top of his skull, the stone under his boots was hot enough to fry an egg, and yet somewhere deep in the marrow of him there was still a sliver of that black water. A cold, heavy thread of the River of Three Ways, coiled up in his chest like a sleeping eel. The hands. The faces. The current turning three ways at once.
And then—nothing. And then this.
Breathe, he told himself.
His body breathed. That was new too. It breathed on its own, easily, without his permission, a smooth deep draw of hot air into lungs that felt larger and cleaner than the ones he had smoked through for ten years. The body was lighter than his. Looser in the joints. It stood a little taller than he was used to standing, so that the world sat at a slightly wrong angle, as if someone had nudged the camera up a few inches. His hands, hanging at his sides, felt soft. His feet felt soft. The whole thing felt soft, in a way he could not yet put into words—a pleasant, well-fed, well-rested softness, like a pillow that had never been slept on hard.
Not my body.
The thought arrived calmly, and stayed calm for about a second.
Then he looked at the gate again.
It was a great gate of gray stone, three stories high, roofed in green tile, its doors studded with black iron. Above the arch hung a plaque, and on it, in two enormous characters of gold leaf blazing in the noon sun, was a name.
Nalan.
Liu Mang's mouth, impossibly, opened wider.
He knew that plaque. He knew those studs. He knew the shoulder-high counters of the pawnshops and the red railings of the balconies and the precise slope of the green tiles over the gatehouse, because he had described them—sitting at a cheap plywood desk at three in the morning with an energy drink sweating a ring into a stack of unpaid bills, he had typed them out one by one. Nalan City sat on the only road from the south to the capital. He had written that sentence. Pawns, high counters, painted houses, oil sellers, food carriers. He had written that list. He had even, he remembered now with a rising, giddy horror, written the dogs.
This was the first map.
The novice village. The place where every web-novel protagonist gets humiliated in the street, slaps the arrogant young master, and levels up on bandits until he is strong enough to leave. He had built it as a launch pad for his hero and never once imagined anyone would have to stand in it.
It's real. The novel is real. I'm inside the—
Lord Yama's voice rolled through his memory like thunder through a valley. You will be returned to the world. To your world—the world you wrote and then strangled in its cradle.
"Oh," Liu Mang said aloud, to no one. "Oh, no."
He licked his lips. They were cracked. His throat was a dry tunnel lined with sand, and when he tried to swallow nothing went down. He could not have said whether it was thirst or terror. In this heat, it was probably both.
Because he knew how this story went.
He knew it better than anyone alive or dead. And the problem with this story—the real problem, the one Lord Yama had been too busy shouting about peach blossoms to mention—was that it did not go anywhere good.
The fairy and her young master had gotten their happy ending. He had given them that much: a side couple tucked away in the first volume, safely married beneath the blossoms, the only two people in the whole book he had allowed to be happy. Everyone else he had fed into the grinder.
The plot of his novel did not climb; it lurched. Up and down and sideways like a rollercoaster built by a drunk—a sect massacre here, a betrayal there, a beloved master revealed as a demon in chapter two hundred, a sister who died in the hero's arms in chapter three hundred and sixty. He had written the villains with real love—cultivators who ate cities, a demon emperor sleeping under the northern ice. Every arc had ended with the world a little darker than it began. Every time the hero won, the price of winning had been something he couldn't get back.
And at the end—
At the end, the sky had cracked.
Liu Mang had written it in a single feverish weekend. The seals failed one by one. The demon emperor woke. The heavens split open along a seam of black fire and something vast and hungry looked down through the gap, and with one lazy gesture—he had literally imagined a snap of the fingers when he wrote it, the purple gauntlet, the dust—half of all living things in the world had simply ceased to exist. The other half followed in the epilogue. The end. Evil wins. Thank you for reading, please leave a five-star review.
It had been, he had thought at the time, bold.
The readers had not thought it was bold.
Because it was not just the ending. It was what the ending did to the protagonist.
Ye Qiong.
Web novels were supposed to be about the climb. A nobody, spat on by everyone—then the bloodline wakes, and the nobody claws his way up from the dirt until the whole world kneels. That was the promise. Liu Mang had made it. He had given Ye Qiong the wheat-dark skin of a boy who worked in the sun, a sealed bloodline buried in his veins, a system in his head, and let him rise, swift and unstoppable, a protagonist's halo so bright you could read by it, until he killed the final great villain with his own hands.
And then, on the night he finally stood with the heroine under the moon—after four hundred chapters, after she had cried for him and bled for him and been rescued by him seven separate times—at the precise instant their faces leaned toward each other in the silver light—
The sky cracked.
And Ye Qiong vanished in the snap with everyone else.
Without a twist. Without a resurrection. Without even a first kiss.
The protagonist of a four-hundred-chapter adult web novel had died a virgin who had never so much as touched his lips to a girl's.
Author, are you human? had been one of the gentler comments. Ordinary readers had been driven halfway mad. And an impatient man like Lord Yama—reading every chapter by the light of a jade mirror, waiting for something, anything, to happen in a bedroom—
"No wonder," Liu Mang croaked. "No wonder he threw me in the river."
Wait.
He looked down at his arm.
Wait, wait, wait.
Lord Yama had said change the ending. The protagonist changes the ending. That was how stories worked. If he was in the novel, then surely he was—
He held his hand up in front of his face and turned it over in the sunlight.
The skin was white.
Not sick white. Not pale-from-a-basement white like his old hands, which had been sallow and nicotine-stained and dry around the knuckles. This was porcelain. Smooth, even, faintly translucent at the wrist, the fingers long and soft and unmarked by a single callus. A hand that had never carried water or held a hoe. A hand that had never, as far as he could tell, held anything heavier than a wine cup.
Ye Qiong had skin the color of wheat. Liu Mang had written it a hundred times. His wheat-colored skin gleamed with sweat. His wheat-colored fist struck the elder's chest.
"But I'm not the protagonist," he said slowly. "Am I?"
He started to walk.
He did not decide to. His legs simply started moving, and since his mind had nothing better to suggest, it let them. Three steps forward. A turn. Three steps back. Another turn. Around and around in a tight little circle in the middle of City Gate Avenue, chewing his thumbnail, muttering under his breath, while the crowd parted and re-formed around him like water around a stone that had started rolling in place.
Not the protagonist. Then who? A side character? A passerby? Passerby is fine. Passerby is great. Passersby don't get involved. Passersby just watch the protagonist slap someone and then go home and eat dinner—
He became aware, slowly, of eyes.
People had stopped. Not many, at first—a woman with a basket of eggs, a pair of porters, an old man in a straw hat. Then more. The oil seller had paused with his ladle in the air. Two of the women on the nearest balcony had leaned out over the rail, fans frozen. Even a few of the merchants had turned from their haggling to look.
And they were not looking at him the way people look at a madman.
They were looking at him the way people look at a show.
A fat porter with a sunburned neck pointed straight at him and nudged his friend. "Eh. Eh, look. Isn't that Li Yuguo?"
"Which Li Yuguo?"
"How many are there? That Li Yuguo. The city lord's soft scion. The one who married in." The porter grinned with all his teeth. "Look at him, walking in circles—he's working himself up to another tantrum. Last time he threw a bowl of noodles at the cook at Fragrant Pavilion because the broth was too salty."
"Too salty!" someone else snorted. "He's lucky he can taste anything with his mouth always full of his wife's rice."
Laughter rippled out across the street.
"A useless thing like that," the old man in the straw hat said, and spat neatly into the gutter, "deserves to die three hundred deaths."
"Three hundred deaths wouldn't be enough!"
"Hey—Lord of Soft Rice!" one of the balcony women called down, sweet as honey, her fan fluttering. "Is your lady wife letting you out alone today? Did she give you pocket money?"
The crowd howled.
Liu Mang stopped walking.
Soft rice.
He tugged at his hair with both hands. The hair was long—far longer than his own had ever been—bound up in a topknot with a jade pin, and his fingers came away smelling of some expensive floral oil. Eating soft rice. The old slang for a man who lived off a woman. A kept man. A gigolo with a marriage certificate.
The Lord of Soft Rice.
"Why does that sound familiar?" he whispered. "Why does that sound so familiar—"
It was right at the edge of his memory, like a word on the tip of the tongue. But his head was swimming. The heat, the noise, the river-cold still lodged in his chest, a hundred mocking stares—it all piled up behind his eyes, and a heavy, sticky drowsiness rolled down over him like a wet blanket. He swayed on his feet. He snorted, shook his head like a horse shaking off flies.
Then, through a gap in the crowd, he saw water.
It was a side channel cut through a cobbled lane between a teahouse and a dyer's shop, and unlike the sour green canals, it ran clear—fed from the hill springs, sliding fast and cold over pale stones beneath a willow that dipped its long hair to the surface.
Liu Mang pushed through the crowd toward it without a word. The laughter followed him for a few steps and then lost interest.
He crouched on the stone lip of the channel. Up close the water was even better—cold enough that he could feel its breath on his face, a thin, delicious mist of coolness rising off it in the heat. He plunged both hands in up to the wrists. The shock was so sweet he groaned. He scooped it up and drank, and drank again, and splashed it over his face and down the back of his neck, and felt the drowsy fog inside his head shrink back a little.
Then the ripples smoothed, and he looked down.
And jumped so hard he almost fell in.
"Goodness," Liu Mang said. "Who's this handsome bastard?"
He looked over his left shoulder. Nobody. Over his right. A dyer's apprentice wringing indigo cloth, paying him no attention. He looked back down.
The face in the water looked back.
It was, there was no other honest word for it, beautiful. Not square-jawed and sword-browed like Ye Qiong. Softer. More expensive. Skin like milk poured into a white bowl. Brows drawn with a single stroke of a brush. A mouth a little too full and a little too red, the mouth of a man who had spent his whole life sipping things he didn't pay for. Long, heavy-lidded eyes—and under the stunned gape that was purely Liu Mang's, a ghost of something else. A lazy, sulky arrogance practiced in mirrors until the muscles remembered it on their own.
And it was young.
That hit hardest. Liu Mang had been twenty-eight going on fifty—bags under the eyes, gray at the temples, the permanent office-chair hunch. The face in the water could not have been a day over twenty. Nearly a decade, washed off in the river.