He touched his cheek. The reflection touched its cheek. The skin was so smooth under his fingertips it felt almost wet.
If I'd had this face in my old life, he thought, with a small, stupid ache, I'd have had a girlfriend by fifteen.
Something at his waist clinked against the stone.
He looked down. Hanging from his sash on a cord of braided red silk was a token, a flat oval of white jade about the size of his palm, carved around the edges with clouds. He untied it with clumsy wet fingers and turned it to the light.
Three characters were cut into its face, deep and elegant, filled with black lacquer.
Li Yuguo.
Liu Mang stared at them.
The cicadas screamed in the willow overhead. The channel water chuckled over its stones. Somewhere back on the avenue, a food carrier was still shouting hot food, hot food, and it all seemed to come from very far away.
Li Yuguo.
The Lord of Soft Rice.
The city lord's son-in-law.
The word that had been sitting on the tip of his tongue fell off it and landed in his stomach like a stone.
"No," he said. "No. No, no, no. Not him."
Because he remembered Li Yuguo now. He had written him on an afternoon when he was angry—a rejection email, maybe, or his landlord—and poured it all into one disposable character. A pretty, useless, preening parasite who had married far above himself, never earned a copper or advanced a single step in cultivation, and strutted around Nalan City on his wife's name like a rooster on a tiger's back.
The first villain.
Not even the first real villain. The first speed bump. The appetizer. The obnoxious local brat that every protagonist meets in the novice village so the readers can enjoy watching him get his face slapped. Li Yuguo existed for exactly one reason: to bully Ye Qiong in the early chapters, to scheme against him, to fail at scheming against him, and to be destroyed so thoroughly and so satisfyingly that the readers would cheer.
And Liu Mang had made sure they cheered.
He remembered the chapter. It had been popular. Li Yuguo, drunk and humiliated, had used his wife's authority to drag the girl Ye Qiong loved into a back room. Ye Qiong had kicked down the door, blazing with the first awakening of his bloodline, beaten Li Yuguo half to death in front of half the city—and then, while the man was still conscious and screaming, very deliberately severed a particular appendage.
So he can never touch a woman again, Ye Qiong had said, in the line the readers had quoted for weeks.
Li Yuguo had bled out in the street before sunset.
Liu Mang's free hand shot down between his own legs.
He did not think about it. His body did it on its own, a lightning-fast, panicked grab, the way a man slaps his pocket when he thinks he has lost his wallet. His palm closed over the front of his trousers—and there it was. Present. Accounted for. A warm, soft, reassuringly substantial weight of cock and balls nestled in silk, entirely attached, not one inch missing. It even twitched a little under his grip, as if offended by the suspicion.
He let out a breath so long and shaky that it whistled.
"Still here," he whispered. "Still here, still here. Good boy."
The dyer's apprentice across the channel had stopped wringing his cloth and was staring at him with his mouth open.
Liu Mang removed his hand, very slowly, and cleared his throat.
He sat back on his heels on the hot stone, the jade token heavy in his palm, and let the truth settle over him.
I am Li Yuguo.
I wrote myself to death.
There was a bitter sort of comedy in it, if he was honest, and he had always been at least honest enough to recognize his own jokes. Because the man who had written Li Yuguo—the man who had written all of them, the tragic heroines and the butchered mentors and the protagonist who died a virgin—had not exactly been a beacon of happiness himself.
Liu Mang, twenty-eight, a hair's breadth from thirty, had been an otaku in the most complete and unglamorous sense of the word. He did not travel. He did not go out. He did not have friends so much as usernames. He lived in a single rented room above a hardware store with a window that faced a wall, and went downstairs mainly for instant noodles and cigarettes.
He had wanted more. Of course he had. Every man in a room like that wants more. He had wanted money, and looks, and a woman who laughed at his jokes—but he had none of the first, none of the second, and no idea how to find the third, and so love had stayed what it always was for him: a thing that happened to other people. A thing that happened in books.
So he had written books.
And in the books, he had taken it out on everyone.
That was the ugly truth of it, the one he had never said out loud. All the frustration of that room—the wall outside the window, the empty phone, the landlord, the rejections, the long nights of nobody—had gone into the keyboard and come out as suffering. His male leads were betrayed. His female leads were broken. Lovers were separated, families were massacred, every warm thing was offered up and then snatched away. The readers screamed at him. They begged. They sent him paragraphs of abuse and one-star ratings and, once, a mailed package containing a single dead cockroach. And he had read every comment, and laughed, and opened the document, and kept going.
Maybe it had even been a kind of passion. A twisted kind. He tortured them on the page, the torturing felt good, the good feeling faded and left him emptier, and he went back for more. It had not been sustainable. You could not live forever on the sweetness of hurting imaginary people.
His heart had certainly decided it couldn't.
He looked down at the beautiful stranger's face in the water and gave it a crooked, tired smile. The stranger gave the same smile back—but on that face, it looked charming.
"Well," he said. "Serves me right."
And then, slowly, something shifted.
It started as a small thought, so small he almost missed it. I wrote this place.
He looked up from the water, at the lane, at the teahouse, at the dyer's vats of blue and red. At the willow. At the sliver of City Gate Avenue visible beyond the end of the lane, all its noise and color and heat.
I wrote all of it.
Every blade of grass in this world grew where his pen had put it. Every sect, every bloodline, every secret technique—he had invented them. He knew which cliff hid the immortal's cave, which herb in which valley would wash a man's meridians clean, which pill recipe had been lost for a thousand years, which old beggar was a hidden expert, which elder was a traitor and on what day he would move.
He knew where all of the treasure was buried.
Because he had buried it.
His hand closed around the jade token, and his fingers had stopped shaking.
Ye Qiong had a system and a bloodline and a protagonist's halo. Fine. Good for Ye Qiong. But Ye Qiong was only a character. A puppet with good lighting. Ye Qiong did not know what was coming. Ye Qiong did not know what chapter it was.
Liu Mang did.
In this world, he thought, and the thought tasted like cold water on a burning day, I am god.
He stood up. His knees didn't creak. That alone nearly made him laugh out loud.
The first thing a god needed, he decided, was information.
What chapter was it? Had Ye Qiong come to Nalan City yet? Had the original Li Yuguo already—Liu Mang's stomach clenched—laid hands on the girl? Everything depended on the timeline. And there was one sort of person in any city who always knew the gossip first.
He tied the token back onto his sash and walked out of the lane, back onto City Gate Avenue, toward the gate itself.
In the shade of the gatehouse arch, where the stone breathed out a little leftover coolness from the night, a row of runners and messengers squatted along the wall waiting for hire. They were lean, brown, dusty men in short jackets, each with a bamboo letter-tube slung across his back and a pair of straw sandals worn thin from carrying words up and down the trade road. They gambled with copper coins on the paving stones, and they knew everything: who had arrived, who had paid whom, whose wife had been seen leaving which house.
Liu Mang straightened his robe, put on what he hoped was the face of a man who knew what he was doing, and walked up to them.
Before he could open his mouth, the eldest of them sprang to his feet.
He was a wiry man of about fifty, with a sparse gray beard and a face burnt so dark by the road that his eyes looked startlingly white in it. He bowed low—lower than Liu Mang had ever been bowed to in his life—and when he came up, he was smiling the bright, slightly nervous smile of a man greeting someone important.
"Uncle!" he said. "Uncle, you've come out! Are you in need of assistance? Old Chai is at your service—anything you like, letters, errands, a sedan chair, just say the word."
Liu Mang blinked.
Uncle?
He knew the word. In the great households, it was what the servants called the man who had married into the family—the young lady's husband, the master's son-in-law. Uncle. It meant he belonged to someone. It meant there was a lady of the house, and he was her—
His face went hot. He could feel it, the blood rushing up into those porcelain cheeks, and he was horribly aware that on this face a blush would show like red ink on white paper.
Married. The word bounced around inside his skull. I'm married. I've never held a girl's hand and I'm married. There is a woman somewhere in this city who is legally my wife. A completely inappropriate flutter of excitement went through him, from his chest all the way down to his belly. Wife. It was a soft, round, wonderful word.
Uncle Chai mistook the blush. His smile turned knowing and conspiratorial, and he leaned in, lowering his voice.
"Ah, Uncle," he murmured, "planning another little covert escapade? Old Chai understands, Old Chai understands. But be careful, eh? If the county master catches you sneaking off again—" he winced and rubbed his own backside in sympathy—"you'll be chastised again, and last time the whole city heard it."
The county master.
And just like that, the flutter died.
Because Liu Mang remembered who Li Yuguo's wife was.
He had written her as the most beautiful woman in Nalan City. He had also written her as the most frightening.
Nalan Meng. Daughter of a prince, a county master by imperial title, and the lord of Nalan City itself. In this city her word was not law. Law was something you could argue with. Her word was weather. It simply happened to you. Merchants who had faced down bandits on the southern roads went pale when her name came up.
There was a saying in Nalan City. He had written it himself, half as a joke, in one throwaway line of narration that some readers had later adopted as a meme:
Better to brave the beasts of the mountains than to set foot in the City Lord's Mansion.
And the people of Nalan City meant it. A tiger, after all, only ate you.
Into this woman's household the original Li Yuguo had married—how, the novel never explained; Liu Mang had needed a parasite with power and simply stapled one onto her. He had nothing except a pretty face and her name, so he used her name for everything: bullying shopkeepers, cheating debts, strutting through brothels. And when Ye Qiong arrived, a wheat-skinned nobody with fire sleeping in his blood, Li Yuguo had used her name to try to crush him.
It had not worked. It had ended in the street with a sword, and the readers cheering, and a pool of blood drying in the sun.
His hand twitched toward his groin again. He stopped it halfway.
"Uncle?" said Uncle Chai. "Uncle, are you well? You've gone all white. Well—whiter."
Liu Mang did not answer.
He turned around, walked three steps to the nearest pillar of the gatehouse arch—a great round column of gray stone, warm on one side and cool on the other—put both hands on it, and very calmly began to bang his forehead against it.
Thunk.
Why me?
Thunk.
Of all the characters I wrote. Of all the thousands of characters. Why not the protagonist? Why not some lucky passerby, some street vendor, some monk? Why not a dog? I would have been happy as a dog—
Thunk.
Why did it have to be him? The first villain. The speed bump. The guy who gets his dick cut off in chapter forty-something—
Thunk.
Lord Yama, you bearded bastard, you did this on purpose.
Thunk.
"M-master?" Uncle Chai's voice had gone thin and alarmed. "Uncle, why are you hitting your head on the pillar? Uncle, the pillar is very old, please, the pillar—"
One of the younger runners scrambled up and grabbed Uncle Chai by the sleeve, hauling him back. He was a skinny youth with a nervous face, and he put his mouth to the older man's ear and whispered furiously, not quite quietly enough.
"Old Chai, are you trying to die quickly? Don't fuss at him! That's the Lord of Soft Rice. Don't you know what he does when he's in a temper? Last month he had a fruit seller's stall smashed because the man looked at him. And if he goes running back to the mansion saying we insulted him—" The youth glanced up at the gate tower as if he expected someone to be watching from it. "The lady is right there in the city. Ruin his face and it's her face. Have you forgotten who the prefect of Nalan City is? It's Princess Nalan Meng! The Luo Sha herself!"
Uncle Chai went the color of old paste.
"Ah," he said. "Ah. Yes. Quite right."
"So let's go—"
"Yes. Yes." The old man bowed hastily toward Liu Mang's back. "Uncle, Old Chai has just remembered an urgent letter—very urgent—to the, ah, to the east market—please excuse—"
The other runners were already snatching up their copper coins off the paving and stuffing them into their jackets. In a few seconds the whole row of them had peeled off the wall and scattered into the crowd like startled sparrows, letter-tubes bouncing on their backs, and the shade beneath the gatehouse arch was empty except for Liu Mang and his pillar.
He let his forehead rest against the stone.
It was cool on that side. It felt nice.
For a while he just stood there and breathed.
The crowd flowed past behind him. A camel bellowed outside the gate. Up on the balconies, the women had found some new man to tease. The city did not stop for him. It had never stopped for anyone.
His forehead throbbed in a slow, dull rhythm. He was fairly sure there would be a bump. On this face, it would probably look endearing.
And slowly, beneath the throb, the panic began to drain out of him.
All right, he thought. All right. Think. Think like the author.
So he was the villain. So what? A villain was only doomed if he followed his script—and the script was his. He knew every line of it. He knew Li Yuguo's death chapter by heart; he knew exactly which day the drunken idiot would make his move, which girl he would lay hands on, which door Ye Qiong would kick down. A man who knows where the cliff is does not have to walk off it.
The original Li Yuguo had been a fool with a famous wife.
The new one was a fool with a famous wife who had read the ending.
That was not nothing. That was, in fact, almost everything.
He lifted his head from the pillar and looked up through the arch, out past the gate, at the long white road running north toward the capital and the bleached, cloudless, burning sky above it. Somewhere up there, in the shape of that sky, was the seam where it would one day split. He knew that too. The seals, the demon emperor under the ice, the black fire, the snap. The cataclysm was coming whether he liked it or not, and when it came it would not care who was the hero and who was the villain. It would swallow Ye Qiong and his halo. It would swallow every sect and every king. It would swallow the Lord of Soft Rice and his terrifying wife, and the runners, and the women on the balconies, and the dogs in the shade.
Protagonists, antagonists, and everyone in between.
Unless someone changed the plot.
Liu Mang rubbed the bump on his forehead, winced, and found—somewhat to his own surprise—that he was smiling.
The author was holding the reins.
He just had to figure out how to steer.