Ji Lan investigated me for six days.

I have never been studied so hard in my life. Yun Shu, when she investigated me, did it with forms and questions, from across a table. Ji Lan did it the way a master painter studies a forgery she’s sure is a forgery but can’t prove — by following me everywhere, watching everything, narrating my every move under her breath like she was taking notes for a lecture.

The problem was that there was no method to find, because the only method was a fired god of lies sitting on my shoulder.

So she did the thing everyone does. She filled the gap with genius.

It went like this. We’d be walking through the market, and a recruiter from some sect I’d already turned down would rush up and beg me one more time, and I’d do what I always do — mumble, deflect, say I just wanted a quiet life, and slip away. A perfectly ordinary cowardly retreat.

And Ji Lan would stop dead, eyes shining, and whisper: "Scarcity. He makes himself unavailable. He turns down everyone, which makes the whole world want him more. That’s — that’s masterful, I’ve used that move, but he does it without even—" she’d shake her head "—without even trying."

"I’m not trying," I’d say. "I genuinely just want to leave."

"Listen to him," she’d breathe, scribbling. "He even denies the technique while performing it. That’s the deepest layer of the craft. I didn’t reach that until year twenty."

It was like this constantly. I’d trip over a cart and she’d see "the studied imperfection that makes a legend feel human." I’d eat at Granny Fen’s, miserable, and she’d see "authentic, unstaged brand presence — he lets the people find the moment instead of selling it." I told her, flatly, to her face, that there was no technique, that I was a clerk who’d gotten cursed with luck, and she nodded slowly and wrote down: deflects all credit — humility as a weapon — note: study this.

I could not lose. That was the horror of it. There was no honest thing I could say that didn’t get folded back into the legend of my brilliance. Even the truth was just more proof of the lie.

Yun Shu found the whole thing deeply annoying, which became its own entertainment.

Because here’s a thing I didn’t expect: Yun Shu and Ji Lan did not get along.

They were both, in their way, experts on fame. But Yun Shu spent her life deleting it, coldly, with facts, and Ji Lan spent her life building it, gloriously, with art, and the two of them looked at each other the way a tax inspector and a stage actress might look at each other across a dinner table — with the deep, instant, mutual suspicion of two people who are each certain the other is doing fame wrong.

"You’re contaminating my investigation," Yun Shu told her on the third day, not looking up from her ledger. "He behaves differently when you narrate at him."

"Your investigation," Ji Lan said, with a laugh like a bell with a knife in it. "You’ve been on this for a week and concluded what, exactly? That he’s an anomaly? That there’s a ’ghost’? I could have told you that from the Records, darling. You debunkers always know that something’s wrong and never why."

"And you builders always think you know why and you’re always wrong."

"Tea?" I said loudly, because I had learned that this was the only way to stop them, and they both turned and glared at me, united for one beautiful second in their irritation at being interrupted, before going right back to it.

Through all of it, Scroll watched Ji Lan with that soft, fond, faraway attention it had had since she’d arrived. It didn’t crow about the numbers anymore. It just... watched her work. Once, quietly, while she was three feet away explaining to a wall how my "refusal to monetize" was "a long-game belief play," it murmured to me, almost wistful: "She’s doing it all by hand, talent. No scroll. No cheat. Just skill. That’s what I used to write down, you know. Before. People like her." And it went quiet in that old way, the predecessor-shaped way, and I didn’t ask.

On the sixth day, Ji Lan gave up trying to crack me by watching.

She sat me down — actually sat me down, at my own table, and poured her own tea, which from Ji Lan is a sign of respect or surrender, I still don’t know which — and she looked at me with those bright, frustrated, brilliant eyes.

"I can’t do it," she admitted. "Six days. I’ve used every read I have. And either you are the single greatest natural talent the craft has ever produced, doing on instinct what took me thirty years to learn—" she made a face like that idea physically pained her "—or there’s a trick so good I literally cannot see it. And I can’t tell which. From here. In a market. With a tax inspector breathing down my neck."

"So you’ll give up?" I said, with hope I knew was stupid.

"No." She smiled, and it was sharp and bright and excited, the smile of a woman who has just thought of the perfect stage. "I’ll take you somewhere you can’t hide. Somewhere there are no markets to slip away in, no quiet corners, no humble little deflections — somewhere every legend in the land is put under the brightest light in the world, in front of the whole continent, and tested until it breaks or proves itself true."

A cold feeling started in my stomach.

"The Tournament of Ten Thousand Reputations," Ji Lan said, savoring it. "It’s in the capital. Forty days from now. Every name worth knowing competes — broadcast to the entire continent through the Records themselves, every match watched by millions. It’s where legends are made, demon-slayer. And it’s where frauds are unmade, publicly, forever, because on that stage you cannot lie. The crowd sees everything. I see everything." She leaned back, triumphant. "If you’ve got a method, it’ll show under that light. And if you’re a fraud—" the bell-and-knife laugh again "—well. I’ll get to watch you come apart in front of ten million people. Either way, I win, and either way, I finally know."

"I’m not competing in a tournament," I said. "I’m a clerk. I have no intention of going anywhere near—"

"Oh, you’ll come," Ji Lan said, rising, gathering herself like a closing curtain. "Your kind always does. The stage calls, and the legend answers. I’ll see you in the capital, Lin Bo." And she swept out, glorious and certain, leaving the smell of expensive tea and the worst idea anyone had said out loud in my presence in weeks.

"I am not," I said, to Yun Shu, to the room, to the universe, "going to that tournament."

Yun Shu, gathering her ledger, gave me a long, tired, knowing look.

"No," she agreed. "You’re not."

But I noticed she didn’t sound sure this time. And I noticed something worse.

I noticed that Scroll, on my shoulder, had gone very, very quiet — the specific quiet of a creature that has just heard about the single largest gathering of belief on the entire continent, broadcast to ten million souls, and is, very slowly, beginning to smile.