After the Bureau, I gave up on the city.

I left through the back, hood up, breathing as shallowly as I could manage, and I took the long quiet way home along the canal, where there are no markets and no crowds and, I hoped, no one who had heard the name Lin Bo.

I made it almost the whole way.

"IT’S YOU."

The voice came from behind me — loud, cracking clean down the middle from sheer excitement — and before I could even turn around, something hit me at hip height and clung on.

It was a girl. A young woman, I should say — a junior cultivator, by her plain grey disciple robes, maybe nineteen or twenty, small and round-cheeked and absolutely vibrating, with her hair in two messy buns and ink stains on every single one of her fingers. She had latched onto my sleeve with both hands and was staring up at me like I had personally hung the moon and then modestly refused to take credit for it.

"It’s you," she breathed again. "It’s really you. I was there. On Cinder Lane. I saw it." Her eyes were enormous. "The demon king. The breath. The way you blew him into the next realm and then turned to all of us and said—" she pressed a hand to her chest "—’it was nothing.’ I almost died. My name is Tao Tao, I’m a disciple of the Whispering Pine Sect, you’ve definitely never heard of us, we’re very small, and I have read everything ever written about you, which is currently nine things, but I copied them all out by hand, look—"

She let go of my sleeve to dig in her bag and produced a small, fat, hand-stitched notebook, bursting with loose pages, the cover of which she had carefully labeled, in big proud brushstrokes:

THE TRUE AND GLORIOUS DEEDS OF MASTER LIN BO, DEMON-SLAYER. (Volume One.)

I stared at it.

I want to tell you that I had the heart to crush this immediately. That I, a grown man trying desperately to escape exactly this, looked at this overexcited kid and her hand-copied notebook of nine things that hadn’t happened and said something firm and final.

I didn’t.

Because here is the thing I learned about Tao Tao in the first thirty seconds of knowing her. It’s the thing that, more than the scroll, more than the breath, more than any of it, I never figured out how to fight:

She wasn’t lying. She wasn’t scheming. She wasn’t a bard chasing a story or a noble chasing a fee. She believed. All the way down, with her whole heart, with a kind of bright total faith that I had never once in my life had directed at me — and that I could see, plainly, came from a kid who didn’t have a lot and had decided, for reasons I didn’t deserve, to spend it all on me.

"Tao Tao," I said carefully. "I have to tell you something, and I need you to really hear it. There was no demon king. It was a mugger. A nervous little man with a bad knife. I sneezed. The scroll—" I caught myself "—the rumor made it sound like more than it was. I’m not a hero. I’m a clerk. I file paperwork. I’m sorry."

Tao Tao listened to all of this with her hands clasped and her eyes shining, nodding slowly, drinking in every word.

When I finished, she let out a long, shaky breath and whispered, with absolute reverence:

"So humble."

"No—"

"You’re even more humble than the stories," she said, and her voice wobbled, and to my horror her eyes went wet. "You won’t even take credit to my face. You called yourself a clerk." She opened the notebook, licked the end of her brush, and started writing. "’And so great was Master Lin Bo’s humility,’" she said aloud as she wrote, "’that he denied his demon-slaying even unto his most devoted disciple, calling himself a mere clerk—’"

"I am a mere clerk!"

"’—which only proved his greatness further.’"

And then the worst thing happened. The very worst thing.

I felt it.

That low warm tide in my chest — the one from the market, the one that was my power now — it pulsed. Got warmer. Got bigger. Just from her. Just from one kid, standing on a canal path, believing in me with everything she had and writing it down.

Beside me, on my shoulder, Scroll let out a long, happy sigh. The sound of a man watching his investment pay off.

"Oh, I like her," it murmured, just for me. "Talent, do you understand what she is? She’s not just a believer. She’s a believer who writes things down. She’s a tiny version of me. Do you know how rare that is? One of her is worth a thousand of the crowd. Be nice to this one."

"Tao Tao," I tried, one last time, weakly. "You really, really don’t have to—"

"I’m going to tell everyone," Tao Tao announced, snapping the notebook shut, her whole face glowing with purpose. "The Whispering Pine Sect is small, but we talk, Master Lin Bo. And I’m going to build you a— well, it’s small right now, it’s really just a shelf with a candle on it, but I’m calling it a shrine, and—" she was already backing away, bowing, beaming "—thank you, thank you, you don’t even know, I’ve never been part of anything real before and now I’m your first disciple, I have to go, I have so much to write—"

And she turned and ran, both buns bouncing, ink-stained and overjoyed, off to tell the world about a demon king that had never existed and a hero who didn’t want to be one.

I stood on the canal path and watched her go.

"You could have stopped her," Scroll said, almost gently.

"I know."

"You didn’t, though."

"...I know."

I started walking home. The tide in my chest sat there, warm, a little bigger than it had been an hour ago, fed by exactly one nineteen-year-old with a notebook.

It would not, I already knew, stay one.