Please Stop Spreading Rumors About Me — They Keep Coming True Chapter 45: Xue Ningzhi Makes Contact

Xue Ningzhi ca to three days after the final. Alone, at dusk, and for the first ti since I’d t her, she did not walk in a circle of parting crowd. She walked like a tired person. Like soone who had lost sothing and not yet decided what to do about it.

"You’ve ruined a great deal of my work," she said, by way of greeting, settling uninvited at my table the way she had before. But the steel was different now — bent, not gone. "A thousands years of careful managent, and you undid a aningful piece of it in a single afternoon by doing the one thing no one in the history of the Records has ever been foolish enough to do. You told the truth." She studied . "Do you have any idea what you’ve actually done, Lin Bo? Not the part you understand — the fraud, the freeing of my champion, the lovely speech. The part you don’t."

"I made myself impossible to erase," I said. "Your seam-pull found nothing. There’s no hidden truth left to use against . I’m known, all the way down, and loved anyway."

"Yes." Her voice was very quiet. "That’s exactly what you did. You made the first truly unerasable na in a thousands years." She leaned forward, and there was sothing in her face I had never expected to see there: fear. Real, deep, ancient fear. "And that, you absolute fool, is the single most dangerous thing anyone has done in my lifeti. Possibly ever."

The Scroll, on my shoulder, went very still.

"Let tell you a thing the Empire does not say out loud," Xue Ningzhi said. "The thing beneath all the propaganda, beneath ’forgetting is rcy,’ beneath everything I told you in this room before the final." She wrapped her hands around the cup I’d set in front of her, as if she were cold. "We do not erase the brightest nas because fa is a sickness. That’s the story we tell — it’s even half true, and half-true stories are the only ones that hold. The real reason is older and worse." She looked up. "We erase them because the brightest nas are dangerous to the world itself. The more believed a thing is, the more real it becos — you know this, you live it. But there is a ceiling, Lin Bo. A point past which a na becos so believed, so load-bearing, so woven into what people think is real, that reality begins to lean on it. And if it grows past that — if a na becos so vast and so unerasable that the world cannot let it go—" she stopped, and chose her next words with terrible care "—it draws attention. From sothing that has been waiting a very long ti for exactly that. Sothing that the First Author has spent her entire existence, a thousands of years of monstrous, necessary erasing, trying to keep starved. Trying to keep asleep."

"What thing," I said. My mouth was dry.

"I don’t know its true na. Almost no one does." She said it like a curse, like sothing she didn’t want in her mouth. "The oldest records call it only the Editor. It does not want fa. It does not want power. It wants the opposite of everything this whole mad world runs on. It wants the page blank. It wants every story ended, every na unwritten, every light in the sky put out — not erased one at a ti, the way we do it, carefully, to keep the balance — but all of it, at once, forever. The end of rembering itself." She held my eyes. "And it stirs when a na grows too bright to erase. Because an unerasable na is a crack in the blank page it wants. A thing that insists on being rembered, that the world will not let die — that’s the one thing that can wake it. The First Author erases the brightest nas not out of cruelty, Lin Bo. She does it to keep the brightest light from ever growing bright enough to open the Editor’s eyes."

The whole world tilted under . The gap at the top of the sky. The predecessor — the brightest na there ever was. The First Author, erasing them. Not murder. Or — murder, yes, monstrous, but also—

"The one before ," I whispered, to the Scroll, to her, to the dusk. "The brightest na. The First Author erased them because they grew too bright. Because they were going to wake it."

"Now you begin to understand," Xue Ningzhi said softly. "Your friend on your shoulder grieves a murder. And it was one. But it may also have been the thing that kept the page from going blank for everyone. I don’t know. Perhaps both are true. The worst things usually are." She was quiet a mont. "And now there is you. The first unerasable na since. Brighter, by the day, than anything in the sky. A na the world will not let go of — because you didn’t build it on a lie that could be pulled. You built it on truth, and love, and those don’t fade." Her voice dropped to almost nothing. "You’ve made yourself exactly the kind of light the Editor wakes for. And unlike every na before you, the First Author can’t even erase you to stop it. You’ve taken the one tool that ever held the dark back, and you’ve broken it. Over a noodle shop and a swordswoman and a stolen boy."

I sat with that. The catastrophe of it. The terrible irony — that the very thing that had saved and my family, the unerasable knowing-love, might be the thing that dood the world.

"So that’s your velvet offer," I said slowly. "Surrender. Let you and the First Author manage . Dim my light before the Editor wakes."

"No." And this was the part that surprised most, because Xue Ningzhi looked, for the first ti, uncertain — a true believer whose certainty had cracked. "Three days ago I would have said exactly that. Bring you in, contain you, control the light. But I watched you in that ring, Lin Bo. I watched you build sothing I have spent my whole life certain was impossible — a legend that is true. That gives instead of takes. That made a stolen boy a person again. And I find I don’t—" she stopped, frustrated, a woman unused to not knowing her own next move. "I ca here to threaten you, or recruit you, or warn you. And But I find I’m doing sothing I’ve never done in a thousand years of service. I’m telling you the truth, and asking you what you intend to do with it. Because the old way — the erasing — it’s failing. You’ve proven it can fail. And I’m no longer certain it was ever right." Her eyes were cold and lost and, for the first ti, almost human. "The Editor is real, and it is stirring, and you are the thing that will wake it. That much is true. But maybe—" the words ca hard "—maybe the answer isn’t to dim the light. Maybe it’s to find out if a light that can’t be put out is the one thing in all the world that can finally face the dark instead of just hiding from it." She rose. "I don’t know. For the first ti in my life, I genuinely don’t know. And that, demon-slayer, is the most dangerous and the most hopeful thing you’ve done to ."

She moved to the door, and paused, and did not look back.

"Watch the top of the sky," she said quietly. "The gap. It’s already begun to change, since your final. You woke sothing three days ago, Lin Bo. We’re all going to find out together what it is." And she was gone into the dusk, leaving her tea untouched and the whole world rearranged behind her.

The Scroll was silent for a long, long ti.

"It wasn’t only murder," it finally whispered, forty thousand years of grief finding a new and terrible shape. "When they erased my— when they erased the one before. It might have been— oh, talent. It might have been to save everyone. And I hated her for it. I’ve hated her for a thousands of years." A broken pause. "And I made you bright enough to wake the very thing they died to keep asleep. I did it again. I did exactly the thing—" It couldn’t finish.

"Hey," I said gently. "We don’t know that yet. We don’t know anything yet." But my hands were not steady on the noodle pot, and up at the top of the sky, when I made myself look, the dark gap where a na used to be did seem — for the first ti — to be very faintly, very slowly, widening.