Thunk.
This time it was not his forehead hitting the pillar.
It was something hitting his forehead—or rather the very top of his skull, square on the crown, hard enough that his topknot crumpled and his teeth clacked together and a bright white star burst behind his eyes.
"Ahh—what the fuck!"
Liu Mang staggered sideways, both hands clamped over his head, and the something bounced off him, clattered against the base of the pillar, and landed on the paving stones at his feet with a hollow wooden clok.
He stood there swaying, eyes watering, and looked up.
There was nothing above him. Only the underside of the gatehouse arch, gray stone gone black with a century of cooking smoke and swallow nests, and beyond the edge of the arch, the white blank glare of the sky. No window. No ledge. No laughing urchin on the roof. Nothing that something could have fallen from.
He looked down.
It was a box.
A small, plain wooden box, about the length of his forearm, dark as wet ink and polished so smooth it gleamed. It had no lock and no hinges that he could see. It sat on the scorching paving stones in the full blaze of noon, and it was not warm. He could feel that from where he stood. A faint, patient coolness came off it, like the breath from an open cellar—and riding on that coolness, so thin he almost thought he imagined it, was a smell.
Sulfur. Old incense burned down to ash. And underneath, very faint, the sweet rot of drowned lotus.
Every hair on Liu Mang's arms stood up.
On the lid, burned into the wood in a broad, heavy, extravagantly confident brushstroke, were two characters.
Liu Mang.
Not Li Yuguo. Liu Mang. His own name—his real name, the name of a twenty-eight-year-old man who had died face-down next to a cup of instant noodles. Nobody in this world knew that name. Nobody in this world could know that name.
Nobody alive.
He crouched. His hand hovered over the lid for a long moment, and his body—this soft, lazy, well-fed body—tried very hard to pull it back. Leave it. Walk away. Go home, wherever home is. His mind overruled it. Barely.
The lid lifted at a touch. There was no resistance at all, as if the box had been waiting.
Inside, on a bed of black silk, lay a single folded sheet of paper.
It was yellow, coarse and thick, the kind of paper burned at funerals for the dead to spend in the afterlife. When he unfolded it, the ink was still faintly glistening, and a thin curl of steam rose from the characters—the same steam he had seen drifting off a certain inkstone on a certain desk at the top of nine black steps.
The brushwork was enormous and arrogant. It sprawled across the page like a man sprawling across a throne.
Sinner Liu Mang.
This monarch has decided to grant you another chance. Do not squander it.
As a token of this monarch's boundless magnanimity, this monarch bestows upon you a gift: "Alimama."
Use it well.
Below that, the main text ended. But at the very bottom of the sheet, squeezed in sideways along the margin in smaller, messier, almost giddy strokes—like a postscript scribbled by a man who had been unable to resist—was one more line:
P.S. This monarch has changed some of the world's plot for you. This monarch is not as bad as you think. Hahahaha.
Liu Mang read it three times.
He did not understand it. He understood every individual word, and together they meant nothing, and that nothing sat in his stomach like a block of ice.
Changed some of the plot.
He remembered the King of Hell leaning down over him, beard swinging, eyes burning. A peerless fairy. A senior brother who kept looking at her. A misunderstanding at the spirit spring. He remembered the word romance being spat out like poison. He remembered—very clearly, more clearly than he would have liked—the exact expression on that bearded face when Liu Mang had asked if he was an NTR fan, and the lifted chin, and the single, proud, unashamed word.
Indeed.
That man had gone into Liu Mang's world. Had reached in with that bone brush, while Liu Mang was drowning, and changed things.
What things?
He thought of the fairy and her young master under the peach blossoms. He thought of every heroine he had written—proud, chaste, devoted, every single one of them written for exactly one man. He thought of every tender, faithful, carefully protected relationship in four hundred chapters, and he imagined that great hairy hand reaching down into each one of them and adjusting.
Hahahaha.
A shiver ran down his spine so hard that his shoulders jerked.
"You perverted old—" he started, and then stopped, and looked nervously up at the sky. Nothing happened. He folded the letter very carefully, tucked it into the front of his robe, and decided not to finish that sentence.
When he looked back down, the box was gone.
Not taken. Not fallen. Simply gone. On the paving stone where it had been lay a small, neat circle of fine gray ash, and as he watched, a breath of hot wind came through the arch and scattered it.
Then the air in front of his face lit up.
It happened without a sound. One moment there was nothing between him and the far side of the arch but heat shimmer. The next, a window hung there—a flat rectangle of pale gold light about the size of an open book, floating at the exact distance a man holds a page to read it. Its edges were crisp as cut paper. Its surface rippled faintly, the way the light on the bottom of a clear stream ripples, and a soft coolness radiated from it onto his eyes and cheeks. When he leaned back, it leaned with him. When he turned his head, it slid smoothly into the center of his vision and stayed there.
Across the top, in clean, square characters:
[ ALIMAMA ]
Liu Mang stared at it.
He glanced, very quickly, out at City Gate Avenue. A porter was trudging past the mouth of the arch not ten feet away, sweat running down his neck, and his eyes passed straight through the glowing panel without a flicker. A woman with a parasol. A boy chasing a hoop. Nobody looked. Nobody pointed.
Only me.
"A system," he breathed. "It's a system."
Of course it was. He knew systems. He had written a system—had handed one to Ye Qiong in chapter three, the obligatory golden finger every web-novel hero gets so he can cheat his way to the top. He had called it Alibaba, because he had thought that was funny at the time. It had been a shop. Just a shop. Ye Qiong earned points by killing monsters and completing tasks, and then he spent the points in the shop on pills and manuals and talismans, and that was all it ever did, because Liu Mang had been lazy and had not wanted to keep track of anything more complicated.
Alibaba. The father.
Alimama. The mother.
Lord Yama had a sense of humor, and it was as heavy-handed as his brushwork.
But this panel was not a shop. Or not only a shop. Below the title, two options glowed side by side, each in its own little bordered box:
[ Shop ] [ Status ]
Status.
Ye Qiong's system had never had a status page. Ye Qiong had never been allowed to see his own numbers. This was something more. Something better. Liu Mang felt his heart begin to pound, and with it a rush of eager, greedy heat that went straight from his chest to his fingertips—the giddy excitement of a gamer who has just been handed a cheat code.
He did not think twice. He reached out and jabbed Status with one finger.
His fingertip met the light with a faint, cool resistance, like pressing the skin of still water. The panel rippled outward from the touch. The two boxes dissolved, and new lines of text unrolled down the gold surface, one by one, as if an invisible brush were writing them:
> [ STATUS ]
>
> Name: Li Yuguo
> Cultivation: None
> Title: The King of Soft Rice
> Special Trait: Skill of Author
> Mission: Change the world's plot within 10 years
> Life Span: 69 days (can be extended by converting Cuckold Points: 100 pts = 1 day)
> Cuckold Points: 0
Liu Mang read it from top to bottom.
Then he read it again, because his eyes had refused to accept it the first time.
Name: Li Yuguo. So that was settled. Not Liu Mang. The world had made up its mind about who he was, and the system was simply confirming it.
Cultivation: None. Not "Martial Warrior." Not "Beginner." None. A blank. A zero.
Title: The King of Soft Rice. Even the system was mocking him.
And then—
Life Span: 69 days.
He stared at those two digits until they blurred.
Sixty-nine days. Not years. Days. He had been given ten years to change the plot, and sixty-nine days to live. A little over two months. He would not even see the autumn. The leaves on that willow by the stream would still be green on the day his heart stopped—again.
And the way to live longer is—
Cuckold Points.
He read the words, and then he read them again, and slowly, horribly, they began to make sense.
Hahahaha.
"That old bastard," Liu Mang whispered. "That shameless, bearded, perverted old—"
He stopped. Breathed. Made himself think.
All right. It was terrible. But it was not over. Sixty-nine days was not zero days, and the system had given him a way to extend it, even if the way made his skin crawl. And besides—his hand drifted down, almost on its own, and brushed the front of his trousers—the important parts were still attached. His little brother had survived the transmigration intact. In the original story, Li Yuguo lost everything in one swing of Ye Qiong's sword. This Li Yuguo still had his cock, still had his life, and still had a wife waiting somewhere in this city.
A wife.
He thought about that word again, and the heat came back, a slow warm curl low in his belly.
And there was one line he hadn't checked.
Special Trait: Skill of Author.
His breath caught.
Skill of Author. What could that be, except the one thing that made him different from every other soul in this world? The author's power. Maybe the power to see the plot laid out in front of him like an outline. Maybe the power to edit—to reach into the world the way Lord Yama had, and change a line, and watch reality change with it. If that was it, then sixty-nine days was nothing. Cuckold Points were nothing. He could rewrite his own lifespan. He could rewrite anything.
This is it. This is the golden finger. This is the real gift.
His finger was trembling as he reached out and touched the words.
The panel rippled.
> [ Skill of Author ]
>
> Status: Locked
That was all.
No description. No requirements. No Reach Martial Teacher to unlock, no Complete the first mission, no progress bar, no hint. Just one flat, gray word, sitting in the middle of all that gold light like a stone in a bowl of rice.
Locked.
He tapped it again. Nothing. He tapped it harder. The panel rippled politely and said Locked. He pressed his whole palm flat against it and held it there. The light was cool against his skin, smooth and impassive, and it said Locked.
Liu Mang slowly lowered his hand.
The hope went out of him the way air goes out of a punctured bladder: not all at once, but in one long, deflating hiss, until there was nothing left inside but a limp, sagging emptiness. His shoulders dropped. His knees went loose. If the pillar had not been behind him, he might have simply sat down on the hot stones and stayed there.
He gives me a skill and locks it and doesn't even tell me how to open it.
Of course he does.
That's exactly what I would have done.