"May your road be smooth!" Li Yuguo called after the vanishing cloak.
Then, when he was sure no one was looking, he slipped a hand into his robe and counted what was left.
It did not take long. Two hundred taels from the pepper, a hundred of them gone into the King of Thieves' fist. What remained clinked thinly against his ribs: a hundred and forty taels and a little loose change. An hour ago he had felt like the richest man in Nalan City. Now he felt merely solvent.
It'll do, he decided. It'll have to do.
Because the money was not really the point. Not yet. The point was what the money meant—and to whom.
He thought of Nalan Meng kneeling in the incense smoke with the white mark of her teeth on her lower lip. I don't have a hundred taels. I can give you fifty. At most. He knew what kind of woman she was now. He had written her as hard steel all the way through, but he had been wrong about that, as he had been wrong about her clothes. She had a mouth like a knife and a heart like tofu. She would cut him to ribbons with words, and whip the ground at his feet, and threaten to geld him on horseback—and then go and kneel before his parents' tablets and take the blame for him.
But a tofu heart could only soften so many times before it set hard for good.
If he went back to her with empty hands and pretty words, she would look at him the way the servants had looked at him in the courtyard. And then that would be the end of it. No more chances. No more fifty taels.
He needed something real to put on the table.
He turned toward the north end of the city, and the City Lord's Mansion, and walked fast.
He heard her before he saw her.
The sound came over the courtyard wall as he passed through the outer gate: a low, rhythmic whum—whum—whum, like a great bird's wings beating the air, punctuated every few beats by a sharp hiss of breath. The servants in the forecourt were giving the inner gate a wide berth. One of the maids caught his eye, glanced meaningfully toward the sound, and hurried off with her laundry basket as if she did not want to be anywhere near what was about to happen.
He went through the inner gate.
Nalan Meng was in the courtyard, practicing with the great sword.
She had taken off the silver helmet. Her long black hair was bound up high on her head in a warrior's knot, a few strands pulled loose and stuck to her damp neck. She still wore the crimson silk—of course she did; it seemed this world had decided she would wear nothing else—and in the slanting afternoon light it glowed like a coal against the gray flagstones.
And the sword moved around her like a living thing.
It should have been impossible. The blade was five feet of steel; it must have weighed as much as a child. She swung it one-handed. She swung it in great flat arcs that made the air whum and moaned, in short brutal chops that ended a hair's breadth above the stones, in rising cuts that went up and over her shoulder and came down again in a single unbroken figure of eight. Her bare feet slid across the flagstones without a sound. Her body turned and coiled and uncoiled—hips, waist, shoulders, arm, blade, all one line, all one motion—and the crimson silk panels whipped around her long legs and snapped and settled and whipped again.
He could feel her Qi from the gate. It came off her in waves, hot and focused, pressing against his skin like the heat from an open forge. Each time the sword came around, the wave crested, and the dust on the flagstones stirred in a ring around her feet.
He stood there and watched with his mouth slightly open.
I wrote that she was a prodigy, he thought. I didn't know what that looked like.
She saw him.
She did not stop. She finished the form—a last long horizontal sweep that sang through the air and ended with the point of the great sword resting, perfectly still, an inch above the ground—and only then did she straighten. She was breathing a little hard. A bead of sweat ran down from her throat and vanished into the deep cleft of her crimson top.
She looked at him with flat, indifferent eyes. Then she turned, slid the sword into the black sharkskin scabbard leaning against the stone table, and spoke without bothering to look at him again.
"Have you lost it all?"
Li Yuguo smiled.
He did not say a word. He simply walked across the courtyard to the stone table, reached into his robe, and began to take out silver.
One fifty-tael ingot. Clack. He set it down on the stone.
A second. Clack.
He stacked them neatly, one on top of the other, and then lined up the loose change beside them so that it made a tidy little row, and stepped back with his hands folded into his sleeves.
"Principal," he said, "and interest."
The forty taels he had kept back sat quietly in his robe, warm against his chest. That was his seed money; he was not going to plant it in anyone else's field. But a hundred taels on the table—exactly double what she had given him, returned before the sun had even set—was more than enough to make the point.
Fifty into a hundred in a single afternoon.
Nalan Meng turned around.
Her eyes went to the stone table, and stopped there, and slowly, very slowly, they widened. Those long, dark, beautiful eyes—that had looked at him with nothing but contempt and fury and weary indifference since the moment he arrived in this world—went round with pure astonishment. Her lips parted.
"How…" she said. She looked from the silver to his face and back again. "How did you turn fifty taels into one hundred in one afternoon?"
"Of course it was a gamble."
The voice came from the gate behind him. It was a man's voice—smooth, pleasant, warm with good humor—and it slid into the courtyard as easily as if it belonged there.
Li Yuguo turned.
A young man was strolling in through the inner gate.
He was tall—taller than Li Yuguo, broad in the shoulders and narrow in the waist, with the long, easy stride of someone who had trained in the martial arts since childhood. He wore a robe of dark blue with silver embroidery at the cuffs, and a sword on his hip in a plain scabbard of fine leather. His face was handsome in exactly the way Li Yuguo's was not: strong-jawed, straight-browed, clean and open and manly, the kind of face that made mothers trust their daughters to it and generals trust their armies. He was smiling. It was a good smile, broad and white and friendly.
His eyes, for one instant before they settled on Li Yuguo, had been resting on Nalan Meng.
"Elder Brother Yutang," said Nalan Meng.
Her voice had changed. Not much. A fraction warmer. The voice of a woman greeting someone she respected.
Li Yuguo felt his stomach turn to ice.
Li Yutang.
Li Yuguo's father, Li Guangyi—the General of the Devil, the First God of War of the Haotian Kingdom—had had only one son of his own blood. But he had raised two boys.
The second had come to him as an orphan of one of his officers, a sharp-eyed, gifted child with nowhere else to go, and the General had taken him into his household as a godson and given him the family name. Li Yutang. He had trained him alongside his own son. And where Li Yuguo had sulked and skipped lessons and cried when the wooden practice swords bruised his hands, Li Yutang had thrived. He was talented. He was disciplined. He was still young, and yet he had already reached the strength of an Advanced Martial Teacher, a level that most warriors in a city like this would never see in their lives.
When Nalan Meng came to Nalan City to take up her post, he had been the first to stand at her side. Her right hand. Her most trusted ally. The man who helped her drill the garrison, ride the borders, and hold this struggling city together while her useless husband drank and gambled and chased other men's daughters.
Righteous Brother, the household called him. Li Yuguo's sworn elder brother in all but blood.
And Liu Mang had written every single rotten thing inside him.
Li Yutang had wanted his younger brother's wife for years. From the very first day he saw her, perhaps. He wanted her the way a starving dog wants meat, and he had wanted her for so long and with such patience that the wanting had soured into something cold and calculating and enormous. He was ambitious—far more ambitious than anyone in Nalan City suspected. He wanted the city. He wanted her. And he wanted the useless soft-rice brother who stood between him and both of them out of the way.
A beast in human clothing. A hypocrite to the bone.
Li Yuguo watched him cross the courtyard now, smiling his good, clean, trustworthy smile—and saw exactly where his eyes went the moment Nalan Meng turned her back to bend over the stone table and look more closely at the silver.
They went to her ass.
It was quick. It was practiced. Li Yutang's gaze dropped like a hawk dropping onto a field mouse, slid down the long line of her bare back to the curve of her hips, and fastened there—on the round, taut, perfect globes of her ass under that thin, sweat-damp crimson silk, which clung to every inch of them and sank into the deep cleft between. For one heartbeat, the friendly smile on his face did not change at all. But his eyes did. They went heavy-lidded and hot and hungry, and the tip of his tongue touched his lower lip.
Then she straightened, and his eyes were back on her face, frank and warm and brotherly, before she had even turned around.
Li Yuguo had written that too.
He never misses a chance. He remembered typing it. Whenever she walks ahead of him, his eyes are on her ass. And every night, alone in his room, he dreams of playing with it.
He had written it as characterization. A villain's private vice, to make the readers' skin crawl. It had worked; his skin was crawling now. Because it was one thing to type those words at three in the morning about a woman made of pixels.
It was another to stand in a sunlit courtyard and watch a man do it to his wife.
The worst part was that nobody knew.
Li Yutang's reputation in Nalan City was spotless. He was a good son, a loyal brother, a brave officer, a protector of the people. He was the hero everyone wished Nalan Meng had married. He was very, very good at disguise.
And in the original story, it had destroyed her.
Li Yuguo remembered that arc, too, with a sick, sinking clarity. When the bloody storm came to Nalan City, Li Yutang had been at Nalan Meng's side—and he had betrayed her. Quietly. Cleverly. A false report here, a gate left unbarred there, a reinforcement that never arrived. Her defeat on the walls had his fingerprints all over it. And she had not understood. Not until the very end. Only at the last moment, with the city falling around her, had Nalan Meng finally seen what he truly was—and by then Nalan City was already burning, and everything was too late.
And I wrote that, Li Yuguo thought. I thought it was a good twist.
He could not say any of it.
That was the bitter truth of his position. If he opened his mouth right now and called Li Yutang a hypocrite—if he said your righteous brother stares at your ass and wants to steal your city—who would believe him? Not the servants, who had looked at him with such tired disappointment. Not the garrison. Not Nalan Meng. Li Yutang's word was gold in this city. Li Yuguo's word was mud. Worse than mud.
If he struck first and missed, Li Yutang would bite back. And with a reputation as weak as his, Li Yuguo would be the one who bled.
Not without evidence, he told himself, and made his face pleasant. Not until I have proof.
But there was one thing he could do.
He looked at Li Yutang—at the strong handsome face, the good white smile—and called up his skill.
Tell me your secret.
The little gold window slid out beside Li Yutang's head.
> [ Li Yutang ]
>
> Secret: Harbors a deep lust toward Nalan Meng. Will do anything to have his way with her.
Li Yuguo read it without surprise.
He knew that already. He had written Li Yutang exactly that way. The system was only confirming what he had always known—it was like reading his own outline back to himself.
So that's the same. Good. At least something in this world is the way I wrote it.
And then, on an impulse he did not examine too closely, he turned his eyes toward his wife.
She had picked up one of the silver ingots and was turning it over in her rough, scarred fingers, frowning at it as if she expected it to turn back into lead. The afternoon light lay along her cheek. A loose strand of black hair clung to the sweat on her neck.
Tell me your secret.
The window slid out.
> [ Name: Nalan Meng ]
>
> Secret: Has taken a heavy loan from the merchant Chi Dacheng and has no money to pay it back!
Li Yuguo stared at it.
He read it again. And then a third time, while the courtyard and the sunlight and the soft pleasant murmur of Li Yutang's voice all went very far away.
A loan.
From a merchant.
He had not written that. He was absolutely certain. In his novel, Nalan City had been poor, yes—but its lord had been proud and stubborn and far too honorable to go begging to merchants. Nalan Meng had never owed anyone a single copper coin. She had starved alongside her people before she would put her name on a moneylender's contract.
He had never written this.
I've changed some of the world's plot for you. I'm not as bad as you think. Hahahaha.
What the fuck had that bearded old pervert done?
He had already turned a proud, simple tigress of a girl into a woman whose every step made the men around her stare at her ass—that he had seen with his own eyes, on the avenue and on the horse and in this courtyard. That outfit had not been his design. It had been Lord Yama's. And now there was a debt, too. A heavy debt, hung around her neck like a millstone, owed to—
Chi Dacheng.
The name snagged.
He frowned at it. Then he heard, as clearly as if the man were standing beside him, a fat, breathless, merry voice in a red tent: My name is Shi Dacheng. A southern merchant's voice, quick and slurred, swallowing its consonants the way the southern dialects did. Shi. Chi. The system's brush had simply written down what the world called him.
The same man.
The fat, pink, pig-faced merchant he had sold pepper to that very afternoon. The man who owned a merchant group and half the bars and brothels on City Gate Avenue. The man with gold rings on every finger who had laughed and slapped his belly and called him brother—that man was holding Nalan Meng's debt.
Li Yuguo's hands had gone cold inside his sleeves.
He thought of the brothels on City Gate Avenue, with their red railings and their women leaning over the balconies in thin sweat-damp gauze. He thought of a fat merchant who owned them. He thought of a proud city lord with an empty treasury and a drought that had wiped out a year of taxes, and a debt she could not pay.
He knew how stories like this went. He had read a hundred of them. On late nights in his old life, he had written more than a few.
And Lord Yama had read them all.
A slow, dark, complicated feeling uncurled itself in his chest. Part of it was rage—hot, possessive, the husband's rage he had inherited along with this body. Mine. She's mine. No fat pig is going to lay one finger on her. But underneath the rage, colder and quieter, there was something else. The part of him that was still Liu Mang. The author. The one who looked at a disaster and saw the shape of a plot.
Sixty-nine days. Cuckold points.
A proud wife. A heavy debt. A lecherous merchant. A treacherous brother.
Every piece is already on the board.
He did not want to think it. He thought it anyway. A plan began to assemble itself in the back of his mind—piece by piece, the way plots always had for him, at three in the morning, whether he wanted them to or not. A plan to take this disaster that Lord Yama had dropped into his wife's life and steer it. To let the wolves circle her, and walk her, step by careful step, right up to the edge of the cliff—close enough to fill his empty bar—and not one step further.
To train her.
He felt sick. He felt, underneath the sickness, a dark little flicker of excitement that he did not want to look at.
He closed the window in his mind and made himself smile.
"So it turned out to be Righteous Brother," he said pleasantly, as if nothing at all had happened. "Welcome."
Li Yutang gave him a brotherly nod. Nalan Meng put down the silver ingot and turned to look at her husband, and the astonishment on her face had given way to a careful, searching suspicion.