Lin Moshi had been in the novel for four days before she remembered there was an original plot.
This was, in her defense, a reasonable thing to forget. She had been too busy surviving her own world-building to think about narrative structure. Twelve-hour days of manual labor had a way of narrowing one's focus to the immediate and the physical: the weight of the water bucket, the ache of her knees on the meditation corridor floors, the deeply personal betrayal of a sleeping mat that seemed to get thinner every night.
But on the morning of the fifth day, while she was cleaning the outer gate steps and watching the same sparrow land on the same stone pillar for the fourteenth time, she heard a commotion at the main road.
And she remembered.
Chapter four. She had written it on a Tuesday afternoon in late autumn, eating leftover rice, feeling very pleased with herself. The heroine's arrival at the Eastern Meridian Sect. The scene she had spent two weeks outlining, the entrance she had described in careful detail, the moment where every senior disciple would stop and stare and the reader would understand immediately that this girl was different.
She was, Lin Moshi thought, about to meet herself.
Not herself, exactly. Bai Xuening was everything Lin Moshi had wanted a heroine to be: graceful, gifted, quietly fierce, with a kind of luminous patience that Lin Moshi had always admired in other people and completely failed to develop in herself. She had written Bai Xuening with great care and great love and just a little bit of wishful thinking.
The crowd at the gate was growing.
Lin Moshi set down her broom and looked.
✦ ✦ ✦
Bai Xuening arrived on a white horse, which Lin Moshi had written, and wore pale travelling robes with blue trim, which Lin Moshi had also written, and had the kind of composed, quiet presence that made the morning light seem to arrange itself more considerately around her, which Lin Moshi had described in approximately three paragraphs of prose she had been quite proud of at the time.
She was exactly as Lin Moshi had imagined her.
That was the first strange thing.
The second strange thing was that Bai Xuening, scanning the gathered crowd with the careful eyes of someone new to a place and taking its measure, paused when her gaze reached Lin Moshi.
It was a brief pause. A fraction of a second. The kind that no one else would notice unless they were watching very carefully, or unless they had written the character and knew that Bai Xuening had been written to notice things other people missed.
Her eyes moved on. Her expression didn't change. She turned back to the sect elder who had come to greet her and performed the introduction with perfect grace.
Lin Moshi picked up her broom.
Her hands were not entirely steady.
✦ ✦ ✦
She told herself it was nothing. A coincidence. Bai Xuening had scanned the crowd and Lin Moshi happened to be in the crowd and that was the entirety of it. There was no reason for the destined heroine of this story to have any awareness of a nameless background servant who was not supposed to exist as a named character at all.
She told herself this with great conviction for approximately six hours.
Then Bai Xuening found her at the secondary cistern.
It was evening. Lin Moshi had been sent to check the cistern levels, which was a task she had invented for outer servants in chapter two to make the sect feel lived-in and which she now deeply regretted. She was measuring the water line with a marked stick and calculating whether she could reasonably lie about the numbers when she heard footsteps on the stone path behind her.
She turned around.
Bai Xuening stood at the edge of the cistern courtyard. She had changed out of her travelling robes into the inner disciple's uniform the sect must have already issued her, which meant she had been processed and assigned in record time, which was exactly as Lin Moshi had written it because the sect elders were scripted to recognize her exceptional spiritual roots on first assessment.
Up close, she was softer than Lin Moshi had expected. Younger-looking. There was something in her eyes that Lin Moshi had written as quiet strength but which, seen in person, looked more like someone carrying something heavy and choosing not to put it down.
"You were at the gate this morning," Bai Xuening said.
"I work at the gate," Lin Moshi said. "Cleaning the steps. Atmospheric world-building."
Bai Xuening blinked. "What?"
"Nothing. Can I help you with something? I should mention I'm a servant and not a cultivator so if you're lost I can point you toward the inner disciple quarters but I cannot escort you there because I'm not supposed to leave the outer grounds after the second bell and I wrote that rule in chapter two and I am now genuinely suffering for it."
There was a silence.
"You wrote that rule," Bai Xuening repeated, very carefully.
Lin Moshi heard herself. Closed her eyes. Opened them. "I have a very unusual way of expressing things. It is a personal quirk. Please ignore it."
Bai Xuening looked at her for a long moment. She had been written with patience, and it showed. She did not push. She did not demand. She simply waited with the particular stillness of someone who had decided that the truth would arrive eventually if she gave it enough room.
Lin Moshi was the one who had written her that way and it was absolutely infuriating to experience firsthand.
"I don't know anyone here," Bai Xuening said finally, quietly, as if confessing something. "I arrived today and everything is very large and very formal and the elder who greeted me kept calling me 'the destined one' which I do not know how to respond to."
Lin Moshi thought about chapter four. About the stage directions she had written for this moment: the heroine arrives, is recognized, begins her journey. She had not written what Bai Xuening felt about any of it. She had described it from the outside and moved on.
"It's a lot of pressure," Lin Moshi said, more gently than she intended.
"Yes," said Bai Xuening. Then, as if the word had been waiting: "Yes. It is."
They stood beside the cistern in the evening light, which was frozen at the same amber angle it had been frozen at for five days. A cricket chirped the same three notes in rotation. Somewhere in the outer courtyard, the sparrow landed on its stone pillar for what Lin Moshi calculated was approximately the forty-second time.
"Something is wrong with this place," Bai Xuening said. She was not asking.
"Yes," Lin Moshi said.
"You've noticed it too."
"Yes."
"The loops. The light. The way people move like they are following a path they cannot see."
"Yes," Lin Moshi said, and felt the particular discomfort of someone who has written a character as perceptive and is now being perceived.
Bai Xuening turned to look at her directly. "Who are you?"
"Moshi. Outer servant. Water-carrying division, corridor-sweeping division, currently cistern-measuring division."
"That's not what I asked."
Lin Moshi stared at her.
Those were Gu Yanche's words. She had heard them from him two days ago in the meditation corridor and now here they were again, in the same tone, from the heroine she had written on the other side of the story.
Two characters she had created. Both looking at her with the same expression. Both asking the same question.
She was going to have to be much more careful.
"I am very ordinary," Lin Moshi said, with as much conviction as she could locate. "Completely unremarkable. A background detail. Please do not pay attention to me."
Bai Xuening looked at her with the gentle, implacable patience of a river that had decided to wear down a particular stone.
"I don't think that's true," she said.
"It is extremely true."
"Then why," said Bai Xuening, with the same quiet precision she had been written to carry in her most important scenes, "do I feel like I have been waiting to meet you?"
The cistern measured its water level. The cricket cycled through its three notes. The amber light refused to move.
Lin Moshi had no answer for that.
She was the author of this world and she had no answer for that.
She picked up her measuring stick, noted the water level on her tally sheet with the focused attention of someone who desperately needed something to do with her hands, and excused herself with as much dignity as the situation allowed, which was not very much.
Walking back to the outer servant quarters in the unmoving evening light, she ran through what she knew.
Gu Yanche had noticed the loops and had already identified her arrival as a possible cause.
Bai Xuening had noticed the loops and had felt, somehow, that she had been waiting for Lin Moshi specifically.
The world was frozen at chapter forty-seven.
She had no cultivation, no plan, a story bible that ended with a note to figure things out later, and arms that had still not forgiven her for the water-carrying incident.
And somewhere in this broken, looping world, there was a force that knew the story had an author.
Was watching.
Was waiting.
Lin Moshi looked up at the sky, which was the exact shade of early evening purple she had described in chapter one and had not moved since.
"Later," she said, to herself, to the sky, to the abandoned story that had been holding its breath for her return, "is going to be very complicated."