Sweet Romance18 min read
How I Turned a Cult Scandal into a Tech Coup (and Survived)
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I woke up to cold tile and Lucas Hoffmann’s face hovering over me.
He looked like someone who had never known softness and never planned to, and yet there he was, eyes clear and exams-sober, studying me like a problem he couldn’t quite solve.
“I—” I tried to speak, but the world narrowed to rows of teeth and a single, terrible recollection: I was naked. So was he. The room smelled of burnt incense and something worse.
“Mariah,” Lucas said without surprise. “Are you all right?”
“I—” That name felt wrong coming out of someone else’s mouth. But it was mine. “I think I was asleep.”
Outside the doorway, someone knocked like a bell, bright and chirpy. A silvery voice called, “Master, may I come in?”
Kendall Orlov pushed the door open so fast it should have squealed. She stopped cold when she saw us.
“You—” Her face did the exact shift I had studied in the pages of the book I had been living two weeks ago. Shock flared and then, quicker, accusation. “How could you—Mariah! How could you do this to Master?”
“You saw?” I tried to cough, to laugh, to deny, but the body I had taken over had no shame left to buy me time. Pride had already left the room with my clothes.
Kendall pointed with a trembling finger. “How could you give Master that drug? How—”
Lucas’s gaze was a winter blade. He was a man who had built his life on precise margins and clean edges. He didn’t shout. He didn’t accuse. He looked like a man learning to hate with the right of law written into his bones.
“Master,” I said, and because I’d rehearsed lines from the original novel, because I knew every word Kendall was going to say before she said it, I spoke steady. “I can explain.”
Kendall’s mouth worked. Tears came out, theatrically, two lines of salt in the moonlight. “You were the one he trusted! You were the one he wanted to keep the command talisman. You—you poisoned him to get close to him. How could you—”
“Listen,” I said. “I know how this looks. But I’m going to fix it. I can fix it.”
I could feel the old woman in my bones — the book’s original owner of this body, the original Mariah who never dodged trouble because she walked straight into it — and for the first time since I’d woken in someone else’s life, I thought maybe I could out-engineer fate.
“You’re frozen,” Lucas said to Kendall. “Leave, for now. I will decide our course.”
Kendall fled like a sparrow. She knew her lines, her timing, the camera angles that would be in a sect drama years from now. She left, and I could hear her sobs as she flew away.
Lucas looked at me with an expression that did the strangest thing: it was not pity, not anger, but a puzzled politeness.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked.
I had spent the last month learning two impossible things at once: how to be reasonable inside a sword sect, and how to be a PR director in an era that still insisted on incense and banners. I had been a public relations person in the world I’d left. Now my PR skills were all I had.
“Close the story,” I said. “Make it stop being a story in people’s mouths.”
Lucas raised a brow. “And you think you can do that?”
“Yes.” I stood up, naked in a bed that had become the theater of my ruin. “I can change the frame.”
He studied me like he might study a failing technique. “You will not cover this with lies in front of me.”
“I won’t lie,” I said. “But I will manage what people can see and what they cannot. Let me try.”
He hesitated. Then, because he had weight and because he had authority, he did something unexpected: he put a sleeve over my shoulders, just enough to cover my shame.
“Go,” he said. “Do what you must. But if I learn you have lied, you will not stand before me again.”
I left Lucas’s room wrapped in his sleeve and wrapped in the knowledge that the original girl’s history made me a walking time bomb. Every time the book’s story hit a plot beat, the girl in me vanished and the original came out like a bad dream. Every time the script demanded disaster, that girl exploded the scene.
Two things were true: I could not keep being replaced every time a plot demanded my death; and I had to make sure Kendall Orlov never turned those chapters into facts.
“You need a plan,” Rowan Espinoza said when I met him by the lesson hall.
Rowan was the kind of man who thought in blueprints. He smelled faintly of machine oil and ink, and he’d been the first person to understand the public tablet technology I had been sketching in my head: a network of personal spirit-tablets that could hold messages, authenticate owners by aura, and display public threads.
“I already made one,” I said.
“You did?” Finnian Clement — the tower’s practical lead — peered over Rowan’s shoulder at the small wooden tablet in my hand. “You patched the old talk-slate?”
“It’s not a talk-slate.” I kept the explanation precise, the way Rowan liked. “It’s a public sphere for messages. Personal tablets will be tied to each person’s aura. Public tablets will be mounted in the hall. Everyone can post in the public square, but each message will be tied to a real aura and will display the writer’s basic rank. You cannot post anonymously to slander and get away with it unless you buy silence.”
“Hmm,” Finnian said. “That would fix rumor, or at least slow it.”
“And because we will collect messages, test quotes, and timestamp everything, we can correct false claims faster than gossip travels.”
Rowan grinned. “Do it. Install it at the main gate. Call it the Public Spirit Tablet. If this works, stories will die before they become headlines.”
I spent the next twenty-four hours installing what I called the spirit-notes system. By daybreak the main hall had a glowing board hung like a painting: a public tablet that held the flow of information for the whole mountain. Every inner disciple got a little device keyed to their aura — personal tablets that could connect to the public one when given permission. Messages could be set to private, shared, or public. There was a reporting function, and if you wanted to challenge a public claim, you filed a counter-report with two witnesses.
“Seems like the world’s first real social moderation,” Finnian said, delighted.
“Or the first time gossip will learn to dread timestamps,” I replied.
The public tablet grew hot. People wrote about their training, their meals, a dozen tiny victories. Then someone posted a gif — a grainy little capture from Lucas’s room — and the hall went silent.
“Who posted this?” Lucas asked, standing at the door, his voice steady.
“Public post,” Finnian said. “It carries a source aura. Anonymous — but traceable through network logs.”
Lucas’s face did not twitch. He had the same calm that had terrified me on the bed. “Leave it,” he said. “I will answer.”
He walked to the tablet and left an official note: an acknowledgement that an incident had occurred, a vow of investigation, and a stern reminder of the rules of conduct among disciples. He did not defend me. He did not accuse me. He positioned the sect as a fair judge, not a rumor mill.
“That should buy us time,” Rowan murmured.
It bought us more than time — it bought us leverage. My public tablet became a place for measured rebuttals, for controlled releases, for a slow, relentless wash of facts. I wrote about curriculum, about lesson notes, about the recipes for herbal salves. I posted transcripts. I invited students to take assignments on the public tablet to practice evidence and sourcing. My goal wasn’t to vanish the truth; it was to overwhelm gossip with a faster, cleaner narrative.
But the book remembered its chapters.
I had barely begun to breathe when Rowan’s apprentice, Finnian — a man with earnest eyes and ink-stained fingers — came running.
“There’s movement at Clearwind Cliff,” he said. “Master Espinoza sent a recall message — the head of our mountain wants to talk with you about the tablet and incidents.”
Lucas’s mouth twitched. “I will go.”
“I can go,” I said. “If Kendall is here, I can manage.”
He considered me. “You will not go alone.”
Rowan accompanied us. We flew on blades of wood, the air whipping our hair. On the way, Rowan told me everything he could about the system: how to batch-censor slander, how to pin facts, how to use public acknowledgment as a pressure valve. I listened, already a dozen steps ahead, thinking of how to make the tablet not only a shield but a weapon against the story’s beats.
We arrived in time to find Clearwind Cliff bustling. Disciplines clung to ledges and banners snapped in the wind. The cliff commanded the valley, and the master of our mountain — my own master, Lucas — stood as if he had never left stone. He did not storm. He waited. For once I was the one feeling small.
“You made the tablet?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “It gives truth a home.”
“You made it,” he repeated as if testing the taste of the words. Then he smiled — once, small and sharp. “Good.”
That smile became a public rumor of its own. People wrote about it. They posted praise. My tablet flooded with supportive messages and a stream of humble essays on herb identification that I forced as homework. People began to see me as a useful functionary, not merely a scandal.
And then everything spun again.
Kendall Orlov’s voice echoed across the tablets in a clipped note. She claimed to have evidence — a record from the pharmacy recording the origin of the aphrodisiac residue that had been found in Lucas’s room. She claimed it was an “experiment” sent by the Master’s senior apprentice. The post came with a sealed clip from the enclosed test-slate of the pharmacy — the old tube of evidence that the original book had used to finish my predecessor.
“Master,” I shouted privately through my tablet. “Do you want me to buy the evidence? To bribe whoever holds it?”
Lucas’s answer was cold but quick. “No.”
Bribes were a clumsy, worldly habit. In a sword sect, records mattered. Seals mattered more. So I did the only thing a PR person with a programmer’s pragmatism and a sword master’s common sense could do: I engineered the truth’s coverstory out of the public tablet.
I launched an assignment to the inner disciples: a research task on the herb we called Spirit-Pulse. It was a gentle, plausible task with a deadline. Then I put a reward for copies of archived pharmacy logs. I opened a legal channel on the public tablet where people could submit physical items to the quartermaster’s storage.
Within two hours, a pair of junior disciples brought a roll of expired pharmacy paper. Rowan verified its seal. Finnian verified the ink. The public tablet showed each step: scans, timestamps, and the witnesses’ auras. When someone tried to claim the roll under a different name, the roll’s seal did not match.
Kendall’s post glowed red like a wound. People read her claim and then read the logs. The public tablet was simple mathematics: evidence A + chain of custody B = credibility C. Kendall’s claim had a hole where the chain of custody should be.
“It’s not proof,” I said softly in the hall. “It’s a theater prop.”
I stood at the center of a ring of disciples and I explained, line by line, how pharmacy seals worked; how ink reacted to a person’s aura; how a forge of a seal could be detected by the slightest lag in stamping. I showed the originals, read the timestamps, and let the hall breathe the truth.
Kendall’s face went white. Acts of deception are worst done in private; being exposed in public is something else entirely.
She tried to scream that it was a trick. She tried to claim that I had forged the verification, that Rowan had colluded. People laughed at her, at first in little tittering sounds, then in loud disbelief. The Public Spirit Tablet recorded every reaction.
She ran from the hall like a woman falling off a stage.
It should have ended there. Chapters like that end with the “caught” girl reduced to sobs and exile. But the book saved some of its sadism for later.
“Now,” Lucas said afterward, to me, quietly. “You saved us. But this stain still exists on our plateau. If this sect is to be safe, you will need to build a guard that no one can tamper with.”
“I will,” I said. “I will weave them a net that spies can’t slip through.”
He looked at me, really looked, and then he smiled with a gentleness I had not seen before. “Then do it.”
My system spread across the mountain. Personal tablets learned to authenticate aura signatures; public tablets became forums for evidence, citations, and delays. I turned gossip into logs and rumor into a dataset that could be folded into the mountain’s memory.
I also learned something else: the book refused to die.
Kendall Orlov had not given up. She had a crack, and in that crack, the original girl—my body’s prior occupant—had left behind the most dangerous thing: a pattern of behavior that begged for mistakes. Every time the story needed a scandal, that original would come, would behave, and would get wrecked.
I could not let that repeat. I needed to lock the script’s most dangerous beats.
“Clearwind is fine now,” Rowan told me the day after our public victory. “But what about Clearwind’s neighbor — the cliff that holds the sealed temple? Someone opened a passage.”
He said it like a factual meteor. My heart dropped.
“Who?” I asked.
“Your sister,” Finnian said. He used the word like it was an element. “Kendall. She was sent to penance on Clearwind. She came back early. She should not have gone near the sealing wards.”
My stomach clenched. The book’s next beats were listed like law: the heroine would find a forbidden space, would open it, mistakes would be made, and the mountain’s future would be compromised. I had to stop it.
“Then we stop it first,” I said.
Rowan raised an eyebrow. “You and me, Mariah? You will go where women in these books go to give the plot impetus?”
“Yes,” I said. “I have a plan.”
We went to Clearwind Cliff. The day was clear like blade. The wind flayed banners and our tablets drew messages like a comet’s tail.
Kendall Orlov was already there, pale and resolute, taking the lead as only a story’s favored child could. She had the look of a woman who expected narrative reward. She smiled when she saw us.
“Master sent you,” she said lightly. “Good. Maybe you’ll tell them what you did last night, Mariah.”
Her words were a blade behind which a hundred cameras would conceal their lenses. Rowan’s hands were steady on his instruments. Finnian’s jaw clenched.
“You will step down,” I said. “You will hand over the pharmacy logs to the quartermaster. You will surrender any sealed documents you have, in person.”
Kendall smiled with teeth. “You want me to be public? Very well.”
She went to the quartermaster and pulled a sealed packet like a magician. She laid it on the stone table and called for witnesses. Her voice was soft, and many breathing things in her corner of the world had learned to hear the script’s cadence as if it were scripture.
When the quartermaster peeled the seal, the packet bloomed into a small storm: forged paper, mismatched seals, and a line of handwriting that was, at last, not like the Master’s. Everyone saw it.
The hall was a live thing. People whispered. The public tablet fired like gunfire: scans uploaded, signatures compared, an automated chain-of-custody test run.
“Forgery,” Finnian said, simply.
Kendall’s face shocked to stone. She began to babble about reasons and the need for explanation. The crowd closed around her like a tide.
“We will bring this to the Law Hall,” Lucas said. “Public forum. Evidence will be laid. Everyone will see.”
“What?” Kendall said, and her voice frayed. “You can’t—”
“I can,” Lucas answered. “And you confessed to posting the pharmacy record on the public board.”
The Law Hall gathered that morning in a way I had never seen. The inner disciples sat in ranks. The elders were statues. People streamed forward, faces alight with the thrill of public theater: the punishment of a wrong-doer. People wanted justice like they wanted news — because to see a bad person fail is a small, narcotic comfort.
They brought Kendall into the center. She stood, as the sentence was read aloud, and she tried to smile like a child in a painting. The hall’s tablets recorded everything. Every statement, every witness, every challenge would be kept as data.
“Why did you do it?” the head clerk asked.
Kendall flinched. Her lines had been rehearsed for public performance, but the official setting was colder than training rooms. “To stop her,” she said in a voice that tried to be small. “She was an obstacle. I wanted Master’s favor.”
The hall’s breath left. People muttered. I felt something hot and ugly and loud in everyone’s chest. Revenge taste sweet.
The Law Hall’s penalties had a structure: public shame, forced atonement labor, and a ritual dismantling of social capital. For someone who had used public trickery, the worst punishment was the public retraction and removal of the very tools she had used.
“You forged the seal and preserved that forgery in the quartermaster’s chest,” Lucas said. He spoke slowly, like a man teaching others to move. “You used the public boards to accelerate the lie. For that, you will be punished here and now, in the place you wronged.”
Kendall’s face was pale as a winter moon. She looked at me. I found my posture cold.
“You staged a fall for the audience,” I said. “You wanted to make me fail. You were trying to use the plot to kill me.”
“You—” She licked her lips. “You are the one who lied in bed with Master—”
“With enough evidence,” Rowan said, and he stepped forward to show a set of timestamps, the public records of the night, each second logged.
“You will sit,” Lucas said, “and you will confess every lie you made on the public tablet. You will read each post aloud, and you will show where each forged detail came from. Then you will hand over all your scrolls and receive your sentence.”
Kendall shook. She began to read. Her voice at first was brittle. Then, as the transcripts poured out and the public tablet mirrored them line by line, the Hall’s voices rose. Some laughed. Some cried. People opened channels on their personal tablets and began to stream the confession to friends in other peaks. The Law Hall was a living thing, and in its belly Kendall’s power shrank.
When she read the last line — a tiny rune of an apology that she had never meant — something snapped. The hall’s mood turned from curiosity to disgust. People had watched her use the very system she had trusted to win, and now that same system consumed her.
The punishment came next.
“You will stand,” Lucas intoned.
They made her stand stoically in the center. An elder recorded the speech. The clerk listed offenses and the number of names influenced. Each count was accompanied by a number: the number of forced days in labor, the number of social points deducted, the measure of monetary loss she had caused the mountain. Every punishment was a clean number. The Law Hall was arithmetic and shame wrapped in ritual.
Then, worst of all to a manipulator, they removed her public aura privileges.
“From now,” Lucas said, “you will have no public voice. You shall not speak in public tablets. You will post only to a daily ledger, which the quartermaster will publish as a record. You will spend three months in service on the marshlands under watcher. You will wear a public mark of atonement, visible to all.”
Kendall’s face crumpled. People in the hall began to whisper: “Let’s see how she likes no audience.” “No more scripts.”
She tried to beg. “Please—Master—”
Lucas cut her off. “Kendall Orlov, you will make public reparations. You will apologize, and you will work without privilege. If you post, disguise, or use someone else’s aura to speak, you will be expelled.”
Her reactions moved. At first she went through the stages I had been told a hundred times in the book: denial, denial in sudden bursts, anger, then a slow, shameful collapse. When the hall’s watchers cuffed the public mark — a small ribbon of woven reed we hung on the robe — they did it in front of the tablets so all the mountain could see. People took pictures with permission; the network preserved each frame.
I watched the crowd. People recorded, commented, and some of them applauded. Others wept. Some were silent. But everyone was there. The offense and the punishment were public. The lesson had been taught in the only language our world understood: visible consequence.
When the ritual ended, the crowd spilled out. Some walked in groups, now speaking to each other about the need for better instruction. Rowan walked to me, holding his tablet like a man carrying evidence. “You did it,” he whispered. “You stopped one attack on the mountain.”
I drank in the relief like water. The wound of that night had not simply closed. It had been excised and shown to have been excised. The public tablet recorded not only Kendall’s confession but the steps of the investigation. The dataset became a lesson for everyone. Rumor would still swirl — it always would — but now it would swirl against a system that wanted symmetry. We had, for the first time, a reliable method to take rumor out behind the barn and explain it by law.
And yet the story remained a book, and books are stubborn.
Kendall’s fate was not enough. There were deeper plot holes: secrets under Clearwind Cliff, an imprisoned presence that the original story had used as a deus ex machina. The mountain still had a weakness. The Clearwind ward was cracked. Someone or something had been trying to break out. I could feel the narrative tension. The only way to survive was not to be reactive. It was to become proactive.
“You want to seal it?” Lucas asked.
“Yes,” I said. “But not with brute force. We will build a monitoring grid. We will pin the ward’s readings to the public tablets. We will assign real-time watchers. We will make a living map.”
Rowan’s hands tightened over his tools, like a man locking his favorite ship. “We’ll need manpower, and the elder’s blessing, and time.”
“You’ll get all of it,” I said. “In exchange, I want privileges: two watchers on your diagrams and three apprentices from your peak. And I want the public tablet to run a live feed for a week.”
Lucas considered, and then nodded. “Granted.”
We built arrays of tracing charms and light-stones, hid them in statues, and called on the public tablet to post reports every few hours. The mountain learned to be watched. The ward held. For a time, we believed the story would stop feeding on our fear.
But that belief was a thing the book enjoyed destroying.
The next breach came in the form of a single, clever trick: a transfer of a spirit-seal that should have been impossible. Someone with power had used a loophole to place a small charm in a public shrine. The charm pulsed with a programmatic rhythm that we had missed.
“Someone coded this,” Finnian said, grim. “They used a forging-burst and a tracer to slip the charm in.”
“Who benefits?” I asked.
“Not Kendall,” Rowan said. “She’s on the marshlands.”
“No,” I said. “But someone else is trying to open that gate. Someone who needs a lot of help to finish. Someone who needs a human hand.”
There is always a human hand in these stories. The mountain’s system allowed us to identify the shape of the aura that had last touched the charm. It was unusual: full, old, not a child’s reach. We traced it to a voice that had never left the margins of the book: an imprisoned presence — the thing behind the ward.
We went to the ward.
It was colder than I expected. The stone hummed with old power. A figure lay across the inner altar: a silhouette of a man whose aura crackled with loneliness and old genius.
“Who are you?” Rowan asked.
A voice came, dry as rust. “I have no mouth left,” the man said. He uncoiled. “I am Chandler Duncan. I have been here a long while.”
Chandler Duncan belonged in a library. Something in him smelled of old ink and broken vows. He was the kind of character the original book used to hand out miraculous answers like coins. He looked at me with a kindness that was dangerous.
“Can you leave?” I asked.
“You can if someone brings me out,” Chandler said. “Or if you give me a host.”
Rowan’s teeth ground. “We can’t release a sealed mind for more than a contract,” he said. “The ward will collapse.”
Chandler laughed, the sound like a bell cracking. “Bells are brittle. Contracts are binding. Make me terms.”
We argued deep into the night. Chandler’s conditions were simple: if he could be freed, he wanted the mountain to watch over his old library. He wanted exchange: the mountain would keep his secrets safely, and he would give up the one thing no one could trade: counsel. He said he would teach the mapping of the wards and feed our tablets with a new kind of logging.
I thought about bargains. I thought about the book’s beats. I thought about how many times the mountain had been saved by an impossible truce.
We made a contract, honest in its civility, and, in an unusual use of the public tablets, recorded it for the entire mountain. They voted — quietly, through aura-signed messages. The contract was sealed. Chandler walked free under watch.
He was the most useful prisoner I had ever met. He taught us to read the wards like sentences, to parse their grammar. The Clearwind ward became a library of clauses. We built monitors into the public tablet, and the mountain slept a little easier.
And then — for reasons any good book stores away for later — the battle shifted from wards to faces.
Kendall’s punishment had been public, severe, and instructive. But what the mountain wanted, most of all, was a single moment of cathartic revenge: the moment when a manipulator sees her reputation crumble before everyone.
We gave them that moment at the next assembly.
They called it “The Reckoning.” They hung it on the public tablet and pinned posts like flags. The entire mountain came.
Kendall stood on the dais again, this time smaller, hands trembling. Lucas read the formal charges. Rowan displayed the tamper-proof logs. Finnian displayed the chain of custody evidence as an animated map. I watched the crowd. Phones — tablets — recorded every tilt of her chin.
“You have used your public voice to reframe truth,” Lucas said. “You have attempted to twist ward readings. You have abused your rank to fabricate accounts. For each instance, we call forth witnesses.” He pointed, and a dozen disciples stepped up.
One testimony, then another, then a stream. The tablets echoed the names and the signs. Kendall could feel the mountain’s gaze cut her down. She tried to weep, then tried to plead: “I only wanted—” But this time, no one wanted her story. They wanted proof. And proof was a merciless clamp.
They led her through the litany. Each sentence was a measured slap. The crowd reacted in a thousand small ways: a gasp, a hand raised, a bitter laugh. Cameras recorded. The public tablet issued an automatic call to everyone’s devices to broadcast the hearing.
“You built a web,” Rowan said, “and you have been caught inside it.”
Kendall’s eyes flew to me. I saw the something like recognition — not gratitude, not remorse, but the cold acknowledgement that she had once tried to use me and had failed.
At the end, they pronounced her sentence: three months of public labor, the revocation of her public voice, a ritual of apology recorded in the public tablets, and compulsory service on the marsh to repair the damages she had caused. She would wear a public band of reedwork for the season; anyone who saw her would see the mark and know her guilt.
The punishment was long by the mountain’s standard. It was clean. It was public. And for the watchers, it felt like justice.
But the book allows no quiet for winners.
Kendall left the dais, and the mountain breathed. People filed out with their heads full of chants. The public tablet logged an hour’s worth of commentary. For a moment I felt victorious, as if I had stitched the wound closed.
Not long after, a message arrived on my private tablet. It was unsigned. It was a single line.
“Your contract with Chandler will cost more than you think.”
I looked up. Lucas met my eyes across the hall. Rowan’s expression was unreadable. Finnian’s shoulders were tense.
“We have a living archive now,” Chandler said quietly at my ear. “Secrets have weight.”
I felt the mountain tilt under that sentence. The book’s next beat had already shifted; there would be new openings, new betrayals, new devices. But we had learned something valuable: information had power, and public accountability could be made a structural thing, not just a fragile custom.
I had turned the ancient art of rumor into an engineered system. I had protected my life, hacked the plot, and won the mountain’s gratitude. I had seen a bad girl humiliated and punished in public as the book had required. I had freed an imprisoned old mind who taught us how to read wards like paragraphs. I had bowed to Lucas Hoffmann and had given him reason to trust me — or at least to be curious.
The end of the day, as I sat beside Rowan and Finnian and Lucas by the public tablet — the place that had saved and damned us — Lucas touched the screen and wrote one line.
“To those who would speak without weight, speak only when you will bear the cost.”
It was a proverb, and it would be the one I remembered. It felt like a period at the end of an ugly sentence. Yet when I closed my tablet, there was a new message waiting: a shard of a contract, an old rune of warning, an unsigned note that smelled faintly of smoke.
Somewhere in the mountain, the next chapter was already rustling like dry leaves.
The End
— Thank you for reading —