Face-Slapping16 min read
I Came to Cultivation to Nap, Not to Be Famous
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I woke with the taste of hot spring steam in my mouth and a stranger's voice like a cello lowing right against my ear.
"What's your name?"
I opened my eyes to water rippling and a pair of hands—belonging to someone who smelled of steam and stone—locked around my waist. The rest of his body was sculpted in bronze and shadow; I could not see his face through the fog in my dream, but I could feel the weight of him. For half a year, that same man visited my sleep, the exact body I had written into dozens of late-night love scenes. Even his little red mole near the abs—my characters had one, and so did this dream man.
"What's your name?" he asked again. His voice was a low instrument, but I couldn't answer. My throat went wrong whenever he asked. In dreams I could emit humiliating little noises like a wind-up toy but never a proper sentence. It felt like being punished for being a bad protagonist.
Later, when the coach jolted and some maid shouted, "Princess! Wake up! To Xianlai, princess!" reality shoveled me out of my fog.
"I am not ready for people," I muttered. "I am ready to nap."
Mae Orlov—what the palace called my attendant—hopped into the carriage like a mother hen who'd read too many warnings. "Lenora, you have to perform at Xianlai. All eight princesses will be there. If anything happens, get help from them."
I peered at her. "Help? From sisters who practiced pinches and insults on me during every training exercise? They will 'help' me in ways that rearrange my bones."
Mae smiled the way maids do when they hide worry with nonsense. "They're sisters. They'll take care of you."
"Then let the sky bear witness," I said out loud, "that Lenora Beach—grand princess of irreproducible laziness—will ascend the cultivation heights by lying still and letting fate trip over me."
Mae blinked like I had conjured a storm in a teacup. She insisted on coming to the base of the three thousand steps. She kissed my forehead like an aunt and said, "If you fail, you'll be married off to the Western domains to breathe their thin air and chase goats."
"That's motivation," I yawned. "Nothing motivates like being forced to make goat stew."
I had, of course, a secret plan. Sixteen years of being ignored by the emperor and twelve of being practiced into straw by my sisters had taught me to be resourceful. I swallowed a pill bought with the last of the coin I earned from selling my illustrations—an odd, bitter thing claimed to alter appearances. I stuffed my skirts into a rock crack, pulled on coarse trousers, and with one last look at my painted fingers, I swallowed the pill. The taste was like sitting on a lemon and listening to a violin. The change made my chest hollow, my posture wrong, and my voice… deeper in a way that left me ashamed I had ever used it to sing in the bath.
"System, wake up," I said to no one. Which was true; I had bound a system in another life—an app-like thing that promised comodity and convenience. It lay inert for sixteen years. I had paid a small fortune for it. Now, on the first step of the three thousand, I hissed at the stone as if giving it a horoscope.
When I reached the Xianlai gate, the purple-robed attendants stamped identity marks into my waistband—Jiang names and court forms were of little interest to me. I took the identity tag and followed the crowd into a mirror-gallery. I had never seen the man I had become. The glass showed a handsome youth with a narrow chin and ridiculous shoulders. My heart—useless in such matters—popped like a fish in a skillet. I tried to be unimpressed. I failed.
"You look like trouble," a purple-robed brother muttered as he passed.
"I look like someone who prefers her meat cooked medium," I answered. Social interaction zapped me like static. He frowned and left.
The second test was a mystical trial, a "mind mirror" that mocked the mind's deepest fears. I found a quiet place under a curtain of reflecting stones and promptly fell asleep. The dream was different: an icy coffin, a masked man inside, and an incensed pig with tiny wings calling itself a system in a voice absurdly proud.
"I am Quincy Peters," it announced, flapping. "I am the world's most handsome, most competent system."
"Quincy?" I said, rubbing sleep from my eyes. "You look like somebody's roast pig with wings."
"I AM INTERGRAL—" Quincy sputtered. "You woke me after sixteen years of crash! You are the chosen one! Go and save the world!"
"Don't call me chosen," I said. "Call me hungry."
Quincy flapped and made a retching noise. Then he was helpful. "You have ten points. Use points on the exchange. Hit my belly to open the shop."
"Touch your belly? That's gross." I poked him, and a menu flashed in my mind: potions, starter pills, a silly "fire-stick" labeled boringly as a cooking tool. I, being a woman of very straightforward needs, picked the fire-stick and something listed as "storage ring."
The mirror-world spat me back onto the dragon-carved step with a small crowd around me. "Describe how you overcame your fear," the yellow-robed instructor asked.
I made the mistake of being a stage actor in an impromptu sermon. "When the mind is a mouth, feed it clouds," I started. "Look up. Look at the birds and remember—"
An ancient elder, Gabriel Legrand, who had been stuck at a ceiling-crack of cultivation for a century, choked open his eyes, burst into tears, and declared, "You've reminded me of my mother's lullaby," then broke through a millennial barrier and kicked the air into a higher realm.
I clapped, mortified and thrilled, as the old man flopped to his knees and thanked me as if I had invented oxygen. From that moment, people watched my every move and, to my eternal misfortune, thought me a miracle in slippers.
"Who are you?" they asked a lot. "Is he a celestial prodigy?" they whispered. Other boys who had shrugged me off now circled like locusts. I wanted to warn them not to ask for my autograph.
It is unbecoming to mislead a crowd, but I am also a coward. I ducked and took the white-wood path into the second trial—the secret grotto where the test would decide whether my "inner strength" existed or I merely had good posture.
Quincy, mordantly jealous and protective, scolded me in a cast of high-pitched pig tuts. "Act like you have ambition! The easiest way to get points is to show off."
"I hate showing off," I said. "You know how I earned my coin? I wrote trashy novellas. The best of us hide in basements and eat noodles."
"Fine. But if you don't try, you'll lose me to the cloud of forgotten systems," Quincy muttered.
Inside the cavern, stairs floated across magma and glass stones, and a tiny flying boar—Quincy—told me to touch his belly to open the exchange. I did. I bought the stupid storage ring with three of my meager twenty points, and a cheap "camp cooking pole" that doubled as a lower-grade flying device. Freed of my small anxieties by a pot of mushroom-and-wild-chicken stew, I slept by a stream and dreamed of my other recurring man with confusing silver eyes.
When I awoke, the world tilted because thousands of test-takers had shrunk like tides. Only a hundred remained. I had a waist token that said "Void Peak." It sounded pretentious, like an herbal wine label. An old man in a red face, who had been stirred by my speech, called himself my servant from then on. People knelt, and I flinched at the noise of knuckles on stone. I did not want their legs; I wanted my stew-pot. But a staff and a huge following were not to be ignored.
"You're virtual guru-material," an idle youth laughed. "You smell like pig and paradox, friend."
"Better to smell like pig," I answered. "At least I am edible."
Days later, after limp days in a hall of mirrors and a rather humiliating display of lying down on an actual dragon statue and falling asleep while hundreds watched, I left the trial to a people drunk on superstition. Some called me a gift; some called me an idiot breeding bad luck. I called myself lucky enough to have bought mushroom-sort-of-essentials.
A week into my "new life," a hulking gang of silver-masked men cornered a blue-gowned princess in the shadow of the market. She had a face like rain and hands that could pull a bowstring. Margaux Cohen—Her Highness, who spelled "grace" in the margins and loved me for an old kindness—was bound and insulted.
"You're not a princess out here," one sneered. "You are a pretty mouth with no spine. We'll take you to the river, show you how water dresses a woman."
"Stay away," I said, leaning on my cooking pole like a man who drops his spoon in rows. I had no business interfering in politics; the doses of trouble they served in capitals were too high for my constitution. But I also had a spiteful streak the size of a storage ring.
The leader stepped forward. He smelled of sour plums and had a grin that split like rope. Fox Morrison—one of many names whose faces are best unseen—snorted. "A child plays hero. Step back, little lord."
"Don't call me lord," I said. "It makes my chest itch."
He patted me like a pet. "And what can you do? Freeze me with your pretty words?"
I felt something cool settle in my stomach. Quincy made a squeaky noise. Then I did something I had never meant to learn: I was colder than an unpaid bill. I touched the cooking pole. Air shivered. Frost rose like a curtain. Two hulks were ice in a breath. Fox stumbled and leapt away with blood noise in his throat. The crowd parted like curtains. Margaux's eyes cleared; the world smelled of pine.
"Who are you?" she whispered.
"Someone who can't be spoken of at tea-time," I said, and she smiled in ways that rewired my ribs. She wrapped my cloak about her shoulders and called me "sir" in the confiding way princesses use to vow later to strangle you for being sensible. I rolled my eyes and walked off.
Chance had teeth. That night, in the market, news traveled like gossip: "The person from the trial can freeze men." "The person from Void Peak can make an elder climb." The market sellers formed a choir of offers. Someone gave me a bowl of rice to stay quiet. That bowl tasted like victory.
Three days later, on a bright morning where the peppers burned like small bonfires and the clouds hung like indulgent lovers, Fox Morrison reappeared in town, not with wolves but with evidence—the kind of paper that ruins lives.
He had hatched a plan with companions: set up a parade, a public "banquet" of wonder at the Flower City square, and show humanity how pretty power can also be a puppet. He believed he could draw me into a trap. You could hear his smugness like a pipe organ.
He meant to humiliate Margaux and the other princesses publicly and use the spectacle as a stage for extortion: demand terms from the palace, threaten the sisters, and collect coin. He had spies, and he had the audacity of men who bet on cowardice.
It did not go as planned.
The square was full. Stands of spice and lacquer glinted. Streams of people sat like a tide under banners that called for entertainment and law. Fox Morrison stood on an elevated dais with a screen that, when the sun touched it, glinted like water. "Princesses," he called. "We bring evidence of traitorous intent from the palace—this will be shown, and the public will choose justice."
"Behold," he said to the crowd, and the screen blinked. A ribbon of light showed document fragments—letters, a map, words that said money, favors, and collusion. He smiled. "Do you see? This proves that the palace will sell you out."
My palms were against my cooking pole. Quincy thrummed like a chain-sitter. I felt a pressure as if something in the square tightened. People took out their glasses, their small boxes that made faces plastic. They began to record. Smartphones are not mine in the old-world, but in many versions of the tale people carry small mirrors that can capture sound and light. The crowd smelled of pop and fruit and excitement. Children cheered. Old men bet how long the scandal would last.
Fox paced. He looked like a king who'd discovered a garden flea. "With these papers, I can force marriages, force supplies, force the gold to flow! No one will pity the palace when we take terms."
He had forgotten that some of the princesses had friends.
Margaux stepped forward from the crowd wearing the green of court. She did not scream. She did not bow. She walked to the dais with the fine footfall of someone who had been told to wait by the world and had decided to answer. The crowd went silent. Phones rose like a forest.
"Fox Morrison," Margaux said, her voice clear, "you are a common thief with a taste for promises. You think your papers are enough."
He laughed. "She speaks as if she is a judge. No, princess, you have only your wits. The paper proves the palace is corrupt."
"Then watch closely," I said from the edge of the square where I had no right to be and yet had come because a person with a cooking stick has an odd sense of civic duty.
I walked up and took the document by one corner. Fox's smugness flashed—he thought he had me. I smiled in the calm, lazy way that used to disarm debt collectors.
"Is this all?" I asked, voice small enough to be a ripple.
Fox's jaw soured. "You will not handle state documents," he barked.
"I wasn't touching state documents," I said. "I was touching your bragging."
He doubled down. "You—"
The crowd watched. Phone lights blinked in impatience. Someone recorded luck into the air. A woman pushed forward and whispered to her neighbor: "He says the palace is corrupt. If true, we will uproot them." A teen began streaming with a box that sent the feed across the city.
Fox realized his control flickered. He tried to lunge for the screen. A boy in the crowd shoved him back, and the video flickered to show the face of Fox smiling and whispering to a smaller man—messages. Not state documents: a string of contemptuous messages about princes and "retainers as wallets." The crowd chemistry changed. The murmur grew into a murmur of betrayal.
From "I will take your gold" to "I will take your trust," Fox's face moved. He went from avarice to puzzlement to anger, like bruised citrus changing colors. He tried to scramble onto the dais, but this was the moment authorities in the square loved: the liar's pause. "Who are you?" he demanded, louder than he should.
"Watch," I said quietly, but my voice carried. I helped Margaux stand straighter. She was not the only one with hurt hands.
A woman in the crowd who sold small charms had been watching Fox for months. She lifted her phone. Her video revealed Fox's messages with several mid-level merchants and a name: "Guild of the Ashen Rope." Another person tapped through the comments and found a receipt—Fox had been paid, and the numbers were wrong for any legal trade. The crowd's head-tilt became a collective intake of a lung.
Fox's smugness cracked, his smile becoming an expression agreed upon only in the repossessions of men whose debts are larger than their courage. He tried to deny. "I have evidence," he said, the words sliding like wet pebbles. "I have—"
"Where?" I asked.
Now the second act of humiliation unrolled. I had learned some tricks in the past: people who threaten publicly tend to leave a trail to prove they are dangerous and well-funded. They like to be admired. They like to switch disguises. Fox had done so. I walked the circle around the dais and, as if moving on a stage, plucked the microphone from the hands of the town herald who was startled out of his sleep.
"Listen," I said into the mic. "If you want to hear true confession, hear the man who would make your daughters trade vows for rice. Did you tell the merchants to prepare chests for the princess's forced wedding? Did you call us 'useful bread'?"
Fox's denial was reflex, a man who had practiced falsehoods like a parlor trick. "I did not! I—"
The first witnesses stepped forward. A cloak-seller said, "He promised me the contracts to sugar and grain if I helped him. He did not pay when the palace—" A spice merchant coughed and produced a roll of coin slips. A thin man in a grey cap walked forward with a tape of a whispered conversation where Fox's voice said, half-laughing, "When she signs, we'll call it compassion." The tape played for the crowd and for the lights.
Shock spread like a fever. Phones chimed. People leaned forward. An old woman clapped her hand to her mouth and began to cry. A group of boys at the market took out crude cameras and began to shriek in the kind of shrill glee that means scandals are funnier when other people fall. Someone used an iron stylus to carve the villain's face on a small scrap of wood.
Fox's expression went through the stages: achievement at step one—I'd trapped them; then the small, quick flash of surprise when the crowd found more pieces; then denial—"This is fabricated!"—and he tried to make himself righteous; then a tremble—his voice lost a corner of reason; then collapse. He looked at the sky as if bargains could be made with clouds.
"You're lying," he hissed. "This is a conspiracy."
"Conspire to what?" demanded Margaux. "To feed the hungry? To stop men who sell daughters for coin?" The crowd roared. Margaux bit the question like an arrow.
Fox's smile thinned into throat-barked panic. He grabbed at the dais and looked for a man to blame. The crowd's cameras panned to his petty men; they shuffled like mice. Then, very slowly, the people around Fox—some of whom had come for the spectacle—turned and turned their phones onto him.
"Confess," I said. "Tell them you boasted of palace bribes. Tell them you said the princesses were wallets. Tell them you plan to sell the daughters of the city."
Fox tried to choke out a lie, but the stream of witnesses kept pulling him down. An auctioneer produced a letter from a merchant with his seal and Fox's scrawled signature. A man in the crowd, who'd kept a ledger, read it aloud. "This is a ledger of pay-offs: Fox Morrison, number 8." The registry had a face. The camera-laden crowd cheered, like people who had been thirsty being handed water.
Fox's mouth went dry. The crowd got louder. Someone in the back posted a frame-by-frame of a message Fox had written: "She is only good as food and goods." The phrase spread across the crowd like iron dust. Fox took one step back. He looked like a man whose puppets had just cut ties.
"Confess!" cried a woman who had lost a son to a false marriage scheme. A chorus of voices asked for justice. A merchant pelted a handful of pebbles at the dais. "Confess! Confess!" They did not yet have the governor. They had instead what is worse for a schemer: popular outrage.
Fox's face went through the motion pictures: Flash one—smug, because he thought he had leverage; flash two—surprise, because anyone could find a ledger; flash three—denial, because the human mind can still disguise itself; flash four—collapse, because his feet had nothing behind them; flash five—begging. He dropped to the marble with a sound like a sack of spoiled grain. His robe, formerly so straight, crumpled in the sun.
"Please," he begged, and the pleading voice sounded thin and foreign. "Please—don't... I'll give you the gold. I'll give you—"
No one moved to accept. Phones clicked. Someone recorded his pleading. "Please," he said again, the syllables gone small. "Don't ruin me. Don't tell them I'm a man of nothing." He looked at the crown of his hands as if they were foreign.
Sound travels fast in squares. Gossip blossomed as witnesses spoke. Some of the crowd wept for recorder-revenge. Others drew closer, slow like wolves. A young woman who'd had a brother sold into a forced match mounted a bench. She spat in his direction. "You thought you could trade my sister," she said. "Look at your hands. They have bread on them, but not the kind you deserve."
A child shouted, "Look! Look! He's on his knees!" and the cameras honed in. Another recorded the event as if it were an offering to their feed. "We will not be bought," a town crier cried. People clapped. Some cheered. Others began to photograph Fox's fall—screenshots, pixel by pixel, cropping his face to share on markets across the city. Someone uploaded a troll-song with his name, and a drummer from the bakery thumped a beat so that soon the square had a rhythm to accompany the liar's humiliation.
Fox Morrison, who had orchestrated many quiet barters with heavy hands, who had intended to blackmail princesses into lost lives, now lay on the stone and begged like a dog scrounging for alley scraps. He attempted to insist upon bargaining—"I'll pay! I'll kneel! I'll swear!"—but the crowd's reaction had already sequenced into triumph. They wanted his public fall and they wanted his removal. The humiliation tasted like a harvest feast to them.
"Call the magistrate," someone said, finally pragmatic. "Put him in the stocks until the lords decide."
"No," I interrupted, surprisingly crisp. "Let this be known. Let his tyranny be recorded."
I took the microphone he had once used, the same device that now smelled of the stale breath of rumors, and spoke plainly. "Fox Morrison," I said, "you used us for profit. You thought this plaza was your ledger. Let your confession be etched where everyone can read it."
He vomited out denials and then prophecy of repentance. People barked to him to kneel. He did. He rose and fell flat in the dust. He grovelled. He begged. The crowd's cameras captured the entire arc: the smug grin; the stammer; the denial; the collapse; the pleas for mercy. Children took photos and made up rhymes. The downtown scribes wrote their notes. The crier shouted it from market to gate.
People filmed, took wide-angle photos, then selfies with Fox crumpled in the background. A group of brawny market men formed a circle and pushed him face-down. They took his hands and tied them into ropes. They removed his mask. There was no brutality beyond the justice of the hour; he had been publicly exposed and the crowd—starved for rightness—gave him the shaming he had intended for others.
He looked at me for the first time without bravado. "Please," he said, "I can pay back. I will—"
"Begging is free," I said. "So are apologies. People will decide what to do. But in markets and squares we have found that those who plan selling daughters for profit do not get paroled by polite words."
His voice cracked from force of will. The crowd, which had been a thousand flashes of light, shifted and murmured. Some made a show of softening. A few women smacked the ground with their palms as if splicing fruit. A man stepped up and declared, "He must be led to the magistrate. There he will stand trial." The crowd roared agreement. People laughed and took pictures as they walked him away like a bad joke with a moral.
He was led under zap-snap lights—recordings that would live on small screens for a fortnight. He went from smug to shocked to denial to crashing collapse to pleading, and hundreds of spectators had provided the commentary. Someone made an artistic rendering of the whole scene with ink on paper; someone made a satirical song; someone posted a little poem about "a man who thought he could buy the sky." Fox's humiliation lasted days; the city had found its own justice in a corner that did not require the palace.
When the magistrate finally took him into custody, the square settled back into markets. People wiped their hands and continued their trades. Yet, in new whispers, he had become smaller. His name—Fox Morrison—circulated like a cautionary tale for a generation: do not plan to sell daughters for coin. And in the weeks after, dozens of posts compiled video frames of his fall. The renderings of his collapse, his pleading, the clapping of the crowd, the phones taking photos in unison, the applause when the magistrate took him away—these became the city’s shrines.
I went home with a storage ring and a very fragrant bowl of stew. Quincy told me later that my "exposure" tactic had given me ten points. I tossed him a spoon and told him to mind his belly.
"You're trying to make me a hero," I told him.
"You are," Quincy said. "And heroes have to work for their storage rings."
"Fine," I said. "But I refuse to be famous."
In the weeks after, I settled into a curious peace. The sisters, who had been rumor-touched by my public act, had new eyes for me when I bumped into them in court. Hermione Craft—the eldest—looked at me like an old friend who had found a new costume. Margaux smiled in the way people smile at gifts. The palace wrote me letters of congratulations, though they also kept watch. A man of quiet speech called himself my "master" in the way elders call the world to mind. He taught me to sweep altars. I learned to cook in the temple kitchens, to trade my time for quiet.
I did not become famous in the way bards sing. I became known enough to be left alone. I learned to tie my robe in the way a man from Orchid Peak taught me: not because I wanted to be seen but because I'd been mistaken for one and kept the shape.
My new life was not noble. I spent my days learning which herbs made soup sweet and which herbs made soup finish you. I taught a feral wolf—Canyon Baumann, the beast I'd rescued from the mouth of a cave—to fetch the water. He liked it. Quincy liked the water better than I liked the wolf. People saw me carry a storied ring and asked if it was a treasure. I answered, "Yes. It's mine." They left me be. This was the kind of peace I was after.
Yet the world is a restless thing. Rumors like hot coal are not easily cooled. Fox had associates, and the Guild of the Ashen Rope, angered by a hung ring, planned in narrow places. For now, the square's justice had satisfied the crowd, but Fox's shadow would flicker in the corners, ready to return.
I learned to guard my stew. I learned to hide my face when commentaries began. I learned to put my hands with a servant's skill into useful things. But I carried with me the knowledge that a crowd could do what courts sometimes would not: it could witness, and when it witnesses together, it becomes harder for monsters to hide.
"Keep your pole handy," Quincy said once, in the middle of a soup line.
"I always do," I answered. "It doubles as a spoon."
"Good," he said. "You'll need it."
And one morning, when Margaux slipped me a bottle she said had been made by her hand and whispered, "For when you are tired of being brave," I understood that bravery is not a single act but a shelf of small comforts. I drank my broth, counted my points, and wrote a sentence in my head, which was the closest thing I had to a promise.
"I will be full," I told Quincy. "And I will be quiet."
Quincy snortled. "That is the worst vow I've ever heard from someone with a storage ring."
"Then help me keep it," I said.
"Deal," he answered, and the square's echo went on behaving like a story.
The End
— Thank you for reading —