Face-Slapping15 min read
I Played Dead Twice — and Got a System, a Rescue, and a Hotpot Fortune
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I remember the smell first: damp straw, dust, and the sourness of old anger. Then the sound—my mother's voice breaking in the dark, bargaining with herself and with everyone else.
"Please, Mother," Fiona Bray sobbed. "Don't let them take my girls."
"Take them where?" Corinne Bonner said from where she stood under the rafters, flat as a blade. "To a better life. To a life that suits them."
"Better life?" I spat, though no sound came out. I was Lailah. I had pretended to be dead already once in my life, but that was the old life. Now my nails scraped at the inside of the coffin lid and I listened.
"Let go," Corinne ordered. "We don't have time for theatrics. The carriage waits. The old house expects the ritual at dusk."
"Carriage?" a voice hissed close by. "You'd sell your own blood for silver, Corinne?"
"Don't make me laugh." Corinne's voice was silk over steel. "It's not selling. It's arranging. The dead have a place. The living must provide. The Jia family will give much more than we expect if these girls go."
They took us—three of us—away that day at the edge of the village. They thought they had bound us with ink and hunger, with fear and a little courage borrowed from grief. They were wrong.
"Don't let them take her." Mother lunged and clawed, but two women wrenched her back and pulled my hands. I held onto the coffin edge until my knuckles ached.
"Let go," Corinne told me, cool and certain, and when I looked, her eyes had the small, bright look of someone who counts coins at night. "They will be well fixed. This is an honor."
"You call selling daughters an honor?" someone mocked from the crowd.
They thought it would be a quiet, ashamed caravan leaving in the dusk. They misjudged us. They misread heat for weakness.
"Why is she awake?" said someone. "The coffin is moving!"
"Shush!" the porter cried. "They'll hear."
I waited for the slapping and the curses. I expected nails, ropes, and maybe the kind of laugh my grandmother could make when she thought no one watched. Corinne stepped forward and slapped—twice, maybe cruelly, sure. She wanted to show she could. She wanted to show the village she was still in command.
"Stop!" my mother begged. "She's my daughter. She isn't—"
"She will be honored," Corinne said, and slapped me harder. "Do you know how much the Jia house pays for a living bride who comes with a good story? A living bride with obedience—it's rarer than you think."
I let the slap sting. I let my face burn. I smelled the cheap lilies someone had left, saw the watching faces. They had meant to humiliate me in private. They did not expect what would come next.
The coffin lurch startled the porters enough that they set it down. People clustered. It was then that my two sisters and I—Karin and Maya, my sisters—decided to play the part of dead girls and see who blinked first.
"Ghosts!" someone screamed and bodies scattered. For an instant, the world beyond the wood was noise and confusion and a dozen whispered prayers. Then the lid flew up, and I slid out.
I remember the first thing I said aloud when I could breathe.
"We are not dead."
That line, said plainly, changed everything. People who had come to mock froze. Corinne's smile thinned. Her hand trembled.
"You three," Corinne hissed, "be silent!"
"Mother, they're alive," Karin said—our eldest—voice steady and cold. "We are alive."
Maya leaned toward our grandmother, eyes bright. "We shouldn't be spoken for. Not for money."
"You are children," Corinne shot back. "What do you know of money? Of security?"
"Then stop taking ours," I said.
The carriage men we were meant for—sent by the high house—paused, confused. They had done such deals before. A living bride sold into an old house's superstition was their trade, but living girls who would resist were trouble.
By the time the Jia household's matron—Ekaterina Christian—arrived on her embodiment of status, the village square hummed with rumor. The matron had sent a handler, Camilla Morel, before, and she arrived with an air like midnight velvet.
"These girls are ours by agreement," Camilla said, and her voice was a lawyer's ledger. "They come with the dowry we paid."
"Mother, don't," Fiona begged. "They have been ill—"
"We paid for this," Corinne insisted. "The girls were to be given a good match in death. It's fitting. The Jia family asked; the Jia family paid."
Before things could get uglier, a young man in light clothing crossed the lane—Emilio Wright. He was walking with the careless certainty of someone who did not accept the world at face value.
"Excuse me," he said, and when he paged us in his eyes we paused. "What is going on?"
"You are late, Master Wright," Camilla spat, like a hound who smells a rival. "This is not your business."
"It became my business when I heard a woman was crying in the square," Emilio said, and his tone had both apology and accusation knotted together. "Who are you taking? Who told you to take them?"
"One leaves when tradition asks," Corinne said.
Emilio did something no one expected: he stepped between Corinne and the carriage.
"Stop. These girls are coming with me," he said.
There was a rustle. "You are not the master here," Camilla said.
"I can be," Emilio answered softly. "I will not let them go where they may be harmed. If you proceed, I will write to my father and to the magistrates in the capital. I will make the Jia house's name a headline for every household in the province."
Camilla paled the way someone looks a second before the bottom of a ledger is revealed. Corinne hissed and mouthed a curse, but she had traded dangerous words for richer coins long enough to know when the world weighed heavier. The porters obeyed Emilio and set the coffins down.
"Take them," Emilio said to us, flat and almost impatient. "Out of this hell."
He had the smooth confidence of someone who had always been rescued on paper and not in person, but he acted now. We were lifted into his care. The carriage left in a rush, and when it pulled away everyone stared as if someone had stolen a star.
"Thank you," I heard Fiona whisper as the carriage took us toward better shadows than those of Corinne Bonner.
"Don't thank me," Emilio said. "Thank me when your family owes me nothing."
We came to the house of Emilio Wright's family in the cool hours of night. He left us in warm rooms under watchful servants and left to confront his grandfather's stubborn illness. He permitted us not to think of the market's catcalls or Corinne's plans. Later, in daylight, he would find reasons to test us, to prod at our edges like a curious boy at a clock.
We had survived because we were quick, because Corinne misjudged theater for truth. But the danger didn't end: Corinne was not a woman who accepted a slip. She planned, and I listened.
"I have a plan," I whispered to my sisters when we were safe. "We survive. We sell. We buy freedom."
"How?" Karin asked.
"By being the thing the village won't accept: clever and useful and alive. We will ask Emilio's help, and we will ask the world to show up."
Days later, while walking through an empty orchard with my head full of the small crafts we could do, a voice—small and soft and not one a human made—spoke to me.
"Host," it said.
"Who said that?" I asked aloud, but there was no echo of a person.
"I did," the voice answered, like a bell under water. "Miri. I am a system."
"A system?" I laughed, because only the foolish bragged of fate's help.
"Reward system bound to a lost ancestor," Miri said. "Gifts will come at random. I exist to assist the host. Will you accept?"
I looked at my sisters. "This is surreal."
"Take it," Maya said. "If it helps us keep food in our bellies, take it."
"I accept," I said, because there are moments when you must catch a rope even if you do not trust the hand at the other end.
Miri obliged: in my pocket appeared a small packet of silver needles—tools of medicine. A skill I had once known in another life, but never practiced in this world's measure, fluttered awake. Miri's voice hummed: "You will gain rewards. Use them wisely. I will not tell you the cost."
We learned fast. Those needles fixed an old man's nerve in a neighbor's field. A neighbour paid in a way more valuable than coin: word of a good healer travels fast. Next, Miri rewarded us with a little storage pouch, a chest of invisible thread that could hold things without weight. We learned also that Miri loved to test limits: once, our luck exploded and fish leapt into our baskets and a whole slope of small game fell at our feet—there were, after that, eyebrows raised and whispers in the village for weeks. We stocked the town. We learned how to package and sell.
"You're making money," Karin said as we counted coins under the lamplight. "You're actually doing it."
"We are," I answered. "We are living."
Emilio watched us with a patience that suggested he sometimes preferred the world in its rawness to the world covered in varnish. He came when our reputation smoldered with story—when his grandfather's illness spread to other corners of talk—and he provided a shield we did not have before.
But the shield made enemies. Corinne Bonner had been refused, and refused women do not go quietly. She sent men in black shirts with lists and names and precise instructions. She moved like someone who had sold their soul to accounting. She wrote notes to the household of Ekaterina Christian. Ekaterina—when she finally heard the truth of a near-ghost marriage and a rescue—smiled like someone whose hand was used to pressing the throat of story.
"This will not stand," Ekaterina decided, and she had men to see whether the law preferred riches to rumor.
We sold preserves and sharp candies, steamed buns and warm loaves, needles and cures. We sold the idea of ourselves. It was a strange currency but it kept us alive. Word spread beyond the hill. Emilio's household opened us to a market of people who needed our goods and had the coin to spare. We grew careful.
But the village never sleeps. Corinne spread rumor: that we had bewitched the Jia house and stole its fortune; that we dragged down the name of the dead; that we were demons clothed as daughters. Ekaterina sent people to watch us. They saw the smiles and the coins and they envied and they sampled and they schemed.
"Stop," I told Karin one night. "They will try something public to shame us. They always do when they cannot buy us."
Karin tensed. "You want the village against them?"
"No," I said. "I want them to break themselves."
There are ways to make wickedness collapse. One is to show it to those who hold status higher than the villain. Corinne had counted her cousins wrong. Ekaterina had not looked up to see the magistrate listening. Emilio had a father in the capital who preferred his own name to be unscathed. We used that. We used Miri's little threads and Emilio's pen.
It was on a market morning—our mooncake stall crowded, our hot iron pans smoking—when it began.
"Lady Ekaterina," I said, when she came with her servants and the air of someone tasting sugar and deciding whether to keep the jar. "You look well today."
She smiled. "You profit from your wiles, girl. Selling your wares in the city. It is amusing to see."
"Amusing," I echoed, and let my voice be ordinary. "Do you still prefer living brides for the dead, Lady Ekaterina?"
Her smile froze a degree. "What is that supposed to mean?"
"A ritual. An ancient arrangement. I hear your household once accepted such..."
She gave a little laugh. "What would you know of such things?"
"Everything you bought," I said. "Tell us how much."
It was, to anyone watching a simple exchange. But I had gaslighted no one into believing anything; I had facts. Letters. Receipts. The Jia house had paid not for the purchase of three docile girls, but for silence—as if one could buy silence as one would buy a cow. My fingers tapped the pouch at my waist and I pictured Miri's soft hum.
"Hold," said a voice from behind. It was Emilio.
"This is not a market for slander," he called. "But facts are facts. I have records now. I will hand them to the magistrate and to the capital. Lady Ekaterina—do you deny you agreed a settlement? Corinne Bonner—do you deny accepting money?"
For a moment they both steadied their faces; both thought the crowd would turn. But the people had come for my mooncakes—they were patient and hungry. They also liked a good story like a hot bun. The magistrate's clerk—Simon Ward, who oversaw the village ledger—happened by and stayed. The matron of the house who once scheduled us for a dead marriage—Ekaterina—had been seen in a dozen letters that said more than "settle discretely." The crowd turned.
"You how dare—" Corinne began, fists bunched.
"You have receipts," Simon said in a voice that sounded like gavel wood. "You promised money. You have witnesses. You counted on the girls' silence. But the girls are not silent. The Jia household thinks its reputation beyond tint. If it is not, then let it sign a paper and return what was taken."
That started it. The market clenched and released like lungs. Some people cheered quietly. Others bit their lips. The Jia household's matron turned a color I had scarcely seen on anyone before: a storm cloud. She had ruled the hill by carefully portioning virtue and guilt; what would a woman do when that ledger came to be balanced in public?
"These coins were an exchange!" Ekaterina hissed. "They were for the family's grief."
"Grief is not sealed with coin," said Emilio. "It is not dignity purchased with two-faced gold."
Corinne moved forward in a way that made me think of small predators. "You all think you can humiliate me here?"
"Humiliate you?" someone shouted. "You tried to sell children!"
The phrase hung and landed.
We produced what we had: the contracts, the notes, the man who had driven the carriage the night we were taken—who now, with a mouth like a sieve for lies, swore we had been drugged. The porters, the messengers, the Jia household's own ledger entries were held up like proofs. The crowd was raw. People loved to be right.
Ekaterina's face went rigid. She stepped back as if pulled on a rope. People began to circle. Corinne shouted and then tried to cry; later the tape would show how her voice slid from fury to supplication. That public change is the worst for a liar—it's the point where your lies become mirrors reflecting the crowd's disdain.
"Return it," I said. "Return what you took. Return the dignity."
"What if we refuse?" Corinne screamed.
"If you refuse," said Simon Ward, tall and slow, "then we will make sure the magistrate knows. The capital will know. The Jia household's reputation will be walked over in the town square. If you have coins, you will not keep them. If you have pride, you will find it battered."
Ekaterina stepped forward and—no longer confident—signaled Camilla to fetch the bookkeeping chest. It took two hands to pull open the dusty ledger. There it was: her signature. The townspeople gasped as if they had been watching a magician reveal a simple trick.
"You cannot deny this," Emilio said softly. "Either return what was meant to be returned, or let the magistrate sort it."
They chose to return. Ekaterina's great house had more to lose than a handful of silver. Corinne had less but had believed in secrecy. She was the one who began to crumble. She tried to step forward and weave a new story—"We were helping you"—but the market had already smelled the lie.
They were ordered to return a sum in front of the whole square. Corinne begged, her voice cracking from a practiced mask into a raw animal sound. Ekaterina kept her face cold and handed over the money with two fingers wrapped in silk, like it was an afterthought.
"Shame them," some villager mumbled, and a chorus murmured agreement.
Corinne's hands shook as she counted and handed coins to the magistrate's representative. People watched, whispering. Children ran in small circles around the stall, their laughter cutting like scissors. Someone in the crowd—one of the servants we had once feared—lifted a coarse cloth and snapped a picture on a small new gadget the city youths had brought in. The scene would be told for seasons: the wealthy house paying in public to avoid a worse rumor, the mean woman who had thought herself above judgment reduced to passing over heavy coins.
Corinne choked and then tried to deny. "I—" she began.
"You did it for money!" the butcher yelled. "You sold blood for coin!"
"Not true!" Corinne cried, then collapsed into a ragged heap of sound. Her mask was gone; her eyes, when the crowd leaned in, looked drained and small. People pressed forward, mouths parted like a tide.
Then everyone heard it: the sound of a chair hitting the ground, and Corinne's grandson—someone I had never noticed—pulling her away. "Stop!" he cried. "Do you have any shame?"
No one could say what they wanted more than the sight of her changing. She went from calculated to frantic to broken, doing the arc every bully must make when their string ends. She clung to the pillar by the market well and begged.
"Kneel," someone ordered, and she did, half-bent, face to the air.
Spectators began to cry out. Some mocked, some applauded. Small children pointed. A woman in a woven hat spat and said, "Let her watch her grandchildren and learn what we've learned."
Ekaterina remained composed but her servants' faces told stories no one would believe later as accidental. Camilla's hands trembled as she took a bag of money and relinquished it. The magistrate demanded that both Ekaterina and Corinne be seen to stand in the town record as returning the sum and publicly apologizing for the scheme. They were told to kneel in the town square at noon the next day while Simon read the oath: never to attempt arranging such a transaction again and to publicly pay for the three girls' living expenses for a full year.
That day was punishment enough for Corinne: she became a cautionary story. She had once planned to make her name into a brand of fear; instead she was reduced to a table of coins and a crowd that chewed on her pity for sport. Ekaterina's punishment would be more subtle—the loss of face in the capital, invitations retracted, a ledger of shame kept by the women of other houses. She tried to protest to her friends in the city but found her dinner invitations returned and a silence where the gossip had once been warm. The Jia house would never fully recover all social standing.
We watched them fall into these layers of consequence. It was not violent—no one dragged them into the mud—but the city’s quiet mechanisms are a worse punishment for the kind of person who hides behind silk: public unmasking and the ripple of loss. Corinne's grandson watched her and then turned away, ashamed perhaps at the woman he had once admired. People around us murmured and some threw pebbles near her resting place. A woman in the crowd whipped her head to me, and I met her eyes.
"Your mooncakes taste like the truth," she said, and laughed.
I did not laugh back. I had not been playing victim for money; I had been buying air. After the market cleared, hush spread like a cloth. The money returned; the promises were recorded in the ledger. Corinne's voice did not change for a month. The Jia household's name was bruised but not broken. That public day had been long and full. It met the standards of justice for our people: witnesses, confessions, restitution.
And yet I knew this would not be the end. The clever and greedy change shape. They learn. They make new plans. They hire new men.
When night came, Emilio tapped the files again and said, "We put the matter in writing. But they will file their accounts, their notes. Pry open a ledger and there is always a loose string. Keep watch."
We learned how to make watch. We taught ourselves to tie knots of business and of kindness. We began again. We made mooncakes and packaged them in boxes with ribbon. We brewed a hotpot broth batch that tasted like fire and comfort and the day we had survived.
At night, when the moon was fat and sweet and the market had folded, I would sit by the wooden table and think of what had happened. "We did it," Karin would say softly.
"We did," I would answer. "But not for revenge. For life."
If any of them expected us to return to the raggedness of before—Corinne to gloat again, Ekaterina to smirk—they were wrong. We had learned the measure of the world: coins buy silence briefly; courage buys daylight forever.
That night, the system whispered into my ear and rewarded me another odd thing: a recipe for a hotpot broth. I smiled because the little miracles kept coming. A thousand things remained possible now, but one rule anchored me: we would not be sold again. We would not let our daughters be arranged for dead men. We would live loudly, laugh loudly, and always remember the slaps we took, because those slaps were the final nudges toward the life we made.
"Tomorrow we sell the broth," I told my sisters and mother. "We serve it to the village and to the city. We make it so good their feet ache to come."
"We will," Maya agreed.
"We will," Karin echoed.
"Then sleep," I said. "For tomorrow we cook and sell and—if the world wants to test us with more poison or more coin—we will meet it at the market."
We slept like people who had learned how to count coins and also how to count themselves. We slept and dreamed a little of firepots and of a system that would reward not just tricks but steady courage. We slept and when morning came, the hotpot's aroma rolled out over our little house and into the lane, and the morning cat and the scraggly dog followed it like pilgrims.
There was more ahead—letters from the magistrate, a slow stitch of restitution, and even a tender, clumsy moment with Emilio when he asked one evening whether I ever regretted being alive.
"No," I told him. "I do not regret that I lived. I regret I ever believed life could be bought."
He was quiet and then he smiled, sharp and warm, and in that smile I saw things that could be built without selling any more of us.
We kept selling our food and our cures and our mooncakes. Miri gave me small gifts and big tests. One day our luck would overflow so terribly that fish would leap into our baskets and wild game would fall at our feet as if the world owed us a feast. Another day Miri would give a recipe so perfect people wept at the first spoon of broth.
But the public punishment we had meted out—when the village stood and watched Corinne and Ekaterina hand back the money—was the turning point. That day wasn't blood and stoning; it was ledger and eye. It was public, and it showed what the village could do when it closed ranks around the truth.
When the seasons turned and the hotpot broth recipe matured, we opened a small stall with the iron pot one of the system's gifts had helped us buy. People came. They called us clever. They called us brave. Corinne Bonner lived on as a stern tale told to daughters by candlelight; Ekaterina Christian's dinners had invitations scratched out in a tidy hand that never again came our way.
Sometimes I would stand at the stall and watch the steam and think of the coffin lid that had loosened. Once, I touched the inside of my own wrist: the system's storage pouch sat there like a pulse. I had more than coin now. I had a name and an account. I had sisters and a mother who were learning to be owners of their days.
At the market, as I ladled hot broth into a bowl and handed it to an old man who had been a stranger to our house years before, I heard little voices—children—say, "There she is. The girl who was dead and rose."
I smiled, and I told the child, "Yes. We rose."
We rose not because someone wrote us a cheque. We rose because we refused to be quiet. We rose because a young man stepped in and took a stand and because a small system taught one stunned girl to accept help.
And because there is always an answer, we made the broth so tender that it kept people warm through the winter. That is the kind of justice that does not need theatrics. It needs hands and heat and long days.
We did not stop watching the houses of the rich. We watched, and when they stumbled, we were not cruel. We simply did what the market did best: trade. Trade was honest. It required weight and measurement, and it could not be faked by a pad of paper.
In the end, Corinne's final humiliation at the market—the day she knelt and handed back the coins—was not the end of her story. She continued to live like the rest of us, but with fewer people at her table. Ekaterina paid a different tax: exclusion. She sat now at certain dinners once she had the coin, but the conversations turned away from her in a way she could not buy.
We? We kept our iron pots hot, our mooncakes sweet, and our silver needles clean. We kept our eyes bright and our hands ready. And for the rest of my days, when the wind smelled like autumn and the market filled with the hum of people bartering, I would think back to that night in the square and know—no one would ever hush us again.
The End
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