Face-Slapping13 min read
"I Woke Up in My Wedding Dress — Then I Broke Their World"
ButterPicks318 views
"I dare you to touch me."
Rain hit my face like fists. I spat mud and sat up, feeling the weight of a body gone wrong and the sharp taste of someone else's anger in my mouth.
"You'll die if you keep talking," one man hissed.
I blinked and the world snapped into focus. Two thugs. A wedding dress soaked red with rain. My heart hammered, not with fear but with a clear, cold plan.
"You found the wrong corpse to bother," I said, and moved.
The first man's head cracked under my hand. The second lunged; I pivoted, my fingers closing like a steel trap. Bone broke. Their eyes went white, then dead.
I stood in the storm and felt something foreign and old wind through me: a thread of power I had not known I owned and a memory I had not lived. A plane falling at eight thousand meters. My own hands, an operating room I never entered. A different life that smelled of oil and asphalt. Then family portraits, a house that was not mine, a wedding wreath that had turned to rope.
"This is a body," I told the rain. "But I'm not done."
Someone on the path coughed and collapsed onto their knees before me. He looked like a statue of a man, except sick. A handsome face twisted in pain. He grabbed the hem of my dress like a drowning man.
"Robbery?" I muttered, then bent down. The man's hand gripped tighter. He was poisoned or bound by some dark craft. I tasted the memory of a boy who'd died protecting me years ago. My fingers went numb with a memory that wasn't mine, and another motion rose up in me, a tool made of hair and breath: my hand made a needle, my hair a blade.
"Let go," I whispered. He didn't. I braced, pressed my hair-needles—Silk-Needles—into pressure points. Quiet power moved like water in a channel and the man's fingers loosened.
He bled onto my dress and then went slack. I pulled free and left without looking back. The rain washed my face clean.
"It won't matter," I said to myself. "They think I'm dead. They think it's over. They are wrong."
I remembered more then. The name of the family whose face I wore: House Ice. I remembered being a nobody there—called a waste for not having a spirit root, for being unable to train. I remembered a prince who had been my secret sun, a cousin with a soft voice and sharp teeth who smiled while she set traps, and the day before my wedding when everyone had cornered me into a ditch and left me for dead.
"Good," I said. "Let them think they won."
The city gate to the Third Prince's mansion loomed ahead. Guards, umbrellas, a white-robed woman with tears for show. The cousin clung to the prince like glue. I walked forward, rain dripping from my sleeves, fire in my chest.
"Brother Kayden," the cousin purred when she saw me. "She survived."
The prince looked at me and his face turned to paper.
"You," he said. "You're—"
"—the one you tried to kill?" I finished for him and smiled. "You can finish the sentence."
People stared. They remembered me as the painted, ugly bride. The cousin's smile broke into something sharp.
"How dare you appear?" she and the prince said, matching voices.
"How dare you pretend to mourn when you plotted my death?" I asked, stepping forward until my dress brushed the prince's sleeve. He took two steps back like a man bitten.
"You're a disgrace. You are not married to me." Kayden spat the words as if he could make them iron.
"Prove it," I said. "Show me the proof you claim."
"She—" Kayden started, then stopped. Everyone waited. The cousin blinked carefully, then laughed, trying to sell the lie with show.
"I don't need proof," I said. I pulled back my sleeve. On my arm, clear as carved paint, was the sign everyone treated as proof of a woman's chastity: the red mark that read a woman's virtue. "You lied."
Gasps went up. The cousin's mouth opened, shut. Kayden, who had meant to humiliate me into being the shamed one, found himself huffing anger like a smoker. He stepped forward but a light came from my chest and my hair was suddenly a dozen needles poised, raining the truth.
"I will refuse the match," I said. "And I will write the words myself."
I tore my wedding dress apart and, with a flare of will, used my hair and rain to write on cloth with ink I made from the mud. The crowd fell silent as my words hung between them.
"Kayden Ford, you have three crimes: you sleep with my cousin while engaged to me, you planned to disgrace me, and you failed as a man. I sever this contract. I renounce you."
The crowd swayed like wheat. A woman screamed. Kayden's face went hot and purple, then pale.
"You dare?" he shouted, burning with royal hate. He surged with spirit, bright and sharp.
Spirit—real spirit—flared from his body. I did not feel my old strength waiting there, but something else moved: a tiny ember worth of what I used to have, and something new and heavy in my blood. The first blow he threw sent me skidding, but I stood, found a piece of wood, and hit back.
The wood struck his mouth. Blood spattered. The crowd did not know what to believe. The prince—he who was groomed to command armies—had been struck by the "waste." He snarled and attacked like a beast.
My body screamed under the pressure. I felt joints splitting and bones wanting to fold. The world narrowed to air and fiber and the taste of iron. Then, like a switch, something in me brightened. Warm light filled my limbs, and a hard, thin seed in my chest unfurled.
"It's a spirit," someone breathed. "She has a spirit root."
Spirit rose and wrapped around me like a cloak. I felt it bloom. Levels passed in a blink—Spirit Adept, Spirit Master—and then I was steady. The battle shifted. I hit like a storm. Kayden's face drained of color as he tasted defeat. The prince's burst of power waned; the drugling that the cousin had sprinkled had a timer and it ran out.
"I will not bow," I said plainly. "To any of you."
They brought me out of the gate in a cage with iron bars. I walked them down the street with my head high and my dress half-torn, the divorce banner fluttering. The prince and his snake of a cousin were shoved inside beside me. I walked, counting the coins in my head and the names I'd ruin.
"Shout it!" I told the crowd. "Read the paper for five thousand gold coins."
A burly man read my words aloud while others whispered and passed my story like a flame. Word spread through the city like oil. Newsmakers ran, nobles gossiped. The prince was a joke. The cousin, pale and losing favor, had her lungs full of panic.
Kayden tried bargaining, threats and bribes. I listened, bored. "Make me your concubine," he begged when he was desperate, his pride and his manhood both empty. "I'll be generous."
"You're a disgrace," I said. "You wanted to make my life small. Do you think I want you?"
He was left to their scorn.
House Ice's inner hall was a mess of old grudges. My "uncle"—Ephraim Mueller, the man who had always watched over me—stepped forward with the weight of years behind him. Another uncle, Victor Kraemer, who had plotted in the dark, shook with hate in his hands. They demanded I explain. I explained with a smile.
Victor decided to play dirty. He called out my name, then hurled a blade that should have finished me. He thought he could end the scandal once and for all. I barely had time to brace, but something else happened. A wave of power slammed into the blade and left it bent and burning.
"Stop!" a voice said, deep and cold.
A figure in black stood in the doorway like shadow standing up. His clothes were ink-dark and his eyes looked like polished stones. He moved with slow certainty, and the air around him rearranged itself.
"Who are you?" Victor yelled.
"I am Van Ferguson," the man said, without anger but without kindness, "and you will not touch her."
No one moved. Not because his voice told them not to, but because the air itself had weight and the room trembled like a trapped animal. The man stepped forward, lifted a hand, and then walked straight toward me. He carried no weapon; his presence was the weapon.
I watched him as if noticing him for the first time. He was the man I had saved in the forest. He had stayed a phantom at the edge of my life and now he stood there, calm as if time obeyed him. He bent and touched the inside of my wrist for an instant. A drop of his blood hit my skin and vanished.
"I owe you," he said once, low and raw. "Say my name if you need me."
"I didn't ask for favors," I said.
"You will," Van replied. His eyes measured me. "And I will answer."
Then he left. No one could say how he left. One second he was there, the next a smell like old smoke and leather and something unplaceable. The great man had become a ghost once more.
We had enemies left and right, and my home was a court of knives. They stabbed at me with words, with poison, with games. I answered with more precise moves. I fought the cousin in public and broke her arm. I broke Victor's son's spine so he could not walk to fight me. I left enough of them breathing to scream, but not enough to recover.
Piece by piece, the family realized I had changed. The uncle who had protected me my whole life, Ephraim Mueller, I learned was stifled by a slow-acting poison. Someone had grounded his spirit; years of barely advancing in his cultivation were not because of age but because of medicine in his tea. I tasted the trace and the truth in my hands and my fingers itched.
"Who would poison him?" I asked one night, voice low.
Victor laughed in the dark. "Who would want him stopped? Some people like their throne without challengers."
"Then no one will challenge my uncle anymore," I said. "Not while I breathe."
I worked with what I had: a strange gift of modern insight and a body that surprised me with its hunger for power. I had a pocket place—Van's drop of blood had lit a key—and in my palm a piece of old paper had been waiting for me: a plain sheet that turned into a door when I pressed it. Beyond that was impossible: a small world, rich with everything a cultivator could want. It called itself the Tianning Domain. And its spirit—at first a whining child called Qian Tian—grumbled like a king trapped in a boy.
"You're the cauldron," the boy said, folded on a tiny throne. "You wake me and I answer. The rules are the rules."
"Fine," I said. "I will learn."
The Tianning Domain was dangerous and wonderful. It had a tower of trials, a garden of herbs, a forge, and rooms full of books on techniques beyond my world. It offered progress and it needed exchange: points for work. I sat down, breathed, and the domain fed me a rush of spirit that made my limbs hum.
The first night inside the domain I rose a little. The second, I made pills. They failed at first—my mind was weak and the cauldron judged me with a child's snarl. I tried again, over and over, and every time the cauldron's boy ranted, "Stupid!" and my hands learned.
On the third sunrise the cauldron shone. My first pills came out perfect. They smelled the way success does: bright, clean, honest. The Tianning Domain liked me. I liked it. We were a team.
Back outside, I moved in fits and starts. I took the prince and cousin in a cage to the square and put a notice on the door: THEY HAD BETRAYED ME. Ransom required. The city laughed, then lined up.
"Two million gold," I told the prince's steward. "Or they spend the next year in iron and mud."
He paid. The city loved theater. I sold my first batch of pills in the market under my false male name—Eli Ice—to test the price. They fetched more than anyone expected. Word spread. A boy from the slave market, Travis Bertrand, who had not actually been drugged, watched me buy him and then stayed. He had a narrow look about him, eyes that had learned to read someone else’s heart.
"Why do you help me?" he asked the night after.
"Because I can," I said. "And because I need someone who sees things."
He bowed and followed. So did Joelle, a loyal guard the family had trained in secret, who turned out to be stronger and more cold-blooded than anyone had thought. They grew into my seed guard, quick and hungry and loyal. We built a household of three strange souls: me, a man who had been a phantom now pledged to my debt, and those two.
The auction in the city was the big test. I walked in, male mask on, bottles in my hand: Pills with ten marks—ten marks meant something only a person who had a real heart for proceess could achieve. It meant these pills would restore spirit and heal a person near death. The auction master—master Liu—looked at them and paled.
"Ten marks," he said, as if the room had been muffled and someone had thrown a stone.
The crowd leaned in. The rich and powerful scent out supplies. "Who made these?" they asked.
"Eli Ice," I said, small bow. My voice was steady, flat.
"You are mad to show such things," someone whispered.
I smiled. "I need buyers. I need people to know the name."
The pills sold for three times the expected price. A prince offered to buy a dozen. A lord wanted to hire me. The word 'genius' was used in hushed, reverent tones.
Kayden watched from a corner. He had tried to climb back, tried to ask for mercy, for return, but he had nothing now but memory. He saw my face—my original face had returned for the auction; the male mask slid—and something below pride broke inside him. He looked small.
"You have become a brand," someone said later. "What's next? Will you go after the throne?"
"After my name," I answered. "After justice."
My uncle, now clean of poison thanks to my drugs and the care of the Tianning Domain, rose to power with a fierce glow. Victor and his kin tried to move against us with a pack of men, but I was ready. I had forged a web of alliances. I had trained in the secret rooms of the Tianning Domain. I had Van's little ghostly mark burned into my skin—a way to call him.
One night Victor sent assassins into my home. They found only a dark house and a quieter ghost. I took the field with members of my household and the winter wind at my back. We met them on the path where they thought us broken.
"You ruined me," Victor shouted when he saw me. "You small thing!"
"You're the one who poisoned a man you called brother," I said. "You burned the family for your greed."
He lunged and I moved like a living blade. He fell to his knees and I carved his arm to the bone. I took his tongue and left him to die without words. Some cried at my cruelty. Others cheered. The city learned from it: do not stab a wolf in a family's back and not expect the family to bite back.
Kayden—pride and need—came back later begging. He tried to use old promises. I laughed and told him, "You told me once I was unworthy. Now you are worthless."
He begged, then tried to hurt people I loved. The court grew angry and fed him to rumor. He sank until he was a husk and then a ghost. He came to my door one last time and offered to marry me properly if I forgave him. I gave him two offers: leave, or go to the city square and tell everyone the truth about what he did. He chose the second. He burned his own honor to get a scrap of momentary pride. After he spoke, the crowd spat.
"Regret," I told him gently. "It's yours now."
With his confession and Victor's ruin, I took a step further. I could have stayed at the edge of power, selling pills and gathering coins. But the Tianning Domain had shown me a different scale. It held a book of techniques no one had seen, and in its tower a trial I must try if I ever wanted to become more than a name. The tower's levels were full of demons and puzzles. I climbed them like a thief.
Van's voice came to me one night as I sat under the domain's low moon. "You seek to be more," he said, as if he had read me.
"I want them to regret," I said. "I want them to feel what I felt for years."
He smiled in a way that did not comfort. "Then don't be petty. Be complete."
So I grew. I forged pills, then weapons, then techniques. I healed my uncle. I built an orphanage with some of the money. I lent to a widow and watched the town heal. I kept my eyes fixed on a narrower prize: I wanted to be untouchable. Not by blood and not by title, but by force and by being the only one who could give what people needed.
People who had mocked me came to my door. The cousin Isabela—Isabela Bates—knelt and begged. I looked at her and saw nothing. I spared her life only so that she would live under the knowledge that I might one day take it.
"Mercy," she whispered. "Please."
"Then leave," I said. "Go far. Speak no word of what you did."
She left with a throat full of dust and a life full of regret.
Van came back to me in quiet hours. He never asked for love. He offered a promise: a hand at my back when the world turned. We spoke little. He had his own empire of shadows and blood, and I had mine of pills and law. In the end we were allies who had dug our names into the city's stone.
Years later I stood on the auction stage and watched my pills sell for prices that could buy a small country. I had been called a waste. I had been laughed at. Then I had been scorned and humiliated. Now I held the city's finest in my palm and I felt nothing but a clean, bright pleasure.
"Aren't you tired of vengeance?" Joelle asked once, night before an auction. "You destroyed them. What else is left?"
I looked at her, at the friend who had once been a hidden blade, and answered with a small smile.
"Rebuild," I said. "Justice is a seed. It does not end when the root is pulled."
We rebuilt House Ice into a power that sheltered the weak. I gave people chance to repay kindness with labor, and those who paid with cruelty saw their names fall into ash. Kayden died in exile, old and empty. Victor's family sold their estates and tried to slink away. Isabela worked as a servant far from the capital.
Van visited in flashes. Once in the garden he placed a small, black ring by my bed and said, "If you ever want me to remember you as anything other than debt, speak."
I laughed. "I do not buy friends. I earn them."
He tilted his head. "Earn me, then."
I did not intend to humiliate him by romance or weight. He was my shadow and sometimes my shield. He once saved me and I saved him in return in ways I did not expect. The city said we were strange partners, but most folk liked a clear story: a woman who had died on a plane and who came back to scorch a prince and set herself on a throne. It sold well.
One last thing I did to close a circle: I went back to the place the prince had chosen to disgrace me. The ditch where they had left me. I planted ten trees there. Each tree bore a sign—one word each—"Truth, Strength, Mercy, Rebuild..."
"Why plant these?" a child asked me as she watched.
"Because," I answered, "roots take time to hold anything solid. They hold a land together. So I plant roots where they had tried to burn me."
The child touched my hand and smiled like a sun.
"Then grow," she said quietly.
I did.
Years later I would walk through a city where people smiled if they had reason and protected if they had fear. The prince had died with his rage still smoldering but without the power to hurt anyone. Victor's daughter—no, not my cousin, but someone who had learned to live better—ran a school that taught children to read pills and math.
The Tianning Domain still waited in my pocket like a secret cave. Van's shadow still moved like a weather change. I kept both because they were honest: one offered possibility and the other offered protection.
When people asked me what I had learned, I would smile and put it plain.
"Power can be used to crush," I said once to a woman who wanted me to punish a rival, "or it can be used to make the world safer for children. I chose both."
The woman frowned. "That's not a clean line."
"It's not clean," I said. "Nothing worth doing is clean."
I turned and looked at the road where the prince had been dragged like a clown, at the signs of the trees, and at the small boy who had once been my bought slave but who now ran a clinic in House Ice's yard. I felt the old life like a scar: a notice that told me not to be soft. I felt the new life like a warm hand. Both made me who I was.
"Do you still think of how you died?" Travis asked sometimes, for he had helped me keep the records.
"Every day," I said. "Not as a mourn, but as a memory of what I used to be. It helps me be what I am."
"Are you happy, then?"
I laughed. "Happiness is not the thing I chase. Truth is. If truth makes me smile, then I call it happiness."
I went to bed those nights and heard Van's voice in my mind like a rope around an anchor. Sometimes he was there, sometimes he wasn't. Sometimes I whispered his name and the world blinked and he appeared at my door. That was the arrangement.
Years later someone would write a song about the woman who came back from the sky and became a legend. Children would sing it. Men would curse it if it left them poorer. I never read the song.
My life had been violent and it had been kind. It had been a long list of debts paid. It had been a short list of mercies granted. I had been broken. I had broken them back.
At the top of the city's tallest watchtower, I once looked down at the glint of a river and thought of sky.
"Van," I said into the wind once.
A shadow walked out of the fog like it had always walked.
"Do you still answer?" I asked.
"I always answer," he said, soft as a closing door. "But only when it's worth scarce trouble."
I smiled—a small, sharp curve that had learned to mean many things. "Good," I said. "Because I'll always need you to keep the dark honest."
"Then keep being light," he said.
"Fine," I said.
And I went back down the steps.
The End
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