Sweet Romance11 min read
My Accidental Life in a Book, a System, and One Spicy Hotpot
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I wake up with the taste of ink and cold tea in my mouth and a pink canopy overhead that does not belong to any bedroom I have ever slept in.
"Miss, miss, wake up," says Kimiko, my maid, tugging at the curtain. "Madam sent twice. Today Master is home. Hurry for the morning meal."
"Who—" I press my palm to my forehead. My head is a drum. The canopy is girlishly pink. The voice inside my skull from last night—a mechanical bell—rings again and I remember a list of tasks and a number: 1383.
"I finished a book last night," I mutter, and the room smells like someone else’s tea.
"Ingrid says you mustn't sleep late reading those papers," Kimiko whispers. "You always do this. Your brother will be waiting."
I blink. I am in a book. Or a copy of a girl's shared daydream. My life used to be a thousand tiny spreadsheets and a battered phone and a landlord who never fixed the pipes. Now a father in lacquered robes sits in the main hall and a son with a feathered fan smiles like the hero on a stage.
"Father, Mother, Brother," I say, bowing stiffly. "I am sorry I kept you."
"Come, child," Keith Bradshaw says with a voice like a bell that also holds orders. "Your brother has just come back. Sit."
Ryder Jung is everything the novel promised: easy smile, untroubled appetite, and the kind of confidence that makes you forgive him even when he says ridiculous things.
"You have been reading talks, little sister," Ryder teases, fanning himself. "You should have come to see me sooner."
"I was getting ready," I say. My name here is Lucia Zheng. My hands want to check my phone and find only silk.
"Eat, we will talk after," Mother—Ingrid Castle—says, smiling like a sun that hides the hard edges of duty.
After breakfast, Ryder tugs me towards his study like a proud tour guide.
"The festival, the Huihui Festival—what is it exactly?" I ask.
Ryder explains and I learn a new vocabulary that the system had not bothered to translate into sensible terms: "Four titles—Yi, Liang, Cai, Chu: Adaptability, Virtue, Talent, Kitchen. Win four and the system relaxes you. Lose… you suffer penalties."
"Is this your system?" I ask the empty air, and a tinny voice replies.
"Task issued. Obtain four 'Virtuous' badges at the Huihui Festival," it says. "Failure will trigger penalties."
"You, come out and explain," I shout. "Whoever you are with your numbered moderation!"
The only reply is silence and the soft rustle of silk.
"You're certain you can win the talent contest? The kitchen contest?" Ryder asks. He originated as the book’s proud brother, the sort who charmed his way into people's stomachs.
"I can try," I say. "Talent might be mendable. Kitchen—" I laugh despite myself. I had once burned tea.
Kimiko watches while I flip pages of old competition records in the study: the test questions are a bizarre mixture of domestic melodrama and survival drills. The virtue test features fake kidnappers and tears. The talent test favors music. The kitchen test requires cooks to score for local palates and to adapt. The adaptability test is about manners and quick thinking in staged crises.
"Which one do you want to try?" Ryder asks.
"All," I say, and the system bells echo like a guillotine.
The days bleed into a blur of practice. I learn that the book's original heroine who shared this name was a pale, almost breathless presence who loved flowers and faded away between scenes. I am not her. I am not a reed in someone else’s wind. I memorize the tests—devise answers, run through contingency scripts, collect the list of the judges and their prejudices. I discover a piano-like zither tucked away by the window.
"Do you play?" Kimiko asks.
"I—" My hands touch the strings. A fragment of music brushes me and I realize the original girl here had skill I never knew I had. My fingers find a tune and then a louder one. I laugh and let the old pieces go.
"This will do," I tell myself, and I commit to learning the kitchen test in a way no orderly essay could: I invent a soup to break an entire town's rules.
"Spicy from faraway will be my weapon," I decide. "It will be my own."
The first attempt is a disaster. Kimiko watches as I add too much of everything, as black charred herbs float like shame. Father eats two polite bites and pretends the world hasn't crumbled. "Next time," he says. "Your heart was with it, child."
The second attempt, with Ryder's clumsy but eager help and Blakely Garner's quiet kitchen wisdom borrowed from the cook, becomes something red and warm and alive. We call it "mala soup"—not a dish in any of my modern cookbooks, but a brave mix. People eat, cough, laugh, and then they eat more. Ryder looks at me with a grin that says this is the kind of success you can taste.
"You have named it wrong," I tell him. "It is my failed attempt turned perfect."
"Try admitting you are brilliant," he says, but he smiles like he believes me.
The festival arrives and with it a new level of danger. The square is a hive of booths, of children running with paper lanterns, of judges wearing linen and scowls. I wear blue and a bracelet Ingrid will not stop fussing over. Ryder acts as my champion and as a very public source for gossip.
"Lucia," Kora Sutton says softly across the green, "you are astounding. I will be sitting near your side during the talent rounds."
"Thank you," I say, and the voice from the system flickers briefly in my mind: "Task two: meet lead and increase affection."
"Meet him where?" I whisper into the silk of my cuff.
"At the exam's bulletin," the system replies. "Find Aiden Roux."
When the boards post names, the crowd roars. Someone shouts, "Ryder is first!" and then another voice: "Second is Aiden Roux!"
Aiden Roux walks past like chapter-breaking weather: tall, spare, quiet, and not at all flattered into attention. His eyes are not loud; they are a steady current. Beside him is a slight man with a practical face, Brennan Clement. Aiden's sister, Evangeline Moreau, moves around him like a small wind—bright, practical, and with a laugh that scrubs the air clean.
"Do not frown like that," Kimiko urges when she sees me look. "If he is the main male, you will be starstruck and then the system will penalize you for lack of tact."
"Good advice," I say, and then I blurt like a foolish person. "Aiden Roux—" I say the name because I have to. "You is—"
He regards me with a very polite surprise. "Yes?"
"You're nicer than your description says."
That is not how to flirt. He smiles the tiniest smile, a frost that does not break. "Thank you, Lucia," he says, neutral as a ledger.
"Noted," my system whispers. "Task failure. Prepare punishment."
My chest hollows. "You can't do this to me," I tell the air. "I met him. I stood near him. He even smiled."
"Not enough," the system says. "You must interact, directly. Face 100%."
"Then I will," I say, because fury fuels me as well as fear.
I win three badges on the festival day: Adaptability for a staged debt dispute I untangled with a fake contract and a borrowed voice; Talent for a zither performance with dramatic whispers and staged sound effects that people said felt like theater; Virtue—two of the four—because I coaxed a husband into listening more to his mother's grief in front of a packed tent.
But the kitchen medal splits the crowd. Half the judges cannot stand spice. Half declare it genius. I end with a bronze and a heartbeat away from first.
The system blares that night: "Task incomplete. Three days of penalties: halves on music and knowledge."
I am furious. "You are a broken program," I tell 1383.
"Recalibrating," it chirps. "One chance granted."
I sleep like someone who was promised a lottery. The next week we travel with the Ryders to Aiden's county. I pretend my visits are casual; the system calls them deliberate.
At a roadside inn, a set of men pounce—a small gang with an impressive capacity for cruelty. An ugly man with a scar, Orlando Callahan, leads them. He snarls a line at me: "You are Zhang Hua—your family owes, and now the girl is forfeit."
I look at him, and in that second my throat closes. "What?" I say, because the novel's lines of violence are real now.
"She is ours until the debt is paid," Orlando says, and his voice is syruped with an easy confidence.
"Hands off," Aiden says. He has no need to be loud. He simply stands so that the air around him changes.
"Who are you to meddle?" Orlando laughs.
There is no magistrate in the square. But there is a festival. Men clutch wooden clamps that could be weapons, women clutch babies, and a ring of vendors forms around us like an audience.
I do something rash. I write a contract on the inn's ledger, with Brennan and the innkeeper as witnesses. I demand they sign that the debt was coerced, that the men were negotiating without the debtor present, and that the debtor—if any—must be produced. Orlando clutching a coin purse laughs until the innkeeper, one of the festival's "temp scribes," refuses to be bullied.
Aiden steps forward, the rope of command slow and inexorable. "Orlando Callahan," he says, his voice a quiet blade. "You stand accused of kidnapping and trafficking. In front of these citizens and under my witness, you will answer for your conduct."
Orlando's smile freezes like something pushed into ice. He had expected the usual: a frightened girl, a quiet exchange, a purse, a back alley. He did not plan on witnesses or on a man who could hold a room with two words.
"That's not true," Orlando snarls, his chest pounding with the rhythm of arrogance. "You lie. She belongs—"
"Silence," Aiden says, and the circle goes quiet enough that even the jesting boys hush. He produces a simple paper. It is the agreement Orlando's men had written that morning: signatures scrawled in the wrong hand, a stamp that should not be there. A merchant recognized the seal and shouted. Orlando's face moves in stages: smug, uncertain, furious, disbelieving.
"You forged my father's seal!" he tries.
"Prove it," Aiden says softly.
One of Orlando's men coughs and begins to mutter, eyes to the ground. "We—we were told by a man in the gambling den that the family had debts."
"Who told you?" Aiden asks.
The man points with a shaking finger at Orlando. "He said the family needed to pay. He said the girl would be used to settle."
Orlando's demeanor cracks and the audience rearranges. A woman steps forward with a small child and says, "I saw them throw the ledger in the gutter last night. They were celebrating their haul."
Another voice rises, and then another. Someone pulls out a sketch pad—they are artists at the festival—and they begin to draw, then to tell, then to scribble. The innkeeper cries out, "I will not let my doors be used for such trade."
Orlando staggers from triumph into panic. He clutches at the air. "This is false! Lies! They are—"
"They are what?" Aiden asks.
"Scoundrels," Orlando screams. "I was forced. I was—"
"To accept stolen goods and to traffic human beings?" Aiden's voice is an even thread now and it cuts.
The crowd leans forward. A merchant takes a feather and scratches down his account. A boy lights a small lantern and runs to the magistrate's temporary tent. The festival's criers rush to spread the news. People begin to chant for the magistrate's men to be summoned. Orlando's face oscilates between a bird of prey and a trapped animal.
He tries to deny: "No, I—"
Then he is shoved. The smallest of the men, who had been quietly watching, steps back and whispers, "He paid us for this. He told us girls were for sale." The whole change happens in seconds: a sneeze becomes an avalanche.
"Get down," someone shouts, and Orlando falls to his knees. Boots trampling, he scrabbles in the dry dust. Hands pull him up and spin him so the crowd can see.
"Admit it," a woman he had insulted cries. "Admit you caught girls to sell, Orlando!"
Orlando snarls, claws at the air, and then the first cracks appear.
"No! You must listen," he says. "You don't understand. I had no choice—"
The crowd—liberated by the public exposure—becomes the judge. Someone starts chanting, "Shame! Shamed! Shamed!" Another fetches a basin of soapy water and starts to pour it over Orlando's head. Someone else knocks his hat away. Children point and clap. Some chant for the magistrate to bind him in a public pillory until judgment.
Orlando's demeanor crumbles through a precise arc: first indignation, then confusion as his plan is disassembled, then frantic denials, and finally disintegrating into begging.
"Please," he says, eyes on Aiden. "Have mercy. I will—I'll pay you. Take the money. Take anything. I'm sorry. Please—"
"No," Aiden says. His voice is as small and as absolute as a bell toll. "You will answer for this in front of the magistrate. This is not a matter of private coin."
Orlando's body shakes. A crowd begins to record the moment in flourished ink and in memory; a merchant draws the scene and sells a hundred copies the next day. Women clap, men mutter, and a chorus of voices begins to write out an account and pass it to a courier who races toward the magistrate. Orlando is led away by two magistrate's clerks, hands bound, his face sliding from anger to despair to pleading, and finally to blank shock.
"No—" he says, collapsing to his knees in the dust, robes askew. "Please—please—"
A voice near me whispers, "We will not let you hurt people anymore."
I stand dumbstruck, watching my sheer luck and my planning and Aiden's firm sense of justice weave together in a public unmasking. The crowd is a living organism now. Some clap, a few cry, a small group begins to cheer for me, the shrewd girl who would not submit to being sold.
Afterwards, as Orlando is led away, he looks back. He sees the crowd, the ledger, the merchant's testimony, Aiden's quiet, and then my face. He reaches out with both hands. "Please," he says, and he is suddenly small. "Please, I did not know—"
"No one will listen to excuses designed to hide wickedness," Aiden says.
"Begging does not undo harm," someone calls.
The crowd takes in the scene and spreads it: they will write, they will tell their friends, and they will redraw it with a great deal of flourish so that it will be retold as a caution. Orlando is punished by public shame and by the magistrate's men; his gang disbands. This is not the end of the law, but it is an ending for his freedom that day. He is spoken of as an example, one who kneels in the dust while the townsfolk tally his crimes out loud.
That punishment scene—when it plays out in the market—lasts long enough for me to breathe again. Orlando's reaction moves clean through the stages required by the rules of human drama: arrogance, doubt, denial, collapse, pleading. The crowd filmed him not with cameras, but with ink and memory. They clapped and pointed and many drew the scene and sold drawings to the curious.
After the shouting dies down, after the magistrate's men have taken Orlando away and after the market gossip has a new song, Aiden and I sit on a low wall.
"You were very brave," he says simply.
"I had a plan," I confess. "I can't live as a footnote in someone else's story."
He looks at me in a way that is not quite cold and not quite warm. "You are not a footnote," he says. "You are someone who refuses to be borrowed."
The days that follow are a tangle: wins and losses, a system that bullies and then rewards, a brother who teases but quietly fixes my laces each morning, and Aiden, who sits like a rock at the center of a lake of small ripples.
"Why did you stand up?" I ask him.
He shrugs. "Some things should be obvious," he says. "Some things should not be allowed to hide."
Our feelings are not neat. The book promised a tidy arc where the heroine swoons and the hero leads. I have to work. I study law books, festival rules, the small clerical habits that hold cities in balance. I practice the zither until my fingers blister. I cook until my palms smell like chili.
"Do you think you can be persuaded?" I ask once, wanting to change fate.
"Persuaded?" he says, smiling a little. "I suppose I am not immune to soup and to courage."
"And to public shaming," I add, because I am wicked.
He hums. "You are unlike anyone I've known."
Ryder's exams go well. He studies and then leaves for the capital. I travel with him partway, then Aiden and I take separate paths. We write letters: he sends short phrases and folded notes, Brennan sends poems on scraps, Evangeline sends recipes sealed with steam, and I send back music and plans and small inventions to make the zither louder or the pot hotter.
"Do you love me?" I ask one night when the moon is a coin.
Aiden's reply is not a leap. It is a careful, honest thing.
"I admire you," he says. "I like the way your eyes do not let injustice stand. I want to know you, not as a part, but as a person."
I hold that answer like a small warm jewel. It is not finished, but it is not empty.
The system keeps molding me, the book keeps reminding me of its outline, and I keep changing my path inside it.
At the end of my first season living in the book, I stand again at another festival gate. There are four medals in my hand—three I built and one I borrowed. Ryder, ink-smudged and laughing, holds the other end of a rope; Ingrid gives me a look that is both an appraisal and a blessing.
Aiden approaches. "Will you continue?" he asks.
"Yes," I say. "Because I refuse to be a plot device, whether the plot likes it or not."
He nods. "I will refuse with you."
We turn and walk back toward the city market. The lanterns shine and the zither in my arms hums with the music of all the things yet to be written.
The End
— Thank you for reading —