Face-Slapping16 min read
The Girl Who Bought an Empire: My One-Billion Dream
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I woke up to a voice I didn't recognize, and a countdown over my head.
"Supplies ready, start purchasing. One hundred million allocated — one hour on the clock," the voice said, calm and matter-of-fact.
I sat bolt upright and laughed at myself. "What is this, a video game?" I muttered, then the scene changed and the sky above a huge supermarket opened like a theater curtain, a digital clock blinking down. I reached out and the world obeyed me.
"Buy food," I told myself. "Start with grain."
Buttons hung in the air near each shelf. I tapped "purchase", typed numbers like a lunatic, watched figures fall into a cart like confetti. Ten million grain. Ten million preserved food. Ten million seasonings and oils. Ten million domestic goods: pots, small solar panels, warm blankets. Ten million medicine. Ten million meat and frozen goods. Five million women's clothes. Five million snacks and bottled drinks. Fifteen million diesel, twenty generators, farm tractors — just like that the cart filled. The clock was ruthless. Thirty million left with fifteen minutes flashing, and a whisper in my ear told me of the underground garage.
"Cars, fuel, motors, batteries. Pick now."
I grabbed tractors, small trucks, twenty generator sets, spare batteries — and shouted at the empty sky, "Take it all!"
Then I woke up in the cold.
The mud walls around me were gray as old paper. A faded calendar hung on the doorframe: April 3, 1975. My blanket was a thin sheet, my bed a hard earthen platform. Two other children slept nearby; one of them opened his eyes and spat at me.
"Get up," he said. "Stop being lazy."
I rubbed my arm and pinched my leg. It hurt. This was not a dream.
I am Eleanor Zeng. In the city I was twenty and small-time — I cooked at a private kitchen and scrolled through books on my phone. The week before, I'd read a dated rural novel with a character who was a dead-end, a nobody. I had joked in the comments, "If I ever wake up inside that book, I'll burn both mother and sister in front of the village." Now my bed was a straw mattress in the compound that belonged to the Li—no, not Li. Old habits. The people here had different names, and I had to learn them fast.
"Wake up, Eleanor! Don't freeze!" an impatient voice demanded. The speaker was Ember Mahmoud — the new wife who had taken my family's warmth like a draught. I had seen her in the novel too: sharp nose, thin lips, and a temper like a snapped twig. Behind her, a girl with small fierce eyes watched me: Kaitlyn Bogdanov, the favored stepdaughter. Both of them were the same as in the story: dangerous in soft voices, clever in cruelty.
"Move," Ember said. "You can't lie there like a corpse."
"I hurt my head," I lied. "Let me rest."
Ember's eyes were cold. She spat like she cleared a throat. "You're not going to be a burden. You can go live with your grandfather, or we can sell you like a goat and get your school fees."
"Kaitlyn, you better not get in trouble in school again," Ember scolded the smaller girl. "We have a plan."
They took me for a joke the way big hands sometimes sweep away a pebble — dismissive, careless. I let them. My head was foggy, but the memory of the mattress at my old apartment returned like a splinter. My arms still smelled faintly of the antiseptic soap I'd used before bed. The images from the supermarket dream were vivid: shelves, buttons, numbers, the hum of generators. The things I'd bought were somewhere.
I sneaked out at dusk and found the thing that proved the world had bent for me. The old villa behind our house — five hundred square meters, more rooms than I could name — was full. People think the seventies were all scarcity and strict lines for bread, and they were right. But I had a living room stacked with sacks of grain, freezers humming with meat, cabinets lined with medicines, boxes of solar panels, a small fleet of tractors and generators in the underground garage.
I laughed until I cried. "If this is a test, Earth, I pass," I told the moon.
"You're lucky," Grandpa Leon Porter said the next morning when he learned I hadn't died. He was a stooped man with moonlight in his eyes and stubbornness in his bones. He had taken me in when the world surrendered my mother to an early death and Ember stepped in like a shadow that wanted to swallow the light.
A week or so passed. I hid my treasures and learned to keep my head down. Ember and Kaitlyn kept their claws sharp and busy. "Your chopping is slow," Ember would say. "If you were faster, we wouldn't get behind." Kaitlyn would roll her eyes and mutter through a mouthful of stolen cake, "You only act brave because someone else feeds you."
"One day I'll have what I need," I told Grandpa. "I'll change everything. Promise me you will keep your health."
He looked at me like you look at a child with a broken toy and then a future toy under the bed. "You will, child."
Then very clear footsteps came through the village: a big car, a woman with a strong face, and three men in neat coats. The woman introduced herself kindly: Svetlana King. She held a basket of useful things and the aura of a matriarch used to steering storms.
"We're from Wakshan," she said. "My son is a fireman. He was burned, but he is a whole man now. His name is Oscar Cantu. We have been looking for a stable, sensible girl — someone who can stand beside him."
A rumor sang through the village: the Cantu family had money, stations, influence. The men of our village cleared their throats at the mention of Wakshan and the Cantu name. Ember's face, which could wind knives into a wicked shape at the drop of a hat, softened mid-sneer into careful warmth.
"Would you allow us to speak with your grandfather?" Svetlana asked.
Leon Porter, who had the patience of an old oak, welcomed them. They spent hours talking in the yard. Ember fluttered across the grass like a hawk dreaming of dinner; Kaitlyn pranced underfoot in pigtails, plotting.
"Of course," Ember said too loudly. "A match like this — who would refuse?"
That night the villagers left and the Cantu matter hovered over me like a storm. I tried not to think of buying off my enemies with tractors or paying my way out to freedom. Still, I'm not an idiot; if a chance to remove Grandma's fear of being alone arrives on a platter, you take it.
Days later, a man with a soldier's bearing and a face shaped as if an artist had been merciful came to the yard. His ear had a pale scar and his hands moved with a carver's care; his eyes were a storm of rain and a harbor at once. Oscar Cantu was walking slower on one leg, but he was not a broken man.
"You are Eleanor?" he asked quietly. The way he said it made my name sound like a promise.
I invited him to walk with me. "Why would you pick me?" I asked when we were alone under the small bridge by the river, where laundry flapped like captive flags.
"Because you do not ask for charity," Oscar said. "Because you do not fold. Because your face tells a story that is hard and honest."
"You can't possibly know me," I said.
He smiled, not cruel, not indulgent. "I know enough."
We walked, and he listened. He told me about the fire that had changed his life, how the hospital had been a mix of kindness and bureaucratic cruelty, how his mother, Svetlana, bore herself like a woman used to commanding cattle and houses. He said candid things about his leg and about worries the world had about marriage when one can't do everything the same way anymore.
"I will not force you," he said plainly. "But if you will marry me, I'll promise to keep what you built, and to stand in the way of Ember and Kaitlyn when they cross the line."
"I am not a missing person who needs saving," I said. "If we do this, it will be because I choose it for myself. The match must not be a bargain where I lose my life."
He took my hand. "Then choose me because you want to, not because you must. And I will ask that we delay any ceremony until you feel it is right."
We made no grand plans that day, only the small, honest agreement of two people who had seen too much of rupture and wanted to sew at least a seam.
Word spread. Ember and Kaitlyn's smiles became sharp and glittering knives. They couldn't hide that they'd hoped for a different prize, and the village's undercurrent of gossip turned into a roar. Kaitlyn's schoolmates now looked at her in a new light, a jealous, sour one. Ember's face worked like a machine — haughty in public, scheming in private.
They didn't imagine I had allies. I had Kevin Abdullah — the man who'd sat late in the canteen with charts and took me to the supply office; the serious man who could make a clerk remember a name. He'd helped organize the hospital situation when both Grandpa Leon and his brother were hurt after a frightened horse trampled them on the hillside. I had a small army of friends in the old folks and women who traded gossip like currency. I had a vault of things in the villa. Item by item, I learned to use what I'd bought in the dream.
The day Ember and Kaitlyn decided to trap me, they chose a public stage: the harvest festival at the village square, the day when the whole district gathered to show off good crops, gossip, and marriages. The plan was simple and ugly. Kaitlyn would faint near the village altar and wail that she had spotted me and that I had degraded her in the hills — the same lie they'd tried before. Ember had arranged it all with so many whispers that even the peacocks in the county knew to look.
I knew the night before. Kevin had slipped me a thin stack of small wire recorders and a phone that worked somehow; I used them to gather evidence. The stepmother and stepsister had a habit of confessing in the calm of their own conspiracies — and they had spoken often.
When the harvest morning came, I sat quietly in the corner of the square, under a straw awning, while everyone else wore their Sunday best. Oscar walked by my side, his hand over mine like a guard. The crowd pressed around us: neighbors, elders, children with sugar on their lips, the men from other villages who loved a festival because it meant a new rumor. There were three hundred people or more, all breathing humidity and excitement.
"Look," someone said near me. "It's her. Leo Porter's grandchild."
"She doesn't belong to them," murmured a voice. "Watch how the mother looks."
Ember was there, all smiles and false light. Kaitlyn was drama personified, pale and trembling. They waited for the moment when the square was full and distracted.
Kaitlyn gasped and fell forward as if a great sorrow had broken into her bones. "She did this," Kaitlyn shrieked, pointing at me with a corpse-like finger. "Eleanor! She took advantage of me on the hill. She ruined my future!"
A hush fell like a blanket. Ember's eyes darted like knives. The onlookers murmured. Someone shouted, "Call the elders! Call the village head!"
Kaitlyn's breath hitched; she kept the act perfect. A mother in the crowd sobbed and then calmed — this was the kind of village chaos that demanded an answer. The elders walked forward slowly, their sandals moving like measuring scales.
I put my hand on Oscar's sleeve. "I didn't," I said softly, loudly enough for those two close to hear. "I was at home, and then I went to Mr. Kevin's to get medicine for my grandfather. You can call him. And you can listen to what my stepsister whispered in her kitchen last week."
"What did she whisper?" Ember hissed, trying to commandeer the orchestra.
"She told Soledad to take the bargain now," I said calmly. "She told Aunt Soledad the plan: turn the village against me, blacken my name, get the family to pay them off with land or house or marriage."
At that, someone gasped. Ember's face moved from shock to a practiced denial.
"It's a lie!" Ember said, voice high and bright. "How dare she—"
"Ember, speak clearly," someone demanded. "This is a public matter."
Kevin stepped forward, a little pale and precise. He walked to the center of the square with a portable tape player in his hand. I had given him three minutes of recordings: Ember's own voice, inside her kitchen, plotting. Ember had bragged about "selling the girl" and "getting the price" and laughing about how easy it would be to make the family pay. Kaitlyn had admitted she would claim anyone would listen.
"Play it," someone in the crowd said.
Kevin pressed the button. Ember's voice filled the square through the small speaker, recorded and raw: "We will stage it at the harvest festival. We let her push the goat into the river — no, not the goat. We'll make the girl look like she was out of her mind. Then we'll whisper to Leo — no, not Leo, Leon — we'll tell them we need money for Kaitlyn's 'wedding clothes'."
Kaitlyn's head snapped like a marionette's. Her mouth opened. Ember's face went a color I had never seen on her — a deep, sinking red as if she'd swallowed hot iron.
"What is this?" Ember said. "That's not my voice. Somebody's doctored—"
A woman shouted, "Your voice is on the tape! My husband heard you!"
Children pointed with nimble fingers. Phones were out — someone was already filming. The square became a wave. Men who had been flirting with gossip turned to look like jurors. People began to pin their ears.
"What do you think?" an old man called, voice like a hammer. "Do we believe the tape? Did you all hear her?"
A thousand nods and gasps answered him. Ember's denial school collapsed into something lower: disbelief, then frantic rearguard. She backed away, and her voice dropped into ragged shadows.
"No! It's— listen— it's fake! It's edited! Someone's put words in my mouth!" She pounded the palm of her hand like a rejected bell.
Kaitlyn's legs gave out. She sobbed but the sobs sounded hollow now. Children in the front row were impolite enough to giggle. Someone started to record live, and hands rose like a morning tide.
"How could you do this to a child?" said a woman, and by 'child' she meant Kaitlyn. Ember's eyes flamed into a kind of animal panic. She swung at the microphone, and a man near her pushed her back. Her hand clawed at the air like a trapped bird.
"Is there any rebuttal?" the head elder asked. Ember had none.
Then I stepped forward. "I want everyone to know everything," I said. "Kaitlyn was in on it. She told them she'd plant the story if they gave her a promise. Ember told Soledad Johansson she wanted money. They planned to claim I was 'impure' so they could profit. I'm willing to put my head down for what I said: if anyone has proof I hurt her, let the elders see it. If not —"
"Then?" someone prompted.
"Then both of them should apologize publicly," I said. "And Ember should return the eggs she stole. And Kaitlyn should publicly confess her involvement and promise to never touch our house again."
The crowd called for something stronger. Ember laughed, a dry sound. "You think you can command the square? Who are you?"
"She is Leon Porter's granddaughter," someone answered.
"No," I said. "I am Eleanor Zeng. But I am also tired."
The witnesses were already there. Soledad Johansson, the one who'd been paid small bribes to help, stood frozen. A woman I'd once shared tea with — Juliet Briggs, who'd had the audacity to counsel Ember — stepped forward. Her face was lined and she didn't enjoy the moment. "They've been planning," Juliet admitted. "I overheard them. I told them not to. But they—" She stopped and looked at Ember as if the woman had become an open pit.
More testimony flooded in like water through a breach: the pastor's wife, two market women, a boy who had seen Kaitlyn's fake fainting lessons at the barn. Every testimony stacked like wood in a bonfire. Ember's countenance drained, then hardened into shrill denial, then collapsed into a keening like a hunted animal.
They tried to hide in layers of pretense — "It's a misunderstanding," "We were joking" — but the town was wet with proof. People started to move away from them as if they might be contagious.
Then the elder made a decision as heavy and final as bread. "We will administer a public apology," he said. "The plan they cooked is a deception and a betrayal. Ember Mahmoud, Kaitlyn Bogdanov — stand in the center."
They stood like two animals whose names had been taken.
"You will say what you did, without excuses," the elder said. "You will explain to the entire village, and you will promise to make amends. If you refuse, the village will not shelter you. We will record this and inform the town council."
Ember's face crumpled. "I — I didn't mean—" she started.
"You did mean it," the elder said. "Tell us why."
At first she lied, the way shoppers bargain for fruit. "I only wanted my daughter a chance," she said. "I couldn't feed her to the standards. I thought—"
"You plotted to sell a child," the elder cut in. "You plotted to make money from defaming a girl. That is a crime against the village's moral fabric."
Ember's braggadocio slipped away like mud in water. Her voice dropped from the snarl to the small. "I was scared," she said. "We were scared of not rising."
A hundred voices rose up like courtroom sound: "Scared? So you would ruin a life? Is that how you build a family?"
Kaitlyn then began to plead. "I didn't— I was told—" she said. "She said we'd get land. She said—"
"Who told you?" someone asked.
"Ember," Kaitlyn blurted, and the word had the force of a confirmed theft. It was the turning of a key.
Ember's reaction went through the stages we all know in petty tyrants: smug amusement, denial, anger, then shock, then breaking. Her small face rearranged. She began to stutter. "I— no— you lie! I would never—"
A teenager near the front shouted, "Play the tape again!" Kevin obliged, and the square heard Ember's kitchen plotting in which she had discussed sums and promises like a merchant trading livestock.
"No!" Ember screamed. Her voice went higher and thinner. She looked around for allies. There were none. People took out their phones. "Please, please," she begged, hands out like a supplicant. "I have a daughter to think of! I didn't mean for it to go this far!"
The villagers reacted. Some spat. An old man clapped his hands in disgust; young women covered their mouths. Some older men stood to leave — embarrassed to be related to such acts. Others recorded, whispered, and leaned in. Someone started a chant: "Apologize! Apologize!"
"Kneel," the elder said.
Ember's knees struck the dirt with sound like dry wood snapping. "Please," she said in a voice that had slid down to the bottom of a well. The crowd hissed like wind through reeds. People took photos; some clapped. A group of youths circled, making the scene larger.
"Beg us all," a woman said.
"Beg?" Ember croaked. "Please—"
Kaitlyn, who had been the willing tool moments before, watched her mother kneel and didn't join. She stood like a plant who had been cut. Her mouth dried. The crowd's reaction was a complicated weave of derision and pity. They filmed the whole thing; someone uploaded the footage. Others spontaneously began to shout out accusations they'd kept hidden for years; the truth had become a public fire.
"Get up," the elder said finally. "You will make restitution. You will apologize to Eleanor publicly. You will promise to leave the village if you cannot live honestly among us."
Ember's smile had shattered. Her eyes tracked from face to face. Her voice, when she spoke, shook. "Please, I — I am sorry. I am sorry, Eleanor. I won't touch your things. I won't touch your life. I'm sorry."
It was not a noble moment. It was not heroic. It was a collapse of small ambitions and large cowardice. But the public theater had done something important: it removed the private hunger of hatred from behind closed doors. The crowd, sensing justice, applauded like a sudden rain. Some people who had watched and gossiped for years now had evidence to point at. They pointed.
Ember went pale, then red, then white. She had gone from schemer to supplicant in less than an hour. The crowd recorded, pushed, shouted and gradually dispersed, satisfied with spectacle.
What I felt in that instant was not triumph the way the novels promised. It was such raw relief it tasted like water after a long drought. To see them reduced — broken into something small and naked — let the village breathe again. They would still be there, of course: Ember, with her rage shriveled and hidden, and Kaitlyn, with a habit to unlearn. But they'd been stripped of power in public, and the weight of the world's scorn is a heavy towel. When a bad person is publicly exposed, they must first feel the weight of being seen.
After the day, I did not parade. Oscar stood quietly by my side. "You did well," he said. "You could have taken the easy route and fought back privately, but you chose truth."
The harvest festival ended with us arranging the modest details of the engagement. We agreed to delay any wedding until I felt ready. I told Oscar I would not leave the villa empty-handed; the things I'd bought would not vanish. We discussed, frankly and practically, who would inherit what. He promised: the villa's main house and the supplies would remain with my grandfather until Grandpa Leon and I decided otherwise.
The immediate problem was Ember's threat to regain leverage. The tape had placated the crowd; Ember had knelt and begged. But people are preserved by custom, and Ember's return to the household would not be uncomplicated. For a while, she tried to act as if nothing had happened, but the village's preservation of memory is terrible and patient. When Ember tried to go back to cooking with me in the same kitchen, the women from the square refused to borrow her sugar. When she asked for a favor, people said no.
Months rolled like slow carts. I began to use my supplies in small ways: giving packets of milk powder to the old women, trading cloth coupons for a few items the village had no access to, trading meat for help at the villa. Kevin helped me connect to friendly clerks. Oscar visited and we sat with our hands close, not yet married, but firm in a mutual plan: we would rebuild the villa into a little home for Grandpa Leon, a place to host the sick and keep the medicine cool. He taught me to trust a person who'd been burned and wasn't ashamed of the scars. I taught him how to bargain with a stubborn supply clerk and how to make dried apple rings that kept for months.
Ember's presence became a careful thing — sometimes she would try to side with people who still disliked us, other times she would fall silent in the pantry. Kaitlyn moved on from school for a while, though the elders made sure she took responsibility. The public humiliation had been a teacher. I didn't take joy from her kneeling; I took joy that the village had shown the kind of strength that can prevent private cruelty.
When the big day came — not the wedding but the moment where I signed a modest agreement that confirmed Oscar and I would stand as partners — I placed a small tin of powdered milk in the drawer of my bedside chest. It was a plain thing, but it represented more than calories. I had not given up my plans. The generators from the dream hummed in the basement. The car sat in the garage, low and ready. We had a stock of medicine for Grandpa Leon's little ailments. More importantly, I had my dignity.
"Will you still want me," Oscar asked once, in the dark, "if I am less than you dreamed?"
"You've already given me a promise," I said. "Not just to protect me. To be honest. That is better than any dream wedding."
"Then we'll do it my way and your way," he said. "Practicality for everyday, kisses for emergency."
We laughed. The world was quiet and warm around us, the sound of diesel generators like a distant lullaby. I turned the tiny tin of milk in my hands and felt the weight of it, real and useful.
There would be more battles afterward — legal arguments over land, petty theft, old grudges that did not die overnight. Ember found a thin job in a neighboring town and moved, still loud but diminished. Kaitlyn stayed for a while, then visited school, then left — not fully reformed, but less dangerous. The tape remained in my pocket for a long time, a stubborn talisman of proof that sometimes people show themselves when they think no one is listening.
At night, when the villa's diesel hum softened into a steady sound like a sleeping beast, I would take an old generator's key and wind it like a watch. The small "tick" it made was not a promise of forever. It was a promise I could keep for now: to keep the lights on for my grandfather, to keep food in the chest, to keep the people I loved safe from petty cruelty. That small key turned and the lights steadied.
In the end, I learned a life lesson I had said when I was still a city girl: building an empire is less about gold and more about the quiet pieces you can guard — a can of milk powder, a warm blanket, a promise-kept. When you buy an empire in a dream, you still have to live in it. You have to make beds and sweep dust and listen. You have to choose what battles are truly yours.
I never forgot the supermarket lights, the way numbers had obediently fallen in my cart. But those lights didn't save me. People did. The stern faces that refused to gossip anymore, the woman who whispered an apology, the man who offered his hand — these built the village's new story.
And the small tin of powdered milk? I keep it in my chest. Sometimes, when the night is quiet and Leon Porter's breathing steadies, I open it, breathe in the faint sweetness, and think about a generator winding down. It is small, but it holds everything a future needs: warmth, proof, and the odd, stubborn hope that we can be kinder than we were taught to be.
The End
— Thank you for reading —