Free Web NovelChapter 23: The Bureau’s Last Stand
The morning before we left for the capital, I went back to the Bureau of Minor Corrections one last time, to quit a job I hadn’t actually shown up to in over a month.
I could have just not gone. Yun Shu pointed this out. "You’re a Storied-threshold legend with a continental reputation," she said, "and you’re going to walk into a leaning government office in the worst district in the city to file a resignation form with a man who tried to sell your desk."
"I’d feel bad otherwise," I said.
"That," said Yun Shu, "is the single most accurate sentence anyone has ever spoken about you."
The Bureau had changed.
Pao had not, it turned out, let my fame go to waste. The sad leaning building now had a banner over the door — BIRTHPLACE OF THE DEMON-SLAYER — and a line out front, and a hand-lettered sign listing prices. Two coppers to enter. Five to see my old desk. Ten to "sit where the legend sat." There was a man charging people to look at the leak that used to drip on me. The cursed vault, where I’d found the Scroll, had a velvet rope across it and a sign reading WHERE DESTINY WAS DISCOVERED — DO NOT TOUCH (3 coppers to touch).
It should have made me angry. Mostly it just made me tired, and a little sad, the way it’s sad to see something small and miserable that was yours turned into a show.
Pao was holding court by my old desk when I came in, mid-speech to a clutch of paying tourists. When he saw me he went pale, then red, then — I watched it happen — desperate, because Pao had been a ruined man since the day he’d tried to claim my glory and the whole city had renamed him "the glory-thief." His own fame had cratered. He’d spent a month watching mine soar while his curdled, and he’d built this whole sad shrine trying to claw back a single copper’s worth of relevance.
"Lin Bo," he breathed, and then, recovering, oily and frantic, loud enough for the tourists: "My boy! My protégé! Returned at last to the place where I — where I — first recognized his greatness, nurtured it, mentored—"
"You assigned me to clear a cursed vault as a punishment," I said. freeweɓnovēl.coɱ
"—a punishment that, in my wisdom, I knew would awaken his destiny," Pao said smoothly, not missing a beat, and he produced — of course he did — a scroll of his own, a contract, thrusting it at me with shaking hands. "Which is why, before you go, you’ll simply confirm, in writing, in front of these good people, that I, Overseer Pao, am and have always been your first and foremost mentor, entitled to a modest share of—"
I looked at the contract. I looked at Pao — sweating, ruined, sixty years old and clutching at a stranger’s fame because he had nothing of his own left. And then I looked at my old desk. The bad one. In the corner, under the leak, where I’d sat for three years dreaming of six quiet tables.
I’ll be honest with you about what I felt, because it surprised me.
Fond. I felt fond of it. The desk. The leak. The small sad life I’d had here, where nobody knew my name and nobody wanted anything from me and I’d been free, in the way only a nobody is free. I’d hated this job. But it had been quiet, and it had been mine, and I was about to leave it forever for a stage in front of ten million people. Standing in that dingy room, I understood that I wasn’t saying goodbye to Pao or the Bureau. I was saying goodbye to the man I used to be. The nobody. The clerk. Lin Bo, who wanted noodles. He’d lived here. And he wasn’t coming back.
So I didn’t sign Pao’s contract. But I didn’t crush him either.
Instead — and I want it on the record that I knew this was a mistake even as I did it — I reached into my own purse, the one with the last of my clerk’s savings, the noodle-shop money, and put a fair stack of it on the desk in front of him. More than the shrine would make him in a year.
"You don’t need to pretend you mentored me, Overseer," I said quietly. "Take this. Close the line. Let people look at the vault for free. It was never a punishment that made me — it was just a vault, and you were just a man who needed his quota met." I almost smiled. "We were both just doing a small job badly. There’s no shame in it. I’d rather you remember it honest than famous."
Pao stared at the money. Stared at me. And for one second, under all the grasping, something cracked, and there was just a tired old man who’d held a door for an elder fifteen years ago and never managed anything bigger since.
"...Thank you," he said. Quietly. Almost real.
And then, of course, the bell rang in my skull, and the gold letters bloomed over the dingy little Bureau, because there were paying tourists watching and they believed:
✦ DING. ✦
Legend updated: "And on the day he left for glory, the demon-slayer returned to the wretch who had wronged him, and forgave him, and filled his empty hands — wanting nothing in return."
Belief surging. Reach: continental.
Talent, you did it again. You can’t even QUIT a job without it being beautiful. — Scroll
The tourists wept. Someone started a small shrine to my mercy, right there, next to the shrine to my desk. Pao, restored a little in the eyes of the crowd as "the man the demon-slayer forgave," looked like he might actually faint with relief.
I filed my resignation form. Properly, in triplicate, because I am still, underneath everything, a clerk who respects paperwork. I set my brush down on my old desk for the last time.
And I walked out of the Bureau of Minor Corrections, and out of the Lower Ledger District, and out of the small quiet life of the nobody I used to be, into the loud bright dangerous one I never asked for.
Behind me, I heard Pao tell a tourist, with the beginnings of his old oily confidence, that of course he’d known I was destined for greatness — he’d seen it the very first day.
Some things don’t change. Honestly, it was a comfort.
