The laughter spread around the ring. Fingers pointed. A beggar woman cackled and slapped her knee. Li Yuguo felt his face heat, but he kept smiling; he was getting used to this. Li Yuguo's popularity in Nalan City, it seemed, had been dug so deep into the ground that there was nowhere left for it to go but up.
He ignored them and turned to the one-eyed man.
Up close, the stranger was even bigger than he had looked. He stood a full head taller than this body, and he smelled of road dust and old sweat and, faintly, of medicine—bitter herbs, the kind you brewed for a fever. His face was weathered and hard. But his one eye, looking down at Li Yuguo, was not hostile. Only wary. Measuring.
"Hero," Li Yuguo said politely. "Since this is your family's treasured sword, why do you want to sell it?"
"Didn't I just say?" the man said. "My family has an emergency. Otherwise I wouldn't sell it."
Li Yuguo nodded slowly, as if considering this. Then he reached into his robe and drew out a heavy fifty-tael ingot of the merchant's silver—then another—and held them out, the metal flashing in the sun.
"Then how about this," he said. "Take my money first. For your emergency. That way you don't need to sell the sword." He smiled. "After all, it's your family's treasure, isn't it? If you really sold something like that in a dusty market for a handful of coins, your ancestors would definitely not be happy."
The ring went quiet.
Zhang Wu and Zhao Liu had been watching all this with their mouths slightly open. Now, as the silver came out, Li Yuguo saw them glance at each other—and then, as one, they backed away.
It was almost funny to watch. They did not even argue. They simply stepped aside, out of his way, like water parting around a stone, and their faces rearranged themselves into wide, ingratiating smiles.
He understood why. The two of them were nothing but second-rate rats of Nalan City. If they wanted to keep scurrying around its gutters in peace, they had to stay on the right side of certain people—and whatever else Li Yuguo was, his wife was the lord of this city. With a backer like that, who in Nalan City would dare to be his opponent? To men like these, the whole city was Li Yuguo's back garden, and he could pick whatever flowers he liked.
"Ah! So it's Brother Guo! Brother Guo, please, please!" Zhang Wu bowed so low his greasy topknot nearly brushed the dust. "If you like this knife, then of course we brothers will give it to you! We were only—just helping to set the price—"
Li Yuguo smiled at him faintly.
"There's nothing for you here," he said. "Go."
"Yes! Yes, of course, right away!"
The two of them turned and pushed out through the crowd, still bowing. The ring of onlookers, deprived of its fight, began to break up, grumbling, drifting back toward the stalls.
Zhang Wu and Zhao Liu did not stop until they had reached a narrow corner between two warehouses at the far end of the square, where the shade was deep and the smell of rotting cabbage leaves was strong and nobody could see them.
Then Zhang Wu yanked up his sleeves and spat on the ground.
"Who does he think he is?" he snarled. "Isn't it just because his wife is the prefect? Hmph! He really takes himself seriously. One day—one day his wife won't be the prefect anymore, and then we'll see how we teach that pretty little rabbit a lesson. I'll break every one of his soft white fingers—"
"Fifth Brother. Let it go." Zhao Liu laid a hand on his arm. His narrow eyes were flat. "You know what he's like. If he kills someone in Nalan City, it doesn't matter. Nothing happens to him. And that brat's reputation is already rotten all the way through. Sooner or later he'll get what's coming to him without us lifting a finger. We don't need to go looking for revenge."
Zhang Wu ground his teeth. Then he blew out a long breath through his nose.
"Come on, Old Six," he growled. "Let's go get a drink. Damn it! It's so hard to come across a fat sheep like that, and the King of Soft Rice took the advantage right out from under us. I'm so angry I could spit blood."
They went off, cursing, into the warren of alleys behind the warehouses.
Back in the market, the one-eyed man was looking at the silver in Li Yuguo's hand.
Then he looked at Li Yuguo. A slow smile spread across his scarred face—not a friendly smile, exactly, but an amused one, with an edge of challenge in it.
"Young master," he said, "aren't you afraid I'll take your money and run, and you'll never see me again?"
Li Yuguo laughed.
"Hahaha! If a hundred taels of silver can let me see one man clearly," he said, "then the money's well spent!"
And before the man could refuse, he caught his big scarred hand, turned it palm up, pressed the heavy bars into it, and folded the thick fingers closed over them.
The man's whole body went still.
Li Yuguo felt it through the hand he was holding: a jolt, like a current running up the man's arm. That cold, calm, storm-coiled stillness he had felt in the ring broke apart all at once. The man stared at his own fist, and at the silver inside it, and then at Li Yuguo's face, and his one eye was very wide.
He had not expected Li Yuguo to mean it.
For a long moment he said nothing. The noise of the market rolled on around them. A fly droned past. Then, slowly, with the stiff dignity of a man who has not bent his knee to anyone in a very long time, he dropped down onto one knee in the dust and clasped his fists before his chest.
"I am Guan Yunfan," he said. His deep voice was rough. "The grace of saving a life, I will never forget. Young master, I will repay you if I have to come back as grass to tie around your enemy's feet, or as a bird with a jade ring in its beak."
Li Yuguo looked down at the bowed head with its crossed scars, and inside he was laughing.
It really is him. Guan Yunfan.
He knew this man very well.
He had written him with love. Guan Yunfan had a long, rich history in the story—the kind of side character readers adopted as their favorite, who got fan art and fan theories and long comment threads arguing about his past. He was the greatest thief under heaven. Not one of the alley rats like Zhang Wu and Zhao Liu, but something legendary.
The King of Thieves.
He was good at stealing. He had never once missed. He had walked into imperial treasuries and sect vaults and the bedchambers of generals, and walked out again with whatever he came for, and no one had ever laid a hand on him. And he was strong—far stronger than his ragged cloak suggested. His skill with a blade was something Liu Mang had written about in a dozen breathless fight scenes.
But that was not what had made readers love him.
Guan Yunfan was a chivalrous thief. A heroic thief. He did not steal from the poor. He did not rob honest officials. He chose his targets carefully: corrupt magistrates, cruel landlords, bandit lords, greedy sect elders. And every time he succeeded, he kept only a small portion for his own daily expenses and gave the rest away—to famine villages, to orphanages, to families who had nothing left. In half the kingdom, the poor burned incense for him. That was where his title had truly come from.
And this time—Li Yuguo remembered the chapter now—his beloved wife had fallen seriously ill. Some wasting sickness that no ordinary doctor could cure. The King of Thieves had spent everything he had on medicine and still had not been able to save her, and so, for the first time in his life, he had brought his family's sword to market to sell.
In the original story, of course, it had not been Li Yuguo who stepped into that ring.
It had been Ye Qiong.
Ye Qiong, passing through Nalan City, had seen the two liuzi bullying a stranger and stepped in to help. He had given Guan Yunfan the money for his wife's medicine. And from that day on, the King of Thieves had been bound to Ye Qiong heart and soul—his sworn brother, his most loyal follower, willing to ride at the front and back of his saddle for the rest of his life.
And now he's mine.
Li Yuguo felt a strange, giddy thrill at the thought. It was the first time he had truly taken something from the protagonist. Not a treasure. Not a technique. A person. One of Ye Qiong's most important allies, intercepted in the market before the story even knew he was gone.
Sorry, Ye Qiong, he thought. Finders keepers.
He bent down and clasped his own fists in return.
"I'm Li Yuguo," he said warmly. "Please, brother, get up."
If it had been the old Li Yuguo standing here—with his arrogant, rebellious face and his sneering mouth—the King of Thieves would never have given him the time of day, no matter how much silver he waved around. Guan Yunfan was a thief, after all, but he was a thief with a code, and he had no more respect for spoiled young lords than he had for the corrupt officials he robbed.
But this Li Yuguo had looked at a stranger in trouble and stepped into the ring with his hands empty.
That, the King of Thieves understood.
Guan Yunfan rose. He hesitated for a moment—and then reached into the breast of his cloak and drew out a small lacquered box, scuffed and worn at the corners.
"Benefactor," he said, "I don't have anything to thank you with. But I came by this by chance. I believe it's a low-level spirit medicine." He held it out with both hands. "Please accept this gift from your brother, and don't laugh at how humble it is."
Li Yuguo took the box. It was light. Something rattled softly inside—a single small round object.
Spirit medicine.
He looked at the King of Thieves, who stood waiting with his scarred head bowed, and a thought came to him.
Let's see how this works.
He focused on Guan Yunfan—on the broad shoulders, the scarred brow, the single dark eye—and called up his new skill in his mind. Tell me your secret.
The panel flickered into life. A small window slid out of it, framed in that festive gold, and hovered beside the King of Thieves' head like a speech bubble in a comic book.
> [ King of Thieves — Guan Yunfan ]
>
> Special Secret: Even though he loves his wife deeply, from the bottom of his heart, he still cannot stop himself from staring at beautiful women with good curves.
Li Yuguo blinked.
At that exact moment, a young woman walked past behind Guan Yunfan—a fruit seller's daughter, perhaps, with a basket of apricots on her hip and a thin cotton blouse plastered to her back with sweat. She was nothing special. But she had a generous figure, and her hips swayed as she walked, and the basket bounced against them.
Guan Yunfan's one eye slid sideways and followed her.
It was only for a moment. It was almost imperceptible—a flicker of the eyeball, a tiny tightening at the corner of his mouth, and then he snapped his gaze back to the front with an expression of iron virtue, as if nothing had happened at all. But Li Yuguo had been looking right at him.
He had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing.
Well, he thought. Isn't that normal for every man?
And then, a moment later, the laugh died in his chest.
Because he had written Guan Yunfan. He had written every scene the man appeared in. And the King of Thieves he had written had been a paragon of devotion—a husband so faithful that he never even noticed other women existed. Liu Mang had made a point of it, as a contrast to the lechers and the cheats. Guan Yunfan's heart had room for only one woman. He had written that line himself.
He had never written this.
Changed some of the world's plot for you.
He glanced down at the front of his robe, where Lord Yama's letter lay folded against his chest, and felt it lie there like a cold hand.
Then he put the thought aside. It was a small thing. A harmless thing. A man's eyes wandering for a heartbeat at a fruit seller's hips was hardly the end of the world. He would think about what it meant later.
"Since it's a gift from my brother," he said aloud, tucking the lacquered box into his sleeve beside the bottle of seeds, "there's no reason for me not to accept it! Thank you in advance." He clapped Guan Yunfan on one massive shoulder. "And when you've finished taking care of things, brother, you must come and find me in Nalan City. Then the two of us will go and get properly drunk together!"
Guan Yunfan threw back his head and laughed—a great booming laugh that made the stallholders nearby jump and turn to stare.
"Ha! Happy! I'll be there as promised!" Then he sobered, and the warmth in his eye was shadowed by something heavier. "But right now I still have important things to do. Benefactor—I'll go first!"
He bowed once more, deeply, and turned, and slung his family's sword back across his shoulders beneath his ragged cloak.
Li Yuguo watched him go. The crowd parted for him without being asked, the way crowds part for something dangerous, and in a few moments the broad cloaked back had vanished between the stalls, heading for the apothecaries' street, walking fast.
Li Yuguo stood alone in the hot, dusty market, his sleeve heavy with seeds and medicine, his purse much lighter than it had been an hour ago, and found that he did not mind at all.