The wall exploded inward.
Not metaphorically. The entire eastern wall of the tavern — rotten wood, dried mortar, years of accumulated grime — erupted in a shower of splinters and dust. Something came through it. Something fast and glowing and shaped like a blade of compressed silver light.
The Patriarch turned, his killing bolt half-formed in his hand. The flying sword hit him square in the back of the head.
He stopped.
The purple aura around his hand dissolved. The poison bolt fizzled into nothing. His eyes went wide — not with rage, not with pain, but with the simple, profound confusion of a man who had just been taken out by something completely unrelated to his current situation.
He opened his mouth. A small puff of purple smoke escaped. Then he pitched forward, face-first into the bubbling pool of his own acid, and lay still.
The flying sword clattered to the floor, steam rising from its blade. Through the hole in the wall, I could hear shouting — two cultivators outside, mid-duel, one of them yelling something about "you owe me fifty spirit stones" and "your aim is terrible."
"I told you not to throw it indoors!"
"It went through a wall! That's not indoors anymore!"
"It hit someone!"
"It hit a someone! That's better than hitting no one!"
"It was a Nascent Soul cultivator, you absolute walnut!"
"Well, he shouldn't have been standing there!"
The arguing faded as the duel moved away. One of them called back: "Sorry about the wall! We'll, uh, we'll send someone!"
Silence settled over the tavern.
The bubbling acid slowly stopped spreading, pooling in the cracks between the floorboards. The surviving disciples stood in a loose circle around their fallen leader, exchanging the kind of looks that said they were already drafting their resumes. One of them nudged the Patriarch's body with his foot. Nothing happened. "Definitely dead," he announced. The others sighed in unison — not with grief, but with the exhausted recognition that they now had to explain this to the sect elders.
The surviving disciples stared at their fallen leader. A few patrons peeked out from behind overturned tables.
Han slowly stood up from behind the bench, his glasses barely hanging on his face. He looked at the Patriarch's body. Then at the hole in the wall. Then at me, clutching my smoking shoulder.
"...What," he said.
"Stray flying sword," I said. "Cultivator duel outside. Bad aim."
"The Poison Patriarch. Lord of the Five Veins Sect. A Nascent Soul cultivator. A man who has cultivated poison for five hundred years."
"Yep."
"Was just killed by a stray flying sword. From a duel that has nothing to do with us. Because someone's aim was bad."
"That's the summary, yeah."
Han stared at me for a long moment. Then he walked to the bar, picked up a half-melted bottle of wine, and took a long drink directly from the neck.
"I need a new logbook," he said quietly. "The old one ran out of pages."
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
· · ·
The tavern slowly came back to life around us. The surviving disciples dragged the Patriarch's body out through the hole in the wall, muttering about "what do we tell the sect" and "maybe we just don't tell anyone and say he retired." The tavern owner emerged from the cellar, took one look at the melting floorboards and the missing wall, and immediately opened a bottle of his strongest liquor.
I sat down at the nearest intact table, my arm still throbbing from the poison graze. It wasn't healing. The skin around the wound was an angry purple, slowly spreading.
"You're hurt," Han said, sitting across from me.
"Noticed."
"We need a healer."
"We need a lot of things. A healer. A map. A plan. Some decent food that isn't grey rice." I looked at my arm. "I think my glitch status means I don't heal normally. The system doesn't know how to process 'poison damage' on an entity with no health bar."
"So you're just going to... stay poisoned?"
"Until the system figures out what to do with me, yeah. It'll probably patch it eventually. Might take a few days." I flexed my fingers. The pain was dull but constant. "Could be worse. Could have been a headshot."
Han pulled out his new logbook — a fresh one he'd found behind the bar — and opened it to the first page. He wrote for a moment, then looked up.
"Day one," he read. "The madman survived a Patriarch, got grazed by poison, and called it 'acceptable losses.' I've started a new volume. The old one ran out of pages after the golden wall incident."
"Starting a second volume already?"
"The first one ran out." He closed the book. "What now?"
I looked around the ruined tavern. The patrons were slowly returning to their drinks, collectively deciding that whatever had just happened was not their problem. The hole in the wall let in a cool night breeze. Through it, I could see the stars — or rather, the pixelated approximation of stars, each one a tiny square of light in a badly rendered skybox.
"Now we find a place to sleep," I said. "A healer for my arm. Some proper food. And then we figure out what the hell we're actually doing here."
"Surviving?"
"Surviving's the baseline. I'm thinking bigger."
"Bigger than surviving?"
I leaned back in my chair, wincing as the movement pulled at my wound. "The Author stuck me in this world. I don't know why. I don't know if it was an accident, a joke, or a punishment for some cosmic HR violation I committed in a past life. But I'm here. And if I'm going to be stuck in a badly translated novel, I'm going to make it a bestseller."
Han tilted his head. "You're going to... write the story yourself?"
"I'm going to make the Author rewrite it. Every time he throws a cliché at me, I'm going to break it. Every time he writes a young master, I'm going to audit him. Every time he tries to pad the word count with a training arc, I'm going to take a nap and wait him out. He wants a generic cultivation power fantasy? I'll give him a bureaucratic nightmare with spreadsheets and ROI analysis. He wants face-slapping? I'll give him workplace mediation and conflict-resolution forms. He'll be so sick of me that he'll either write something interesting or retire from fiction entirely."
"And if he tries to kill you?"
I looked at the hole in the wall. At the stars beyond. At the floating system notification that had just appeared at the edge of my vision:
[AUTHOR'S NOTE: ...that was actually pretty funny. I'll give you that one.]
I grinned. "Then I'll make sure it's entertaining."
A silence settled between us. Han closed his logbook and tucked it into his robe.
"Caelan," he said.
"Yeah?"
He looked at me. At the hole in the wall. At the spot where the Patriarch had fallen. At the sky beyond.
"Who the fuck are you talking to when you look at the void?"
I didn't look away from the notification.
"The Author. The guy writing this mess. He's watching. And I think he's starting to enjoy himself."
Han nodded slowly. He picked up his wine bottle, took another long drink, and set it down.
"Okay," he said. "I don't care anymore. Let's find some rice. And if the sky starts throwing golden walls at us again, I'm going to hit them with my shovel."
"That's the spirit, partner."
I stood up, grabbing my rusty shovel from where it had fallen. My arm throbbed. The poison was spreading. The world was still broken and glitchy and full of badly translated NPCs.
But for the first time since I'd been hit by that plumbing van, I felt like I was finally getting somewhere.
We walked out through the hole in the wall, into the badly rendered night, two figures silhouetted against a sky full of square stars. The air was cool and smelled of smoke and distant rain. Somewhere in the village, a dog was barking at nothing. Somewhere else, a cultivator was probably still arguing about the stray sword. Neither of those things were our problem anymore.
Behind us, the tavern owner's voice drifted through the ruined building: "Alright, who's going to help me fix this bloody wall before the health inspector shows up?"
Neither of us answered. We just kept walking. Behind us, the tavern's remaining patrons were already arguing about who had to sweep up the acid. Ahead of us, the road stretched into darkness, lined with badly rendered trees that flickered in and out of existence at the edges of my vision.
Somewhere out there was a healer. Somewhere out there was a plot. And somewhere, probably laughing at his own keyboard, was the Author.
I tightened my grip on my shovel and kept walking.