I should explain something about demons, since one is about to ruin my morning.

Demons, it turns out, live by the same rotten rule as everyone else. They don’t get strong by training either. They get strong by being feared. Fear is just belief with the warmth taken out — and the more people who believe a demon is terrible, the more terrible it actually becomes. They have ranks just like we do. A leaderboard. They climb it by being the thing in the dark that people can’t stop talking about.

Which means that to a demon trying to make a name for itself, there is no greater prize in the entire world than killing a famous demon-slayer.

I learned all of this at roughly the same moment the sky over Cinder Lane went a sick, bruised purple, the morning crowd started screaming, and something with too many arms came down out of the clouds and landed in the middle of the market with a sound like a butcher dropping a side of beef.

It was real. I want to be very clear about that, because everything up to this point had been a misunderstanding, a sneeze, a shoe. This was not a misunderstanding. This was nine feet of grey muscle and curved black horns and a mouth that didn’t stop where a mouth should. It stank of cold smoke, and when it spoke the windows shook in their frames.

"I AM GORRTHAK THE UNSPEAKABLE," it boomed. "RENDER OF THE NINTH PIT. THE HUNGER THAT WALKS. AND I HAVE COME FOR—"

"Gorrthak the Unspeakable?" said a small voice in the crowd. "Did he say Gorrthak?"

"—FOR THE ONE THEY CALL—"

"You’re not supposed to be able to speak his name, but he just told it to us—"

"STOP SAYING MY NAME," snapped Gorrthak, who was, I would come to realize, deeply insecure about the "Unspeakable" thing. He drew himself up, all nine horrible feet, and pointed one black claw across the market — straight at me. "LIN BO. DEMON-SLAYER. FELLER OF KINGS. I HAVE HEARD YOUR LEGEND IN THE PITS BELOW, AND I HAVE COME TO TAKE YOUR HEAD, SO THAT EVERY SOUL WHO FEARS YOU WILL FEAR ME INSTEAD."

I want to describe my heroic response.

I can’t, because I didn’t have one.

What I actually did was make a small noise, like a kettle, and take three steps backward into a noodle cart.

Because here is what nobody in that screaming, scattering crowd understood — what Yun Shu, frozen at the edge of the market with her ledger forgotten in her hands, didn’t understand, what not even Gorrthak the Unspeakable understood:

I could not fight.

I was a clerk. My one power was sneezing hard. The "demon king" I’d "felled" had been a man with a hole in his shoe. And now a genuine, actual, nine-foot demon was striding toward me across the cobblestones, and there was no Scroll trick, no Streisand Law, no clever paperwork that was going to save me from being torn in half in front of everyone I’d ever failed to convince.

"Talent," Scroll said urgently in my ear. For once it didn’t sound smug. It sounded alarmed. "Okay. Okay, this one’s real. Do something. Do the breath. Do the breath."

"The breath knocks over stalls!"

"Then knock over a demon! Believe harder! The crowd believes! Use it!"

Gorrthak reared up, both clawed arms rising, every muscle in his grey body coiling to bring them down and end me.

And I did the only thing my stupid body knows how to do under that much fear.

I sneezed.

But here’s the thing. Here’s the thing I didn’t understand until that exact moment, mid-sneeze, eyes screwed shut, certain I was about to die.

Gorrthak had heard the legend too.

He’d said it himself. I have heard your legend in the pits below. For weeks, the whole world — above and below — had been telling the same story, louder and louder, until it had reached even the demons in the dark: Lin Bo felled a demon king with a single breath. Forty feet tall. Wings like a thundercloud. Came apart like smoke. And Gorrthak the Unspeakable, Render of the Ninth Pit, for all his horns and his hunger, was not made of anything different than the rest of us.

He was made of belief. And he believed it too.

So when the most famous demon-slayer in the province bent double and drew a huge, ragged breath right in his face — when the man who had felled a demon king with a single breath opened his mouth toward him — some deep, ancient, animal part of Gorrthak the Unspeakable, the part that had heard the stories, flinched.

He braced. He believed. For one half-second, the Render of the Ninth Pit was certain he was about to be unmade.

And the breath that hit him — my dumb, terrified, post-sneeze gust, swollen now with the belief of an entire market and a province beyond it and one girl with a notebook who’d never doubted me for a heartbeat — that breath was no longer the breath of a clerk.

It picked Gorrthak the Unspeakable up off his nine feet, folded him backward like a wet letter, and threw him the length of Cinder Lane and clean through the wall of an empty grain warehouse, where he lay in the rubble making a high, confused, wheezing sound, every horrible certainty in him collapsed, utterly convinced that the legend was true because he had just felt it be true.

The market was silent.

Then it was not silent. Then it was the loudest it had ever been, and somewhere in the noise a child was screaming "AGAIN! AGAIN!" and the gold letters were unrolling across the whole purple-bruised sky, big enough to read from the next district:

✦ DING. ✦ LEGEND CONFIRMED. "Lin Bo, Demon-Slayer, felled a true demon of the Ninth Pit before a crowd of hundreds — and a scholar of the Heavenly Records witnessed it with her own eyes."

Belief: 99%. Reach: enormous. This one’s permanent, talent.

You are approaching: STORIED.

That last line. A scholar of the Heavenly Records witnessed it. That was the part that finished Yun Shu.

She was still standing at the edge of the market. Her ledger had fallen open at her feet. She was staring at the hole in the warehouse wall, and the groaning demon in the rubble, and then at me, and her face had gone the specific shade of white of a person whose entire world has just quietly stopped making sense.

She had come to prove there was no demon-slaying.

She had just watched me fell a demon.

Slowly, like a woman in a dream, she walked across the market to the rubble. She crouched. She poked Gorrthak the Unspeakable with the end of her brush — confirming he was real, an actual demon, no costume, no trick, no staged anything. He whimpered. She stood back up, turned to me, and for a long moment she didn’t say anything at all.

"Ms. Yun," I said weakly. "I can explain. I think. Maybe. Not really."

"You felled a demon," she said.

"It was an accident."

"You felled a demon," she said again, and her voice cracked, just slightly, on the word — the sound of eleven years of certainty developing its very first crack. "By accident, in front of an official witness from the Heavenly Records, which means the legend is now—" she pressed two fingers to the bridge of her nose "—verified. By me. I came here to delete you and I have just notarized you."

Behind me, in a voice thick with joy, Scroll whispered: "I have never been prouder of anyone in my entire existence."

In the rubble, Gorrthak the Unspeakable wept softly.

And above us all, my name climbed toward Storied, bright enough now to be seen from the capital — bright enough, finally, that the truly powerful people, the ones who run the sects and the cities and the world, looked up from whatever they were doing, and frowned, and asked each other a single, dangerous question:

Who is Lin Bo?