Twelve days before we were due to leave for the capital, the Thunder Court came to test me.

I should explain the Thunder Court, because they are very important, and they will never forgive me for what’s about to happen, and I want you to understand it was an accident.

The Thunder Court is one of the oldest and proudest celestial orders in the world. Storm-cultivators. They ride the clouds, they speak in thunder, they have been magnificent and humorless for nine thousand years, and they care about exactly two things: their dignity, and their regalia. To a man of the Thunder Court, how you look is how powerful you are. And they look, it must be said, incredible.

None more so than the one they sent: Storm-Marshal Lei.

He arrived the way the Thunder Court does everything — with a thunderclap, descending out of a sky he’d personally darkened for the occasion, landing in the yard in a swirl of storm-cloud and ozone. Nine feet of silver-haired magnificence in robes that crackled with captured lightning. And below the robes, the centerpiece, the pride of the whole ensemble, the thing his eyes kept flicking down to make sure I’d noticed:

His trousers.

I want to be respectful here. These were not ordinary trousers. These were the Sacred Storm-Trousers of the Nine Heavens — an artifact nine thousand years old, woven from living lightning, passed down through forty generations of Storm-Marshals, humming with so much captured thunder that the air around his legs sparked when he walked. They were, genuinely, one of the great treasures of the cultivation world.

They were also, unavoidably, pants. And there is no way to be nine feet tall and terrifying while drawing a man’s attention, repeatedly, to your pants.

"DEMON-SLAYER," boomed Storm-Marshal Lei, in a voice like a distant avalanche. "I am Lei, Storm-Marshal of the Thunder Court. The whole continent speaks your name, and the Court does not abide an unmeasured legend. Before you sully the great Tournament with your presence, you will face me, and we shall see if you are worthy—" lightning crawled up his magnificent trousers for emphasis "—or merely loud."

Behind me, Yun Shu murmured, "Don’t fight him. Whatever you do. You’ll lose in front of everyone and that’s a different kind of disaster."

She was right. I knew she was right. The yard was already filling with a crowd — they always fill, the demon-slayer plus a Storm-Marshal was the event of the season — and I had no skill, no technique, nothing but a borrowed costume of belief. Fighting Lei would expose me in the worst possible way.

So I did the smart thing. I tried to decline.

"Honored Marshal," I said, bowing, palms up, my most humble clerk’s bow. "I’m not a fighter. Truly. There’s been a misunderstanding. I sneezed at a mugger once. That’s the whole—"

"MODESTY," roared Lei, delighted, taking it exactly the way everyone takes it. "The mark of a true master! VERY WELL. If you will not strike, then I shall, and you will show the world how the demon-slayer answers the thunder of the Nine Heavens!"

And he raised both arms, and the sky he’d darkened split, and a bolt of lightning the size of a temple pillar came screaming down out of the clouds straight at me, crackling, blinding, the kind of thing that does not leave a body to bury.

I did the only thing I know how to do when I’m about to die.

You know what I did.

I sneezed.

And the crowd — hundreds of them now, packed into the yard and spilling into the lane, every one of them certain they were about to watch the great demon-slayer do something legendary — believed, all at once, with everything they had.

The belief poured into me. The Breath came out not as a gust but as a wall, a concussion of wind so enormous it didn’t just stop the lightning — it stopped everything, a thunderclap of pure displaced air that rolled out across the yard in a ring, knocked the entire crowd flat in a neat circle, blew every cloud out of Lei’s borrowed sky in an instant, returning it to clear blue noon —

— and hit Storm-Marshal Lei, nine feet of nine-thousand-year dignity, square on.

It did not harm him. He’s a Storm-Marshal; a little wind won’t hurt him.

It took his pants.

The Sacred Storm-Trousers of the Nine Heavens, woven from living lightning, treasure of forty generations, were torn clean off the Storm-Marshal of the Thunder Court by a clerk’s sneeze and went spinning up into the clear blue sky, crackling, end over end, while their owner stood frozen in the middle of the yard in his magnificent crackling robes and a pair of very ordinary, slightly worn, sky-blue smallclothes, in front of several hundred people and, through the Records, a good fraction of the continent.

The silence lasted exactly one heartbeat.

Then the Sacred Storm-Trousers came back down out of the sky and landed, draped, with perfect and humiliating grace, directly over my head.

The yard detonated. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

I have never heard a sound like it. People weren’t just laughing — they were roaring, weeping, falling over, pointing at the half-dressed Storm-Marshal and the demon-slayer wearing the Thunder Court’s nine-thousand-year-old treasure on his head like a fallen kite. And the gold letters were already unrolling across the cloudless sky, bigger than I’d ever seen them, the number spinning so fast it blurred:

✦ DING. ✦

A NEW LEGEND IS BORN.

"Lin Bo humbled the proud Thunder Court with a single breath and claimed their sacred trousers as a trophy. They name him now: the Pants-Thief of the Thunder Court."

Belief: 97%. Reach: continental. New epithet acquired.

[The Sacred Storm-Trousers of the Nine Heavens] (believed artifact — now yours)

Talent. TALENT. Do you understand what just happened. — Scroll

Storm-Marshal Lei made a sound I can only describe as a small thunderstorm having a nervous breakdown. He looked at his bare legs. He looked at the screaming crowd. He looked at his nine-thousand-year-old treasure draped over a clerk’s head. And in the fame economy, where dignity is power, I watched something almost as dramatic as the wind happen to him — I watched his Renown crater, his proud bright name on the Records dimming in real time as the entire continent reclassified the Storm-Marshal of the Thunder Court from "magnificent and terrible" to "that fellow who lost his pants to a sneeze."

He fled. Straight up, into the clear sky, faster than his own lightning, leaving behind only the smell of ozone and the sound of a continent laughing.

I stood in the yard with the Sacred Storm-Trousers on my head and felt my own number surge upward, up toward the very edge of Storied, the threshold humming closer than it had ever been.

Yun Shu, on her bucket, had her face fully in both hands.

"You stole," she said, muffled, "the pants. Of the Thunder Court. By sneezing. Twelve days before the biggest tournament in the world." A long pause. "I’m adding it to the file. I’m running out of words for the file."

Tao Tao was writing furiously, tears of joy streaming down her face. "’And lo,behold’" she narrated, "’the demon-slayer took even the thunder’s trousers, for nothing in heaven or earth was beyond his reach—’"

"It was an accident," I said weakly, pulling the crackling trousers off my head. They hummed in my hands, alive, faintly, with nine thousand years of thunder, and — because the whole continent now believed they were mine — they were. Whether I wanted them or not. The opposite of quiet. A pair of pants that announced me with a soft roll of thunder every time I moved, so that I could never, ever again enter a room without the sky clearing its throat first.

Perfect. Exactly what a man who wants to be left alone needs. Loud magic pants.

"Twelve days," Scroll said happily, gazing at my soaring number, the threshold of Storied glowing just overhead. "Twelve days to the capital, and you’re already this big, and you haven’t even arrived yet. Oh, talent. They’re not going to know what hit them."

I looked down at the thunder-trousers humming in my hands, and up at my name climbing toward a rank I never asked for, and I thought about ten million people, and the Empire’s cold eyes, and a stage I couldn’t fake my way across.

"No," I agreed quietly. "They’re not."

I just had a very bad feeling it might be me.