Here is something you’d never guess about being investigated by someone who wants to prove you’re a fraud:

When you are also trying to prove you’re a fraud, it should be the easiest thing in the world.

We wanted the same thing, Yun Shu and I. She wanted to show the world the demon-slayer was fake. I wanted that too, more than I’d wanted anything since the noodle shop. We were, in theory, the perfect team. I should have been able to hand her the truth, gift-wrapped, and watch her dismantle my nightmare with eleven years of professional skill.

Instead I spent the week watching her make it worse, exactly the way I had, and slowly going as gray in the face as I imagine I look right now telling you about it.

It started the morning after she opened her inquiry. She arrived at Cinder Lane at dawn, brush and ledger ready, and she did what any good investigator does: she interviewed the witnesses.

This was the first mistake, though neither of us knew it yet.

"You were present the night of the alleged demon-slaying," she said to a dumpling seller, in the flat voice of someone who has asked a thousand questions and believed maybe four of the answers. "Describe what you saw. Precisely."

"Oh, it was glorious," the dumpling seller said, eyes going dreamy. "The demon king was forty feet tall. Wings like a thundercloud. And Master Lin Bo just—" he blew gently across his palm "—breathed, and the beast came apart like smoke."

Yun Shu’s brush paused. "Forty feet."

"At least."

"The report I’m correcting says the subject was struck by a single breath at close range. It says nothing about forty feet, or wings, or coming apart like smoke."

"Well, that’s because the report’s modest," said the dumpling seller, as if explaining something to a child. "Same as the demon-slayer himself. He’d never let them write how big it really was."

Yun Shu wrote something down. I was standing a little ways off, hood up, trying to be invisible, and I could see her jaw tighten. Because here was the thing she’d built her whole career on, the thing that had never once failed her: a lie has cracks. Two liars never tell the same story. You interview enough witnesses, you find the contradictions, and you pull.

But these weren’t liars. The dumpling seller wasn’t trying to fool her. He believed the demon was forty feet tall. They all did. And the more of them she interviewed — carefully, precisely, comparing every account — the more she did the one thing a fame-deleter must never, ever do.

She made people talk about it.

A real investigator, from the actual Heavenly Records, standing on Cinder Lane with an official ledger, writing down the deeds of the demon-slayer? By midday there was a crowd watching her watch the case, whispering that the heavens themselves had sent someone to study the great Lin Bo’s victory. By afternoon the bards had a new verse: "So mighty was his deed that Heaven sent a scholar to record it."

The number in the corner of my eye ticked up all day. I didn’t even have to look. I could feel the warm tide rising in my chest, fed by every careful question she asked.

"This is the best thing that’s ever happened to us," Scroll murmured happily, riding my shoulder. "She’s thorough. I love a thorough one. Do you know how much belief a proper investigation generates? She’s doing my job for me, talent, and she hates you. It’s poetry."

But the real disaster — the one I think about most — was Exhibit A.

On the third day, Yun Shu found the shoe.

You’ll remember the shoe. The thief — the small nervous man with the bad knife — had run so fast he’d left one shoe behind in the alley. It had been sitting there ever since, because nobody had wanted to touch anything connected to the demon-slayer.

Yun Shu picked it up with two fingers, held it up to the light, and for the first time all week, something close to satisfaction crossed her face.

"A shoe," she announced, loud enough for the watching crowd to hear, holding it high. "A mortal’s shoe. Cheap cloth, worn heel, a hole in the toe. Not a demon’s. A man’s." She turned to address the crowd directly, the way you do when you’re about to win. "This is the footwear of your ’demon king.’ I am logging it as evidence. Exhibit A. The ’demon’ was a thief who lost his shoe running away. There was no beast. There was a frightened man and a coincidence."

It was a good move. It was, honestly, exactly the move I would have made. Show the people the boring true thing, hold it in your hand, name it, break the spell.

It would have worked on any normal rumor.

But she’d forgotten — or rather, she didn’t yet know — the rule that runs this whole cursed world. She’d just taken an ordinary object and officially connected it to the legend. She’d made it part of the story. A real investigator from Heaven had held it up and declared it evidence in the great case of the demon-slayer.

I watched it happen in real time. I watched the crowd look at that sad cloth shoe, and I watched belief do what belief does, and I watched the meaning bend right out from under her.

"That’s the shoe," someone breathed. "That’s the shoe of the demon Master Lin Bo felled."

"Heaven’s own scholar says it’s the real one—"

"A relic."

"It’s a relic!"

A woman pushed forward and tried to touch it. Then three more. Then a man dropped to his knees in front of a dirty cloth shoe with a hole in the toe and started to pray, and the gold letters flared over the alley, and the number jumped so hard I actually staggered:

✦ DING. ✦

Legend strengthened: "The very shoe of the felled demon, confirmed authentic by the Heavenly Records." Belief surge detected. Reach climbing sharply.

Yun Shu stood frozen, holding Exhibit A over her head, as a crowd of strangers wept and reached for it and called it holy, and her one solid piece of debunking evidence became, in the space of about ten seconds, a sacred object that made the legend stronger than it had been all week.

She lowered the shoe slowly.

She looked at it. She looked at the praying man. She looked at me — really looked, for the first time, past the "fraud" she’d decided I was — and I saw something flicker behind her tired, precise eyes that I recognized, because I’d felt it myself, on the floor of my own office, with a useless stamped form in my hand.

It was the look of a professional watching their one reliable skill stop working.

"I’ve debunked four hundred frauds," she said quietly, almost to herself. "Inflated heroes. Bought legends. Staged miracles. Every single one came apart when I pulled the right thread." She turned the shoe over in her hands. "I have never, in eleven years, pulled a thread and watched the whole thing get stronger."

"...No," I said, before I could stop myself. "It does that."

She looked up sharply.

And for just a second — just one — she wasn’t looking at me like a fraud she was going to expose. She was looking at me like I might be the only other person in the world who understood exactly what she was up against.

Then her face closed again, professional, certain.

"I’m logging the surge," she said, "and the relic, and I’m doubling the inquiry. There’s a trick here, Lin Bo. There’s always a trick. And I am going to find it if it takes me a year."

It wouldn’t take a year.

It would take about one more day, because the next morning, an actual demon showed up to kill me — and Yun Shu was standing right there to watch it happen.