Ye Qiong Tilts the Ground

Li Yuguo stood in the narrow lane and felt the ground tilt under his feet.

Ye Qiong.

The protagonist. His protagonist. The wheat-skinned boy with the sealed bloodline and the system in his head and the halo so bright you could read by it. Standing right there in front of him, close enough to touch, with his hand on his sword and his chin in the air and his chest still puffed out from that ridiculous speech.

No, Li Yuguo thought. No, no, no. This is wrong. This is completely wrong.

Ye Qiong was not supposed to be here.

Not now. Not for half a year. In the original story, Ye Qiong did not arrive in Nalan City until the bloody storm was already breaking—and by then he was at the very peak of the Martial Soul realm, a monster in the making, strong enough to cut through the city's defenses like paper. Strong enough to obliterate Nalan Meng on her own walls. That was the whole point of the timeline. That was why Li Yuguo had half a year to prepare.

It had been a few days. A few days.

And the Ye Qiong in front of him now was nowhere near Martial Soul. Li Yuguo could feel his Qi from here—fierce, bright, hot, unmistakably talented—but young. Raw. A Martial Teacher, perhaps, touching the edge of Advanced Martial Teacher. Barely a step ahead of Li Yuguo himself.

Why is he here? What changed?

Behind him, he felt a small hand clutch at the back of his robe. Jun Xue had pressed herself against his back, trembling, hiding from the stranger's sword.

---

He looked at Ye Qiong's face—at the sharp sword-brows, the fierce bright eyes, the arrogant tilt of the chin—and a sour, uncomfortable feeling crept into his stomach.

He knew exactly what kind of person this was. He had built him.

When he wrote the novel, he had followed the trends of the web. He had written a xiaobai story—a simple, fast, satisfying power-fantasy, light on logic and heavy on face-slapping. And he had given it the kind of protagonist those stories always had: a Long Aotian. The arrogant dragon. The one who never bowed, never doubted, never lost. Who was always right, and always righteous, and always stronger than whoever stood in his way, and who answered every slight with his fist.

He had done it for the readers. Most of them were trapped in their own lives—in jobs they hated, in cramped rooms, under bosses and landlords and parents and debts. They did not open a web novel to see a hero hesitate. They opened it to vent. To watch someone stand up and smash everything that had ever pushed them down, without a second thought. Ye Qiong had been their fist.

And on the page, it had worked beautifully.

But now Liu Mang was standing in front of that fist, in the flesh, and seeing it for the first time without the page between them.

In reality, a man like that was not a hero. A man who never doubted himself, who judged every situation in an instant by his own feelings and acted on that judgment without listening to a single word—that was not a hero.

That was an extremely self-centered person with a sword.

Ye Qiong had already drawn it. The blade slid out of its scabbard with a long, bright hiss, and he leveled it at Li Yuguo's chest without a word of explanation.

---

"Hero," Li Yuguo said carefully, "you and I have never met before."

He did not want to fight. Not now. His cultivation had only just begun; he had been a Martial Teacher for all of three days. His resources were nowhere near enough. And even if they had been—Ye Qiong had the protagonist halo. Li Yuguo had written that halo himself. He knew exactly how it worked. In any fight where the protagonist was in the right, the world itself bent to help him. Swords missed him. Cliffs held under his feet. Enemies tripped at the critical moment.

Fighting Ye Qiong head-on was like fighting the weather.

But Ye Qiong's eyes had narrowed, and recognition was dawning in them.

"Hah! I know you," he said. "I've only just come back from a training trip outside the city, and look who I run into." His lip curled. "You're that bastard. I've heard all about you. You're the King of Soft Rice of Nalan City. A man who eats his wife's food. A useless pretty boy." He spat the words. "What could a thing like you possibly do?"

Come back from a training trip?

Li Yuguo searched his memory. And there it was. Yes—there had been such a thing. In the early chapters, Ye Qiong had gone out on a training expedition with some of his fellow disciples from the sect. They had run into a powerful monster in the wilds, and fought it, and come back changed.

But they had not come back this way. In the original, Ye Qiong's group had returned to the sect along the official road outside the city walls. He had never come through Nalan City at all. Not then. There was no way he should have met Li Yuguo today.

So it had changed.

Li Yuguo had come into this world as its author, and his presence alone had altered things—subtly, quietly, like a stone dropped into a stream. The current had shifted. And the fates of Li Yuguo and Ye Qiong, which should have stayed apart for another half a year, had bent toward each other.

"What a coincidence," Li Yuguo said, and smiled broadly, and switched into his most ridiculous voice. "I didn't expect to bump into anyone today, and here you are, passing right through here! Brother, don't you think the two of us are very destined? Heaven has brought us together in this lane! Truly, the threads of karma are mysterious!"

If there was one thing an author was good at, it was talking nonsense. He could quote scriptures. He could spin destinies out of thin air.

Ye Qiong spat on the ground.

"Bah! Destined my ass! If my horse hadn't gone lame and crashed into a tree and died, I wouldn't have come this way at all!"

Li Yuguo's eyes narrowed. So that's it. A lame horse. A dead horse. A tiny accident, and the whole story jumped its tracks.

---

"This girl," he said, more seriously, and put a hand back to steady Jun Xue where she clung to his robe, "was about to die. I just saved her. So what exactly am I guilty of?"

"You're stubborn, aren't you?" Ye Qiong sneered. "The common people all say you're the King of Soft Rice here, and the eyes of the common people are sharp! A scum like you buying a slave girl—what else could you want her for?"

"The—the slave was truly rescued by the young master."

The voice came from behind Li Yuguo. Small, and trembling, and very brave.

Jun Xue had stepped out from behind his back. She was shaking so hard that her white hair trembled on her shoulders, but she held up her thin bare arm, so that Ye Qiong could see the pink new skin where the welts had been.

"The young master is a good man," she said. "He healed my wounds."

Ye Qiong looked at her arm. And for one moment, something flickered in his fierce eyes—uncertainty, maybe. A doubt.

Then it was gone.

"Girl," he said, and his voice went soft and pitying, "you must have been brainwashed by him. Don't be afraid. Wait for me! I'll save you!" His sword came up. "I'll get you out of this bastard's claws!"

And he charged.

---

"Go," Li Yuguo said to Jun Xue, pushing her gently behind him. "Get back. This one's not good."

"O-okay…" she whispered, and scrambled back down the lane.

She trusted him. He could see it in the way she went—not running away, but backing off to where he told her to go, her pale eyes fixed on his back. Between the stranger who had drawn a sword on her savior and the man who had healed her wounds, she had already chosen.

Ye Qiong did not see it that way. Ye Qiong had decided who the villain was the moment he stepped into the lane.

And Li Yuguo, standing there with Ye Qiong's sword flashing toward him, felt deeply, bitterly wronged.

He had poured everything into this character. Every gift. Every power. Every setting that made Long Aotian heroes beloved—he had piled them onto Ye Qiong's shoulders. And he had missed one thing. He had never once stopped to think about what such a person would be like if you actually had to stand in front of him.

Whoosh!

The sword came straight at his heart.

Li Yuguo dodged—fast, the Lieyang fire flaring in his legs—and the point hissed past his ribs. But Ye Qiong had not committed. Mid-thrust, he twisted his wrist and turned the stab into a sweeping slash, and the edge caught the front of Li Yuguo's robe and tore it open across his chest from one side to the other, a long ragged gash in the silk. Cool air hit his bare skin.

A hair deeper, and it would have been his skin opening, not his robe.

Cold sweat broke out across Li Yuguo's back. His talent is terrifying. He had written it, and still he had not understood. Ye Qiong's sword changed direction like water.

"You won't escape this one!" Ye Qiong gritted his teeth, his eyes blazing. "True Swordsmanship!"

He came on again, without another word, the blade a blur.

---

But Li Yuguo had not been idle these past three nights.

He had practiced the Pao Fist in the dusty garden behind the guest room until his knuckles bled through their bandages. He had cultivated the Lieyang Shenjian until dawn. And the Lieyang Shenjian was an internal art—it did not just fill the dantian; it poured outward into the body, burning through muscle and bone and sinew, making them faster, harder, stronger.

He watched the sword come. He saw the opening.

He took it.

"Cannon Fist!"

He slipped inside the arc of the blade and drove his fist into Ye Qiong's stomach.

BOOM.

Ye Qiong grunted and staggered two steps back, doubled over, the breath driven out of him.

But in the same instant his sword had flicked out, almost lazily, and its edge had kissed Li Yuguo's left shoulder. A line of fire. Then the warm wet rush of blood, soaking through the torn silk of his robe and running down his arm in a red sheet.

Li Yuguo clutched his shoulder and hissed.

Not enough. Three nights. Three nights of cultivation against eighteen years. Even with his father's art, it was not enough to simply crawl up to the protagonist and slug it out with him. Ye Qiong had been training since he was a child.

Ye Qiong straightened up, rubbing his belly, and looked at Li Yuguo with open contempt.

"Tsk, tsk," he said. "So you've got a couple of brushes after all. I didn't expect that. But look—you're hurt worse than I am." He leveled the sword. "Hand over the girl honestly, right now, and I won't kill you. I'll give you a chance to reform yourself!"

A chance to reform.

Li Yuguo laughed. He could not help it. It came out of him short and harsh.

"Hehe. Do you know what I despise most?" He pressed his palm against the wound on his shoulder; blood leaked between his fingers. "Decent people like you. People who always believe they're righteous, and look at everyone else through their own eyes, and decide who's good and who's evil before they've heard a single word." He lifted his chin toward the end of the lane, where Jun Xue stood pressed against the wall, watching. "So you take her away from me. Fine. Then let me ask you. Will she really be better off by your side than by mine?"