The servant's quarter assigned to her name, or rather, to the nameless body she currently occupied, contained the following: one crooked shelf, one sleeping mat with the structural integrity of strong opinions, one ceramic water basin, and a list of daily duties written in brushstroke so aggressive it bordered on a personal threat.
Lin Moshi read the list twice.
Then she sat down on the mat, which exhaled sadly beneath her, and had a very serious conversation with herself about the consequences of her own narrative decisions.
"You wrote this," she told herself. "You wrote the Eastern Meridian Sect's outer servants wake before dawn to draw water from the eastern well, then report to the kitchens, then clean the meditation corridors, then..." She stopped. Pressed her fingers to her eyes. "You wrote twelve hours of manual labor a day and called it 'atmospheric world-building.'"
The list did not offer sympathy.
The mat wheezed.
"I deserve this," she said.
✦ ✦ ✦
She drew water from the eastern well at dawn, which was when she discovered the second problem.
The well was frozen.
Not frozen as in iced over, frozen as in the bucket had stopped exactly halfway down, the rope holding it at a precise angle that defied gravity, and the other three servants assigned to the well were standing around it with the blank, patient expressions of people waiting for something to happen that had already happened and would happen again.
Lin Moshi set down her own bucket.
She had written the Eastern Meridian Sect's morning routine in chapter three. She had described, with some pride, the peaceful rhythm of the outer disciples beginning their day; the well, the kitchens, the mist on the training grounds. She had not, technically, written what happened next. She had moved on to the main plot. She had left these people in their morning routine like furniture left in a house after everyone moved out.
The bucket swung gently at its frozen angle.
One of the servants blinked. Reset. Reached for the rope with the exact same motion she had made thirty seconds ago.
"Okay," Lin Moshi said quietly, to no one. "Okay, that's...that's fine. That's a completely normal thing that is happening."
She picked up her bucket, walked to the kitchen to report that the well was experiencing 'a situation', and spent the next four hours carrying water from the secondary cistern on the north side of the sect instead, which she had mentioned in a footnote of her story bible and immediately forgotten about.
Her arms started hurting at hour two.
Her arms were furious at her by hour four.
"Atmospheric world-building," she muttered, hauling another bucket up three flights of stairs. "Absolutely necessary for the narrative. The readers will appreciate the authenticity."
There were no readers. She was the reader. She was also the character, the author, and the woman whose arms were now conducting a small revolution.
✦ ✦ ✦
She saw Gu Yanche again at midday.
She was cleaning the third meditation corridor; sweeping with mechanical focus, trying not to look directly at the junior disciples who occasionally looped through the same five steps at the end of the hallway, when she heard footsteps that didn't loop. Footsteps with direction and purpose and the particular rhythm of someone who knew exactly where they were going and had already decided the fastest route.
She kept sweeping. She stared at the floor. She was a nameless servant and he was a powerful background character and if she did not make eye contact perhaps the universe would allow her this one small mercy.
"You're sweeping the same section again," said Gu Yanche.
Lin Moshi looked at the floor. He was correct. She had been sweeping the same three tiles for approximately four minutes without noticing.
"I'm being thorough," she said.
"You swept those tiles this morning."
She looked up despite herself. He was standing at the corridor's edge with a scroll tucked under one arm and the expression of a man who had decided to be curious about something against his better judgment. He looked exactly as he had at dawn; composed, precise, faintly dissatisfied with the state of observable reality.
"You were watching me sweep this morning?" she asked.
"I was passing through this corridor this morning," he said, in a tone that made the distinction very clear. "You were sweeping. I noticed. I notice things."
"That must be exhausting," she said.
Something shifted at the edge of his mouth. Not a smile, more the shadow of what a smile might theoretically look like on a face that had not committed to the concept yet.
He looked at her for a moment. Then: "The well on the east side has been frozen since yesterday. The mechanism is not damaged. The rope simply stops at the same point every time, as if..." He paused.
"As if it's stuck in a loop?" she offered.
His eyes sharpened. "You've noticed it too."
This was the moment, Lin Moshi reflected, where a sensible person would say something vague and deflecting and walk away. She had written Gu Yanche as someone who could identify a lie at forty paces and pursue an inconsistency with the patient intensity of a man with nothing but time and high standards.
She had done that to herself. She had written that character and put him in this world and now here he was, sharpening his eyes at her.
"I've noticed a few things," she said carefully.
"Such as?"
"The junior disciple by the east gate. Third-year robe, scar above his left eyebrow. He walks that same path every twelve minutes."
Gu Yanche was very still. "I counted eleven minutes."
"I was rounding," she said.
They looked at each other across the meditation corridor. The afternoon light came through the paper screens at a precise, unchanging angle; she had described this light once, getting the atmosphere right, and it had been frozen here ever since like a painting of a moment rather than the moment itself.
"Who are you?" Gu Yanche asked. Not unkindly. Not warmly either. The way you might ask a question you weren't sure you wanted answered.
"Moshi," she said. "Outer servant. Formerly of the water-carrying division, currently of the corridor-sweeping division, very much suffering in both."
"That's not what I asked."
"It's what I answered."
Another pause. He looked at her with that precise, annotating attention; the kind she had written into him because she liked characters who paid attention, who noticed, who saw the world in fine detail. She had liked writing it. She liked it considerably less from the inside.
"The loops," he said finally. "They started three days ago. Small things at first, a candle burning at the same height. A door that opened on the wrong side of the wind. Now the well. The disciple." He glanced toward the end of the corridor, where the junior disciples were cycling through their five steps with cheerful obliviousness. "This sect has forty-three senior cultivators and eleven elders. None of them have mentioned it."
"Maybe they don't notice," Lin Moshi said.
"Or maybe," said Gu Yanche, with the quiet precision of a man drawing a conclusion he did not yet have words for, "they cannot."
The light held its angle. The disciples looped. Somewhere outside, the bucket was still suspended at its impossible point above the frozen well.
Lin Moshi thought about forty-three senior cultivators who had been written into the background of scenes she'd moved through quickly. Who had been given names and titles and nothing else. Who existed here in the same loop, endlessly, because she had never written them doing anything different.
She thought about Gu Yanche, who had no completed scenes. Who she had left unfinished. Who was, by every law of narrative she had ever studied, the only person in this entire sect who could step outside the story she'd written.
"You notice things," she said.
"I told you that."
"Has it always been like this? Or is it recent?"
He considered the question. "Recent. As if something changed. As if something, arrived." His eyes moved back to her. Stayed there.
Lin Moshi smiled at him with the expression of someone who absolutely was not the inciting incident of a narrative disaster.
"Interesting," she said. "I'm sure it will sort itself out."
She picked up her broom and walked away down the corridor at a pace she hoped conveyed calm authority rather than urgent retreat.
Behind her, she heard Gu Yanche say nothing. Which, from a man she had written to express displeasure through silence, was somehow worse than anything he could have said out loud.
She had three problems now.
One: she was in a broken, looping world with no cultivation and the arms of someone who had been carrying water all morning.
Two: the only fully unpredictable person in the entire story had already decided she was a variable worth tracking.
Three: she had just realized, with the sinking clarity of a writer confronting her own outline, that she had left absolutely no notes on how to fix the world. The story bible on her laptop, the one she had color-coded and cross-referenced and titled with such confidence, ended at chapter forty-seven with the words: FIGURE OUT THE REST LATER.
Later, apparently, was now.