Face-Slapping11 min read
"I Finally Went Home — And Caused an Uproar"
ButterPicks15 views
I remember the moment like a bright, outrageous photograph.
"Bring the bride out!" someone shouted.
"Prince Cristian, you promised," the crowd whispered. Then the trumpet of a man's voice cut through the courtyard, low and cold as iron.
"No. I will not marry her. Ever."
"How dare you!" an old voice bellowed from the palace balcony.
I lifted the red wedding veil without thinking. My hands trembled, then I laughed so loud it startled everyone.
"Prince Cristian, how could you—" I sobbed and leaned toward him.
He only answered: "My heart belongs to Heart alone. I will not take you."
A small bell chimed inside my mind.
[ Ding… Congratulations, host: one hundred rejections completed. Reward: freedom to cross times, and a streaming starter pack. System will unbind in three, two, one… ]
I threw the bridal veil to the ground like confetti. "Hahaha—Mom!" I called, barely able to keep the grin in my throat. "I, Christina, finally can go home!"
The court dissolved into chaos.
"She's a witch!"
"She's a godsend!"
"Look! She vanished!"
I did vanish. The last thing I remember was the warm weight of an envelope pressed into Prince Cristian's hand, then the world turned white and I sat up in my dorm bed with a system ping in my ear.
[ Notice: System unbinding. Before departure, a mysterious bundle will be presented. Two buttons: red and green. Choose wisely. ]
Dani banged on my door. "Christina, seven minutes to class!"
I punched the red button because my thumb twitched and fate likes accidents.
Three hours later, in our modern university lecture hall, my phone buzzed. Mateo Chen—the kind senior who often smiled like he held a secret—asked if I'd join the club dinner.
"Will you come tonight?" he asked in a polite text.
"Sure," I typed. "I'll be there."
I could not tell him my other life: the silk banners, the emperor's fainting, the live sky in that other kingdom that had watched me vanish. I couldn't tell him about the streaming panel left floating in the air like a window onto a madness.
At lunch, Dani and I took our seats; she dug into her bag. "Christina, your notes—"
"Take them," I shrugged. "I'm fine."
The professor droned on. My hands picked up the habit of being inside two worlds at once. I tapped at the system's little streaming tile and the screen over a thousand years away lit like a second sun.
"Who is that pretty girl? Is she the prince's bride?" a voice from the old kingdom asked, stunned.
A hundred yards from the old wedding courtyard, Prince Cristian Marino stood very still with the envelope in his hand. He'd thought I was mad; he called me spiteful; he had never suspected I'd be laughing as I left.
"Traitor!" someone spat.
"My son will not obey!" the emperor roared. Then he doubled over and fainted in a fit of royal dizziness. People started whispering about gods, curses, and the odd girl who laughed when she was rejected.
Dani nudged me. "Are you okay? You look… haunted."
"Just tired," I said. "Let's go to the dinner."
I did not know then that my evening cup of milk tea and the club chat would be seen live above rice fields and that those watching would call me an enchantress or a saint according to whoever felt the most threatened or grateful at the moment.
"Christina, want to join us for hotpot?" Mateo asked later, shy as ever.
"It would be rude to say no," I replied.
"Good," he smiled. "It's a small celebration—we won a club award. Come sit with me."
I sat beside Mateo with a calm that did not reflect the sky-sized screen over the old kingdom.
"She's sitting with another man!" someone from the palace commentary shouted.
"How could she abandon our prince?"
At that moment, Prince Cristian's silence broke. His fingers tightened around the envelope as he read a few words written in careless ink.
"Who is 'Liang Zhichao's grandmother, big fool'?" he asked bewildered.
"It must be a code!" whispered the court. "It must mean something!"
"She's shameless!" said Princess Stella angrily when she saw the livestream. Princess Stella had swaddled herself in blue and reached for the prince's arm as if to secure a claim.
"She won't matter," she said to him. "I am yours."
I laughed that night, though. When I should have fretted in a foreign court, I told a story instead. We played True Talk at the hotpot—truth or dare for a bunch of sleepy engineering majors—and when I had to choose between telling a truth or performing, I elected to tell a story.
"I'll tell a story about a chancellor named Isaac," I began. "If anyone knows the name, you get bragging rights."
"Do we get bonus points?" Mateo asked.
"Damn right," Dani grinned.
I told the story of the Su family because, while the world above watched our antics and stirred with curiosity, the old kingdom needed a story to take its measure of real treachery. I spoke of a man who was a loyal official but had the misfortune of marrying a woman with a poisonous heart. I told of a younger brother who schemed, a sly, crooked woman named Fernanda who took everything, and a boy—Charlie—who, out of desperation, sold the city's very defense to merchants across the border.
As I spoke, the old sky glowed white-hot and everyone in the capital stopped feeding chickens and went to peer at the picture-plane.
"Wait—he sold the map?" a man in the crowd gasped.
"That's treason!" someone shouted.
"You made that up," a courtier called. "How dare you!"
"Tell us more!" another cried.
Little did anyone know, my telling was an unspooling of memory. I had seen the map stolen. I had seen the boy flee. I had watched the bad woman trade smiles like paper. I told the tale with the taste of truth on my tongue, and the palace decided it was well enough to act.
"Arrest them," the emperor hissed to the generals. "Bring the chancellor to me."
I kept my hands inside my sleeves and smiled into my paper cup when the palace erupted.
The fall of the Su family happened fast. The emperor's anger was a blade. He convened a tribunal, and the public square filled like a pot steaming with pinched, hungry people. I watched it live from my phone, with Dani and Mateo leaning over my shoulder, laughing at a video about foldable chairs and the next second dropping their jaws as a crowd down the ages roared.
"Justice will be served," the emperor promised. "The map is to be returned, and traitors will be punished."
The judgment day was the worst part of the whole business.
They paraded them—Fernanda and her accomplices—into the main square. Isaac the chancellor, his shoulders bowed, knelt on the marble steps and begged, "Sire, I know not—"
"You knew," the emperor said. "Your child sold our defense."
Charlie—soiled and shivering—stood apart, the first boy I had seen brave and clueless and suddenly very small.
The crowd's murmurs folded into a single, dense thing. Someone shouted for blood. The city lanterns swung like pendulums, and even the sky-screen pulsed with attention.
"Bring forth Fernanda Soto," the herald called.
She stood on the raised dais, pretense of dignity threading every movement. "You have no proof," she declared, voice brittle. "This is lies and shame."
"No," the emperor said. "We have the cloth merchant's account, and the map itself was recovered at the border. Bring evidence."
A dozen guards shoved a wooden chest onto the dais. They opened it. The city's defense map, folded and salt-stained, lay inside. People around me—watchers in a millennia-late audience and those of the present court—shivered with the same harridan thrill.
Fernanda's face shifted. It was the first change on that morning of doom: smugness, then confusion, then denial, then a slow, thinned panic.
"You lie!" she cried.
"Guards, bind her hands!"
They bound her wrists at the back with thick hemp. The crowd began to chant for a spectacle. In such moments, the public wants not just justice but a narrative that proves rightness is on their side.
"Tell the truth!" a farmer screamed from the crowd.
"I will not!" Fernanda shrieked. "You cannot—"
A herald stepped forward with a long parchment, his voice carrying. "We present the evidence that proves your crimes: letters, the merchant receipts, your own signed pass to the border—"
Fernanda's eyes bulged.
"Shut her up!" someone demanded.
Her voice, which had been high and confident, faltered. "This is witchcraft," she stammered. "This woman is a liar—"
They brought her down the marble steps so she stood face to face with the emperor. He looked at her as if she were something that had once been useful and was now garbage.
"Do you deny your actions?" he asked.
"I—" She stopped. The world had turned into a circus tent and she could not find the words to string across the chasm.
"Very well," the emperor said coldly. "You will face public correction. For the breach of trust and your treachery—"
The punishment was cruelly ceremonial. It needed to be public and humiliating to mark the fall from a life of privilege to the gutter.
"Bring the brazier," the herald intoned.
At this the crowd gasped. The brazier was not for burning; it was for branding and for showing. They uncoiled a length of heated iron and placed it before Fernanda. Smoke licked the air as she staggered.
"Stop!" she screamed. "I didn't—please—"
Her voice was a thin thread. The courtiers closed in; some wept. The spectators, a million eyes between then and now, recorded and pressed their faces close.
"Before we begin," the emperor said, and it was a voice not of mercy but of a ledger put right, "speak now. Admit your guilt."
Fernanda's face went through the stages required by the world to make the punishment meaningful. First, arrogance—"I dare you"—then a flicker of disbelief—"This cannot be"—then denial—"You cannot prove this"—then collapse—"No, no," and finally, the raw and breathless plea for mercy.
"Please!" she cried. "Beg you—"
"Silence," the emperor said.
They took her down to her knees. They placed the heated iron to the back of her hand, not to burn off flesh but to brand a mark of iron to shame her name in the city ledger. The heat was unbearable. She tried to wrench away, but the guards held her firmly, ropes biting into her wrists.
"Please—please—I swear I did not—" Fernanda lacerated the air with her voice. "It was the servants, it was the—"
"No," the emperor said, finality like an oath. "They will answer for their deeds at the proper time. You are the architect of this ruin."
The iron touched. Smoke rose. Her lips peeled back in a sound that was almost a laugh and almost a hiss of pain. The crowd lurched together, waves of thrilled and ashamed faces. Children at the edges watched their parents with the first notions of justice entering the fiber of who they would become.
"Look at her now," someone near me whispered. "She who took and lied."
"She is no noble," another said. "She is less than a servant now."
When they finally pulled the iron away, the brand left a raw sear and the stench of burnt skin.
Fernanda's expression collapsed into one last phase the city demanded: pleading.
"Please," she begged, voice nothing but a string of wet noises, "have mercy, I can pay, I can—"
The crowd responded like a tide. Some hissed, some applauded, some recorded. They loved to see the towers fall because they had once lived under them.
She was led away, wrists marked, head bowed. Half the crowd jeered. Half whispered about the gossip that would spread through the marketplaces for years. And when she fell to knees before the prison door, she begged for water and no one offered it.
The chancellor, Isaac, wept. He had not been punished with iron but with shrapnel of shame. He lost office and riches; his voice was thin and broken. Charlie—his son—stood forgiven by the emperor in the end because he'd been a puppet of greed, but the people loved the story of the villain and the brand, and without a long theatrical penance, the public would not feel absolved.
When it was over, I closed my phone.
"Christina?" Mateo touched my shoulder. "You alright? You look like you saw a ghost."
"I just told a story," I said. "Stories have a way of changing things."
"You're good," he said, in a tone that was both praise and awe. "You should be on stage."
"Maybe in another life," I answered.
The system pinged again.
[ System: Finalizing transfer rewards. Gift: a public streaming bundle and a temporary broadcasting channel linking your two lives. Note: Do not disclose to royals. ]
"I didn't know the streaming would do that," I said.
"You can get famous in two worlds," Mateo murmured.
That night I lay awake thinking of the brazier: not the heat on her skin but the way the crowd needed to see someone fall to feel safe. The system had been a prankster but also a weapon. When the emperor wielded it, cities burned; when I spoke it, families fell. No wonder the old kingdom had a thousand faces.
Time blurred. The foldable stool Dani and I had filmed went viral in that other age. People there began to carry it to weddings; a minor delight turned into a cultural fetish. The city merchants made paper versions and sold them for small-coin fortunes. The tea shops started a drink, "Christina's Cup," and I was amused and repelled in equal measure.
"Your chair sold out," Dani squealed the morning after. "You are trending in the other millennium."
"Great. I'm an influencer of feudal life," I mumbled.
"Own it," Mateo laughed. "You could be a bridge."
A bridge indeed.
Months passed in waves of viral oddities. The old kingdom's sky-screen kept returning, each time with a new trick or a new product. The emperor made the strange decision to weaponize what he saw, and my fame became a tool. The night came when political decisions followed entertainment, and alliances were made on the notes of what a "celebrity" had said about chairs or tea.
I tried not to meddle. But I had learned the weight of words.
One evening, the sky-screen showed a different thing: the emperor had twisted the law and arranged for Princess Stella to be wed as a favor to a foreign power unless Prince Cristian agreed to a strategic marriage that would take him to distant lands. The prince showed up at my window—years ago, in silk, now in the pixel-screen—eyes wide and raw.
"Christina," he said in a message I heard like wind, "you have no right to this world."
"No," I said aloud to my empty room. "But I have every right to leave."
I kept a small red envelope in my pocket—Prince Cristian still had the paper I'd shoved into his hand the day I vanished. If by chance I ever stood in another courtyard, someone up there might remember I had handed it off.
There were hard parts. The emperor began to suspect that the screen could be tamed. He began to send envoys to grasp the skeleton of technology he could not understand. Craftsmen were rounded up. The city tradespeople made copies of folding chairs and drank "Christina's Cup" and each small delight became a problem in the king's calculus of power.
"You can't keep doing this," Mateo told me once, when a new edict appeared in the old kingdom banning certain public broadcasts because they "weakened public faith."
"What am I supposed to do?" I asked. "Not tell a good story?"
"Maybe you ought to tell one that doesn't topple lives."
He was right.
I stopped telling the Su story in the same blunt way. I started to tell better ones: about cleverness without cruelty, about how a map was returned because a child found shame and changed, not because we burned a woman's name into the city ledger.
Yet the punishment had happened. Fernanda's brand stayed visible across the square for days, and the story they told became an example: do not betray the city.
At the end, after the scandal and the branding, I tucked my folding stool into the closet, answered messages from Dani (who had been offered a small reality show), and sat with Mateo over a cup of hot, indifferent tea.
"Do you miss it?" he asked.
"Which part?" I shrugged. "The palace or the branding?"
"The palace," he said quietly.
I looked at him, then at my bruise-free hands. "Sometimes I miss the silk. Sometimes I miss the danger. Mostly I miss the certainty of disappearing."
He touched my hand then, soft and harmless, and said, "Stay."
I smiled. "That's tempting."
There are many things I have learned since that first bell.
One: a stream is a river if enough eyes watch it.
Two: a story told at dinner may become a verdict in a court.
Three: the red button should be pressed with intention.
And four: the little folding chair—my stupid little viral invention—has more power than any crown the emperor wears.
When I finally put the chair on the shelf, dust settled on its hinges and I felt a quiet. The screen pulsed one last time that night, like a heart slowing, and I remembered the brazier and the chant of the crowd.
"Don't forget," Mateo said as we stood under the streetlight, "what you did is real. People were hurt. People were helped. You can't be both judge and storyteller forever."
"I know," I sighed. "But I can be a witness."
He smiled like he wanted to argue, then did not.
In the morning, I found an envelope on my desk: a gift from the system—a small digital card that read, "Use the green button to invite one person back. Use the red button to sever the streaming link."
I looked at the two choices and thought about the brazier, about public shame, about the boy who sold a map because he was hungry. I pressed the green.
A hush like a held breath.
"Who are you bringing?" Dani demanded.
"Someone who should see what we did," I replied.
The screen lit, faint and clear, and then—like closing a loop—I heard a voice I had not heard since a courtyard and a veil.
"Christina," it said, with a thousand pasts in it, "why did you laugh when I was rejected?"
I looked up, heart in my throat. I could either let the laughter be a carefree crack or a stone thrown into a pond. I chose instead to be honest.
"Because I was tired of bowing," I said, as the two worlds blinked and listened.
And when the other world heard that answer, it understood something I had not known I was ready to teach.
The End
— Thank you for reading —