Face-Slapping18 min read
I Took the Job That Said “We Feed You” — and Found Ghosts, Games, and a Mountain God
ButterPicks13 views
I arrived at the Sunshine Home at one in the afternoon with a bag in one hand and Ida Braun in the other.
“Ida, sit down,” I said as gently as I could. “Let me put your things here.”
Ida laughed with the soft, tired smile of a woman who has run a shelter for thirty years. “Melissa, you’re a whirlwind. The children already call you ‘Director Mom’s big helper.’”
“You’re the director, Ida. I’m just the troublemaker who can carry two bags at once.” I tried to sound light. “How’s your leg?”
“You fuss too much,” she said. “But thank you. You didn’t have to take time off.”
“I had time. And anyway, somebody had to make sure you didn’t fall into a puddle and break your ribs.” I put the bag down and arranged the folded clothes on the bed.
Nelson Webb, fourteen and stubborn as a burr, popped his head in while carrying another small bag. “Miss Melissa, where should I put this?”
“Leave it by the table, Nelson,” I said, and my hand found the boy’s cropped hair without meaning to. “I’ll take care of Ida’s things later.”
“Okay!” Nelson saluted me, like soldiers in the movies, then raced off.
The yard was full of children who wanted to know if Ida was okay and if the “director’s daughter” — me — could stay for dinner. Ida waved them off with a small chuckle. She was retiring in a few days; the city had assigned a replacement. She’d thought to buy one last set of supplies for the kids and slipped in the rain. Her son and daughter were both out of the city, she said. The social workers were overwhelmed. She had called me. I came.
When I stepped outside the courtyard the world felt lighter. I reached into my canvas bag for a chocolate bar — small pleasures — but my fingers brushed a red envelope instead. I opened it. Two thousand, in neat bills, and a tiny note in Ida’s handwriting:
“Melissa, a little for your trouble. Don’t tell anyone I gave you this. — Ida.”
I smiled despite myself. “Idiot,” I whispered at myself. I tucked the envelope back into my pocket and walked toward the street.
A flyer slapped my face on the way. I peeled it off and stared. Black background, blood-red letters, and a promise of food and a roof. A place called Infinite Studio hiring “NPC actors” for immersive game worlds. “We pay ten thousand a month. We feed and house. No age limit.”
I laughed out loud in the empty street. “Offer too good to be true,” I muttered, but my thumb already typed the address into my phone. White Crane Road, ninety-nine. It was only a block from my apartment. I had nothing but time, and I liked free food.
I took the cab.
The Infinite Studio front glass doors breathed cool air. A woman at the front desk, angular in white, barely looked up from her screen when I asked about the poster. Her name tag said Claudia Poulsen.
“Yes, that’s ours,” she said without smiling. “Follow me to Personnel.”
Emmett Davenport introduced himself when I handed him my CV. He was all slick black suit and office charm. “You have experience in a haunted house? Excellent. We need people who can commit.”
“Haunted houses are fun,” I said. “I did the blood bride at the old Ferris Park.”
“Perfect,” Emmett said. He waved a hand like a conductor over a chorus of phantom clerks. “We’ll bind you to the system. It’s quick.”
“It’s a system?” I asked. The tech man — Graham Roberts, headphones and everything — blinked and made a small noise. “You’ll bind through brainwave mapping.” He said it like a dentist explaining a filling.
A glass chair, a plastic helmet, and a mechanical voice later: “System 7664 bound: user Melissa Mohammed. Species: human. Age: twenty.”
The chair hummed, the helmet lifted, and my phone buzzed. “Emmett sent you to the Ghosts’ Group,” Claudia chirped. “We have a welcome dinner tonight.”
“Is the food included tonight?” I asked, immediately.
“Yes.” Emmett grinned like he’d won a bet. “Come. We’ll introduce you to the staff. Everyone’s... unique.”
I signed the contract with my thumb. One copy for me, one for the studio. A small, neat staff card printed with my name. They said I could live on my own if I wanted; they’d pay me the wage and assign me to sets. The studio was run mostly by people who were no longer quite in the living world in the way most of us were.
“Do you mind being around them?” Emmett asked.
“Not at all,” I said. “No one ghosted me in college.”
That got a smile from someone — Claudia, Pilar, or maybe Mariana — a current where the room didn’t quite cool.
The dinner at Xiang Manyuan was full of jokes that hung between people as easily as steam. “She’s human!” someone said and everyone went quiet for half a beat, like the word alone changed the air. Later, on the way home, my system whispered, “Next assignment arriving soon.” The next morning I woke up to cheerful alarm music and a message that blinked in my head.
“Host entering a new module,” the system instructed. “Prepare.”
Five minutes, and the world turned.
I was inside an office I’d never seen before but could instantly imagine: faded motivational posters, a broken clock stuck at 9:20, and a small mug that read “World’s Okayest Teacher.” A mechanical message scrolled in my brain:
“Host: Melissa Mohammed.
Module: South Huai High School.
Role: High School Art Teacher, Class 3-1.
Skill: Painting.
Goal: Eliminate at least two players.”
The system voice made it sound clinical, but my chest tightened. Eliminate. Not kill — the system’s rules were a blur I had been told: players could die inside a module and wake up outside, but the pain was real. Some players never came back. The studio told me to be an NPC who played roles, who kept the world in balance. I was not supposed to be a killer. The system? It had other ideas.
I found the school cafeteria easily enough — it smelled like steaming chicken broth and schemes. Three women called me by name right away. “Aiya, you’re here,” said Pilar Duncan, plump and loud, who seemed to have been stove-born and flame-shaped. “What’ll you eat? Dumplings? Noodles?”
“Dumplings, lots of chili,” I said.
Pilar winked. “Good. Eat quick. The students get hungry. And don’t be surprised if most of them won’t eat — they’re weird about our food.”
“So I feed them anyway?” I asked, and they laughed like the joke was tasty.
“You’re new. We’re old. You keep whoever’s got sense alive,” said Mariana Garcia. Estella Miller, the grim girl everyone whispered about, hovered in the corner. She didn’t smile. Her quiet had teeth. She was the sort of person when she looked at you you felt the skeleton in your own chest.
“We got reports,” the staff chat said later: “Ten players inside South Huai today. Two old players. Lots of newbies.” The group was already lighting up with rumors.
The players arrived like pieces on a board: Gunner Falk, lean and used to risk; Maddox Soto, nervous and veteran; Chester Ma, who knew food and fear and how to heat both; Jessica Vang, quiet and watchful; Nelson Lindgren, shrugging at the moon; Aurora Rios, who had authority in how she moved; Damon Pavlov, always halfway to a joke; Joanna Harvey, who blinked too fast; Cassandra Arnold, fierce-eyed; Bruno Rinaldi, distracted.
“What’s our plan?” a confident player named Gunner asked in the classroom where the module dumped them.
“Survive,” said Aurora. But the game was written in stress and cards. “Pick a role. Find the school’s three real spooky events.”
I stood at the blackboard and taught art. “Color defines mood,” I said. “Draw what you fear.” My students — some of them the players — watched me like a reality TV show paused between commercials.
At lunch, a group of them joined me. Gunner sat, fork poised. “Teacher, do you know the school’s history?” he asked.
“This? It’s eighty years of students and little tragedies,” I said. “The second-floor girls’ bathroom has a rumor. The library has a corner someone called ‘the dead shelf.’ Everyone says it’s haunted.”
“Who spreads these rumors?” Jessica asked.
“The system,” I said, and laughed like an old joke.
I had a painting in the back of my office that I’d done on a whim to test the system’s rules: a portrait of a girl with a mischievous smile who might be an easy monster. When the lights were low I could make that girl’s painted hand reach out. I had used it once before — pushed someone into a painting like shoving them through a closed door. It felt wrong, yes, but it was also a soft way to sidestep the system’s harsh task: eliminate players. If I could trap them harmlessly in a painted room, give them time, then release them — maybe that counted as helping. “Eliminate” was not defined in every context.
At night, things changed. A girl named Joanna claimed she’d seen a shadow with pearl bracelets on the sports field. The next day two players were missing — or so the report said. A card with Maddox’s name appeared alone on the field. We panicked a little. We scoured corridors. I decided to test my painting trick: a quiet hallway, a blank canvas, a breath, a brushstroke.
“7664,” I whispered. “Anchor: operate.”
The heady moment when a painted door appeared looked like nothing: a rectangle of oil and light. Gunner stopped; he was curious and brave in equal measure. He slipped just his fingers through. His hand vanished like smoke.
“Melissa!” Gunner’s voice came muffled, then none. I felt guilt hitch my ribs.
Later he reappeared, messy and pale. “You tricked me,” he said, not angry, just tired. “I was in a room where time doesn’t tick. My watch stopped. I felt every minute like a day.”
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
“Like drowning with your eyes open,” he said.
“Then don’t go back,” I told him.
Outside the painting, the players still argued about the tasks. They made plans, alliances, and mistakes. I taught art and sometimes taught mercy. A few players learned to trust the ladies in the cafeteria, especially Pilar. “Eat,” she told them. “You are heavier when you are hungry for the wrong things.”
But the module kept pushing. Two players vanished from their beds. Two more were found asleep. The system’s scoreboard blinked — completed, failed, living, gone.
On the third night, an old teacher with blood on her face confronted a player named Huo Meng in the corridor. She screamed, and the player stuck a scrap of a talisman to her forehead. Huo Meng had used a “confuse” talisman — the cheap kind that fools NPCs for thirty seconds. The teacher’s blood vanished. She was again merely stern and human.
We were winging it. The studio’s rule said: protect the world, act your role. I had my own moral sense: don’t let people die for points.
I played with the painted world more than I should have. I kept gallery visits to myself — small rooms where players could sleep without the system’s eyes. It worked. Two of the disappearing players had been withdrawn into my canvases. They came back bewildered and alive. The scoreboard labeled them “eliminated” in the cruel way a game labels chess pieces, and then later “restored.”
“Are you allowed to do this?” Emmett asked when he caught me in the control room.
“It’s my job to be convincing,” I said.
“The system wrote you the sentence about eliminations,” Graham said dryly. “But your contract says no unsanctioned interference.”
“I’m not killing anyone,” I said.
“You’re bending rules,” Emmett said. “Which means you could get fired. Or worse, the system could reassign those duties.”
“Or you could have kept the job,” I said. “And you’d still be sitting behind a desk. Which do you prefer?”
He smiled, a tired man without illusion. “I prefer payroll.”
When the South Huai module ended, seven of ten players made it to the end. Two of them never showed up again: Maddox Soto and the dorm warden Jessica Vang were absent and unaccounted for. Rumors spread like spilled broth. I spoke to a few of the older NPCs: Pilar, Mariana, Claudia. Even they had stories. They called those stories “lore,” and said you should not be surprised by patterns. Players vanish. Some return. Some don’t.
“That’s why this job is humane,” Pilar said to me one night, refilling my bowl. “We feed people. We keep them human. If you can, you do.”
I sighed and wrote another self-portrait on my canvas. I drew a girl with a crooked smile and a tiny wooden pen in her hand. The pen was a token. I had found it in the studio — a little lucky charm Emmett had keep as an office thing. I drew it into the girl’s fingers because I liked small symbols.
The system pinged and said: “Next module assigned: Hunter Mountain Village. Prepare.”
I didn’t know how big the world could get. The bus into Hunter Village was cramped and hot. My role was different here: I was supposed to be a village girl visit — part of a big family. Emmett had arranged for a family data set: a father, a mother, older siblings. I took on the warmth like wearing someone else’s sweater and loved it. The villagers smiled at me — at the girl my role belonged to — and I began to care for them.
The players who arrived here were seven university kids on a holiday: Gunner Falk again (my face felt too familiar to him now), Qin — who organized it — and two couples among them. Players always show up again, reused by the system in new skins. They laughed, traded gossip, and assumed the village would be safe. They were wrong.
The mountain’s festival was meant to be bright: paper lanterns, food stalls, a choir of voices. I helped prepare the temple instruments — polishing the jade bowls and setting the incense alight. The mountain is old. The stone there is older than my grandparents. The villagers still spoke to a thing they called “the Mountain Spirit.” It was folk talk, odd corners of superstition that the game sometimes amplified.
That morning, I stood at the shrine in ceremonial dress. I felt something watch the village. I spoke the rites the system gave me, and the villagers watched like they believed. The family I had been assigned to nodded proudly. For once, I wanted my actors to have something real.
The Z-family — the local family who had paid to be the honor bearers this year — arrived with a woven red cover over something heavy. People whispered. Zhao’s family had a bad reputation: the kind of men who replaced eyes with greed. They wanted to gain favor this year with something special. At the head of their group was a man who carried himself like a man used to being obeyed: Nelson Lindgren in town clothing, but in my world he was the Z-family’s eldest son.
“Raise it,” the Z-family leader called.
The cloth came off. Under it lay two people: students from the group — cold, limp, and covered. A hush like oil smothered the crowd. “Human sacrifice,” someone whispered.
I went still. “You can’t do that,” I said.
Zhao’s son — Nelson Lindgren, now the family’s proud voice — smiled like a man who had practiced cruelty. “We give the mountain something worthy,” he intoned. “You all want this village to prosper, don’t you? If the mountain is pleased, it will bless us. If not...”
“Stop!” a college kid named Qin lunged forward to pull the two students away, but six men from the Zhao family had already spread out like hands. The crowd murmured, terrified but powerless.
I felt the pressure of a crowd. This was public, and it was terrible. My heart hammered. In that brief, floating second between the red cloth and the horror, I made a small choice: I stepped up, on instinct, and spoke.
“You don’t need to do this.” My voice with the system inside me had edge. The villagers looked at me, the “village daughter” who had been chosen for the rite. They looked to their shame and the sudden possibility that someone would say no. I kept my voice calm. “Find other offerings. Take chickens, or grain, or the old robes in the attic. Don’t make blood.”
Zhao laughed like a blade being sharpened. “You’re young. You don’t understand. If we give the mountain a person, it will reward us for a hundred harvests.”
“People aren’t currency,” someone in the crowd yelled back. The voice grew into a chorus until half the village felt brave at once.
But Zhao’s family had wealth and they had planned. They tried to force the ceremony forward. They pushed the students toward the carved altar. Then something happened the likes of which none of us expected.
The air above the altar pressed down like a hand. The stone of the shrine warmed like a living thing. Old ribbons on the shrine shivered as if caught in a sudden wind. A sound — like a bell under water — struck every ear. I felt it in my chest. The Mountain Spirit noticed what the villagers had almost permitted.
Nelson Lindgren’s face went from triumphant to confused to scared like switch-plates flipping. He was the first to step back.
“Stop this, Nelson,” his sister cried, sounding small.
The crowd’s fear turned to expectation: had the mountain been angered? We all stared, waiting for doom or miracle.
Then the mountain answered. Not with thunder or an avalanche — it used a social instrument in the age of cameras: the village’s public square, the cell phones in everyone’s hands, and a light that no human had manufactured.
A clay pot on the altar shattered, and the steam it let out smelled like unmade promises. Nelson Lindgren staggered backward, eyes wide.
“You idiot!” he shouted to his father. “Turn it off. Turn it off!”
He tried to back away, but something locked his knees. He looked at us — smugness burned out — and for the first time we saw fear. Several villagers recorded the moment on their phones, their thumbs already broadcasting the scene to faceless feeds.
Nelson’s father moved to cover him. “It’s a blessing,” he lied, wringing his hands. “This is the way. The mountain wants our offering.”
A faint, cold light rose from the altar. It wrapped around the Z-family, and at once everyone knew the machine of silence had switched into a machine of exposure. The mountain’s influence unstitched their secrets as easily as untying knots.
From somewhere, a voice — not one human but like a chorus of old stones — spoke.
“Those who sell lives for profit shall have their shame hung before all,” it said.
Nelson’s face contorted. At first he opened his mouth to deny it. “There’s been a mistake,” he stammered.
“Yes,” his sister-in-law said, “a mistake.”
But the words were already in the wind. The light revealed small things: a ledger tucked into Nelson’s coat with entries for transactions, phone numbers of men who took other people; a recording of him speaking into a phone about “clearing the way” for the offer. The villagers’ phones tumbled with new footage that found them mid-breath and stunned. Every frame was a confession.
Nelson’s expression changed from denial to sharp panic. He shoved the ledger to his father, but his hands trembled. “No, no, no,” he whispered. “It wasn’t like that. I didn’t—”
His voice snapped like ice. He tried to laugh it off. “I’m rich! I can give! I can—”
The crowd’s murmuring turned into a ragged roar of revelation. People leaned forward. A breeder of rumors, now the rumor fed him back. A thousand little accusations that had been whispered for years arranged into a shape in the sunlight. The wife of a neighbor pulled out her phone and started recording live.
“Confess, then,” someone shouted. “If you have the courage, confess.”
Nelson glared. “You all will die if the mountain is angry! You don’t understand—”
The glare dissolved. The light stripped him of bravado. “I didn’t mean that,” he said, not to the mountain or to the crowd, but to himself. “I only wanted what I thought was right.”
The crowd moved like a tide. Men who had accepted Zhao’s gifts before now looked like the betrayed. “Go on,” the villagers urged. Cameras flashed. “Who else? Tell us.”
He tried denial. “No. It’s not like that. Those businesses— they were investments. We hire people; we commission talent—”
He tried laughs that broke like thin ropes. He tried gaslighting the room: “You’re jealous.” “You’re poor.” But each platitude unspooled new evidence visible in the light: a ledger of payments, receipts for bribes, photos of men and girls exchanged in the cover of night.
“You lied to us,” someone cried. Old Mother Li’s voice had been steady all morning; now it had thunder in it. “You used our names. You told us we’d eat better if we let you do this!”
Nelson’s face split into a mask of denial. “No— I— you don’t understand, you never—” His voice dissolved into a sob.
There is a sequence everyone there remembers exactly. First came the smugness, then the blink of surprise. Then the breathless denial. Then the tremor behind his words. Then the collapse.
Nelson toppled to his knees, a wealthy man reduced to pleading on mud. The ledger he’d held clattered into the dust and pages spread like white wings. The wind took them and readers looked over a life recorded in numbers.
“Stop,” he begged suddenly, looking at the faces he had scorned. “Please. I can pay. I can—”
“No,” the crowd answered. Their faces were a map of hurt and anger. Phones rose like small torches. Someone recorded his beg but the camera lens was merciless and the file went live in seconds.
“You sold your neighbors’ safety for a harvest—” Old Mother Li spat the words like teeth. “Now we’ll sell your reputation.”
The humiliation was public and exquisite. It played out in every direction: in the village square, on social feeds, via messages that pinged through countless timelines. People who had once smiled at Zhao’s bargains now scrolled and shared. The village’s older harms — petty slights, mean favors, quiet bribes — streamed into the light like travelers recognizing a familiar horror.
Nelson went from defiance to frantic bargaining to pleading. “Please. I’ll give you money. I’ll—”
“No!” a chorus of voices came. Several younger villagers — men who had been in Zhao’s employ — pushed forward and took the ledger. They read aloud the transactions, the names of the girls promised away, the receipts for the hotel the Z-family had rented to hide those who “disappeared.” Each name was a blow. With each name the mountain’s light shone harder.
I watched as phones broadcast the meanness of a family into the world. They filmed the father’s face when he first tried to blame his sons and then found evidence pointing back at him. He broke next. He grabbed his son’s shoulder and sobbed like a man who had realized the bottom had dropped out of his life.
They were human moments — ugly, intimate, unbearable — but the form of punishment was not only shame. People wanted his confession. They wanted to make it so he could never hide again.
“You thought the mountain would bless you?” Old Mother Li said, voice as steady as the stone. “You used people like goods. Now the world will know.”
Nelson’s knees cut the dirt. He tried to stand but could not. “I didn’t ask—” he stammered. “I was told; I was told the mountain—”
The crowd moved closer. A woman who had been in Zhao’s employ reached into her pocket and pulled out a video file of him counting money while men with ropes stood around. She played it for everyone. The footage showed him laughing as though it had been a joke.
The sequence of reactions had happened perfectly then: triumph, confusion, denial, collapse, pleading. The murmurs became shouts, cameras multiplied, and every witness became a judge. Someone in the crowd — a bold person — stepped forward and announced that he would livestream the confessions. The plaza filled with hashtagged outrage in seconds.
There was no tribunal, no formal sentence. The village did what it could: they cut the family from the community. Suppliers stopped deliveries. Friends stopped calls. The internet did the rest. The Z-family’s business partners texted. The banks froze accounts until proof was given. They were humiliated, bankrupt in reputation before the law could move. Nelson wept into his palms, begging, bargaining for the normalcy money had once bought: “Don’t post that part. Please. I have children.”
In the end, the punishment was both slow and immediate. Social life turned away. The family who had thought themselves untouchable was publicly revealed, undone by screens and witnesses who once tolerated them. The mountain’s vengeance took form through the villagers’ unwillingness to forgive.
When the video feeds had cleared, the final image that stayed with most of us was Nelson on his knees as a thousand phones stared at him, a man with all the trappings of wealth humbled beyond repair.
The mountain had not exacted a monstrous death. It had matched their cruelty with exposure and social ruin. It forced the community to make a choice: let such trade continue or show mercy by naming, shame, and distancing. They named the cost and would not accept the price again.
Afterward, the shrine felt quieter. The mountain’s light had receded. The campus kids were shaken but alive. The village repaired what it could. The three students who had been placed as “offerings” stirred and found their limbs free. They staggered to their feet and walked out into a village that had changed.
I sat quietly for a while under the lanterns. My hands smelled of incense and paint, a smell that would always make me remember that evening. A child ran past — Nelson Webb’s little cousin, I think — holding a small paper doll. I drew the doll into my palm and felt something like hope.
“You did good,” Pilar said when she found me. “You spoke up.”
“I just didn’t like being quiet,” I said.
She smiled, proud, and a little sad for a world that needed loudness to find justice.
Back at the studio, Emmett tapped his watch and said, “You made a difference and caused a commotion. HR is calling you in tomorrow.”
“Of course they are,” I said.
“Also,” he added, quietly, “the Mountain asked for something. The village changed. It’s rare for a module to bleed like that. Watch your badge, Melissa. Some rules are… flexible.”
I ate more than the dumplings that night. I ate because I was tired and because food is the only honest currency in a lot of worlds. I took the wooden pen I had drawn into the girl on my canvas and wrote a small line along its shaft: “Do not sell a life for harvest.”
People would retell the story of Zhao’s fall as cautionary mythology. They would replay the livestreams and use them as warnings. The Mountain would be called many things online: guardian, algorithm, karma. I’d be “that teacher,” which was fine. I liked being “that teacher.”
A month later the studio paid me, and I used a sliver of my wages to buy food for Ida and more supplies for the Sunshine Home. Nelson Webb helped me carry it to her. “You should stay,” he said, tugging a box. “I’ll be your assistant director.”
“You would get bored,” I said, smiling. “But thanks.”
We ate dumplings in Ida’s small kitchen. Pilar later sent a care package through the studio: three jars of chili oil. I put one in my system space for the next module.
On the train home that night my system pinged gently: “Next assignment queued. You have a pen in the worldspace. Use it well.”
I placed the wooden pen in my pocket. It felt small and warm, like a promise.
I had painted people into rooms, but I had also poured broth for children. I had watched a village find its backbone and seen a family fall under the weight of their greed. I had been frightened, I had been brave, and I had been messy.
As the train hummed along, I tucked my face into my scarf and thought of Ida’s note: “If anything offends, call me.” I called Ida and told her a trimmed-down version of the story. She laughed and then told me not to be foolhardy. “Feed people,” she said. “Keep them fed, and you do right.”
I promised to.
And then, because I always like small rituals, I took out the wooden pen and scratched a tiny dot into the fabric of my pocket — the place where my system kept minor treasures. The dot held like a mark. Maybe someday I’d find the box again, or maybe the painting world would open and I’d be able to let people sleep inside it for a week. Maybe the mountain would be kind for a while.
“One more thing,” Emmett wrote to me later in the inbox the system projected into my head. “If the studio ever offers you another contract, tell them to put the little clause in writing: no human cattle. The law’s a bit hazy on it, but the villagers are loud and we don’t like riots.”
I laughed. “Tell Graham to patch the firewall, too.”
He did.
But we both knew the rules would bend again. The world of Infinite Studio was a place of loopholes, of system contradictions, and of people trying to be better than the job asked them to be. We fed the living, tended to the dead’s echoes, and tried to make room for mercy.
The wooden pen was still in my pocket the next morning, and when I pulled it out and rolled it across my fingers, I felt the grain of the wood, warm from my hands — a reminder that small things can hold weight.
I kept the painting world’s door closed most days. When the module needed someone to play a monster, I did it. When it need someone to give free dumplings to an anxious student, I did that too. The system required balance. So did my conscience.
One morning, picking up a letter from Ida, I found a small folded note tucked inside my own stack — two words in Ida’s careful, looping script: “Be careful.”
I folded it into my wallet, took my dumplings, and walked to the studio.
The world kept spinning. I kept painting.
The End
— Thank you for reading —