Face-Slapping15 min read
My Luck Turns: The System, the Sauce, and the Bandit Brothers
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"I'll give you one last choice," Ainsley Becker barked, voice as rough as river stones. "Forty taels now, or you marry into the Liu house as a concubine. Pick."
I opened my eyes and met her with the only look I had left: empty, a thin line of amusement threaded through it.
"You think I'm stupid?" I said. "You think I'm the one who should pay because someone else died?"
Ainsley reddened, then smiled as if she'd won a wager. "Of course. Who else has the money? You and your poor mother. It's simple."
Behind her a crowd had gathered; the rain had driven gossip-starved villagers into the yard. I felt that mechanical voice in my head like a cold coin dropped into a cup.
[CONGRATULATIONS HOST: Turn-Tide System bound successfully.]
[TIP: Collect negative emotions to earn Fortune Points. Please proceed, Host.]
"Fortune Points?" I muttered. "Fine. Let's play."
I watched Ainsley puff and preen. She loved being the loudest voice in a small world. Every inch of her wanted to stamp me into the mud, and every inch of me wanted to let her try—if only to see what the system would reward.
"She killed him!" Ainsley shouted. "She cursed him! Pay up."
"Pay what?" I asked the crowd. "You took the bride gift. You returned it because the groom dropped dead. Why should my mother and I pay your debts?"
They stared. Ainsley leaned forward, the smell of her anger like old linen.
"She is deceitful and without shame," Ainsley hissed. "She will be sold to the Liu house tonight."
"Then do it," I said. "Sell me to a house full of old men and you'll still be wearing that dress tomorrow. You'd better choose wisely."
[Fortune Points gained: +50 from Ainsley Becker.]
The mechanical voice chimed again and I almost laughed out loud.
"You—" Ainsley started to sputter.
I let her sputter. I slid my hand to the handle of the wood-splitting axe leaning against the wall and wrapped my fingers around it like a farmer or a fool. Thunder grumbled as the crowd pressed closer.
"You will not treat my mother like this," I said. "You will not take what you did not earn. The money is in your pocket, not ours. You earned that."
"That girl's lying!" Ainsley screamed.
"Is she?" I spread my hands as if offering proof. "Look at me. I have no store of silver. I have a mother who scrubs the river, and a back like a weathered hoe. If I was as powerful as you say, why would I be standing here soaked?"
[Fortune Points gained: +100 from Ainsley Becker.]
Ainsley’s face soured. "You shameless wench," she spat.
"Or lucky," I said softly.
Her hand came at me like a cartwheel of anger. I stepped back, caught the motion, and—because the system told me nothing else about fighting but everything else about consequences—something happened.
[PASSIVE ABILITY ACTIVATED.]
[Host's Anger Threshold reached. Physical override engaged.]
A blackness rose like smoke along my spine. It was absurd and ridiculous and utterly useful: behind me, my breath fogged with a shape that had no right to be in daylight. Horns twined with shadow. A maw that wasn't a mouth but a promise merged with the air above my shoulders.
Ainsley dropped her hand. Her bravado melted and left her face slack with a new, raw thing: fear.
"Who—what is that?"
She stumbled back. She didn't say another word to me. She fled. The villagers cleared like reeds, and I stood with the axe in my hands and a system chime still ringing.
[Fortune Points: 1100]
[SHOP UNLOCKED: Draw Wheel — 100 points per try.]
I tried the wheel because I had nothing better to do; spending Fortune Points felt like trading a small secret for a big gamble.
[THANK YOU FOR PARTICIPATING.]
"Of course," I said to no one. "Of course it's rigged."
I tried again, and again, and what felt like dozens of times until my points were drained and I stared into a bowl where ten live carp appeared, heavy and glinting.
"Finally," I said. "Real fish."
I carried those carp home like treasure. My mother—Gabriella Cross—smiled in the way poor women with steel under their ribs do: quietly, as if any louder would muffle gratitude.
"Where did you get these?" she asked.
"From the river," I said. "And from a little wheel of fate."
She laughed with frayed joy. "Then cook. A good meal for us and we sell the rest."
We ate my acid-spiced fish—the kind of cooking I'd seen on streaming shows in another life, the way a pinch of sugar and a slow pan can make the ordinary burn like currency—and my mother’s eyes filled. She traced my hair with the palms of her hands and said, "You're clever, Camilla." She used my name like a talisman and I pinched the sound, storing it.
I had come from a different century to a body that was not mine. My fingers still remembered how to pace a camera, how to arrange light, but hunger learned quickly what my memory could not: how to bend old recipes into something new. The Turn-Tide system buzzed impatiently in the back of my skull like a small machine that wanted to be fed.
Those carp were the first real thing it let me buy: a fourth-place prize that looked like a meal to a woman who'd starved through other people's choices.
I took the carp to the market and sold most of them, and that small silver tightened like a rope around my plans.
"RULE #1," I told Gabriella that night between stacking pots. "Don't trust the man who gives you a tableful of rules."
"Ain't no rules in the world," she replied. "Only people that keep them."
Then came the bandit. I found him half-dead beneath a willow, dressed in embroidered fabric that stank of nobility gone wrong. He clutched a little pendant stamped with the character nine—an odd, glossy "9" in a cold blue stone—and when I touched it the strange machine voice gave a new readout.
[RECOGNITION: Royal token detected.]
[ADVISE: Caution.]
"What are you doing out here?" I asked him.
He opened his eyes with a grunt that was more pain than words. "For the brothers," he said. "They were attacked."
"Who's they?" I asked.
He blinked and I noticed the lashes, the quiet sorrow. "You can call me Vaughn Garza."
"Vaughn?" I said and then, because it felt ridiculous to be giving advice to a dying man, I added, "You look like trouble."
He smiled, briefly, and passed out.
I had a pouch of the system's prize: a pair of healing pills that smelled like old pine and a little gold glow. I split one in half, fed him, and the wound sealed like a lie well told. He woke in fog, surprised to find I had stripped him down and covered him with reeds.
"Why?" he rasped.
"Because someone had to," I said.
He looked at me for a long time the way a man might look at a woman who has just complicated his life.
"Then you have hopes I owe," he said.
"Don't call it that," I told him. "Call it business."
A bruise of respect spread.
Vaughn left as soon as his legs could carry him, taking the pendant and leaving me with a faint memory that he would reappear. Favors turn into obligations faster than you think.
Business did what business always does: it grew.
I made mushroom paste—my own touch, a trick from my other life tucked into the system's food book—and I walked it to the doors of a failing inn, the Taste House. The manager, a man named Colin Osborne, yawned.
"Who are you?" he said.
"Camilla Bianchi," I told him. "I have something to offer you."
He tasted a spoon and his eyes went wide like a coin table cheated. "Where did you learn to do this?"
"From a found cookbook and my own hands," I said. "I want to sell exclusively to you. You keep the customers; I take a third."
He agreed.
Soon the line wrapped around the corner. Five jars a day. Fifty. Men who'd never tasted a mushroom so alive in their mouths—this paste had the texture of meat and the cunning of a new idea—brought their silver to Colin. Business was practical magic; I learnt that money moves like water and the right trick is calluses at the right time.
Of course the jaws on our road closed their fingers around the story. Gossip travels on a faster wheel than anything I could spin; my little fame found a sinkhole in the person who had resented me from the beginning.
Ainsley learned. Her greed was a mammal that smelled food. She came with bright promises like a trader and a grin like a stolen coin.
"Let me help you," she said. "Open to other houses. Expand. I can be useful."
"No." I kept my voice smooth. "You burned your chance, Ainsley."
Her face tightened to points. "You'll regret this," she said.
[Fortune Points gained: +500 from Ainsley Becker.]
"Then do your worst," I said.
Ainsley huffed and left, and I knew then what the system wanted most: not my kindness or my skill, but my enemies' anger. It rewarded heat. It rewarded spectacle. It never once cared if I was kind. This was a machine tuned to human friction.
She tried to copy my paste. She bought mushrooms by the cartload, shredded, boiled, tightened. The jars she sold smelled sharp and wrong. One rainy dawn the town's old woman—the grandmother everyone used to bow to—threw a cup of Ainsley's sauce on the ground and spat.
"This tastes like a liar," she said.
Ainsley begged for more customers. She bargained for my recipe. She stole from my stove.
I set a trap. I wrote a recipe with salt and sawdust. I left it where she would steal.
She took it. She cooked. She hawked day and night and then the jars were returned. The old woman had everyone taste. The jars were bitter. Ainsley heated under the sun like a moth over a flame. She moved like a trapped thing and the villagers circled like flies with curiosity.
I could have let the market be my judge, but Ainsley had more stings to give. She walked to the elders with words stuffed in her mouth as if they were knives. She urged the matriarch to split property, to shove my mother and me out like an old broom.
"Enough," I said. "If you're so convinced of your rightness, then let's set the ledger down. Let's decide openly."
I asked for a public hearing. The village square filled—mothers with their baskets, men with their plow hands and suspicion. News travels thirsty and the square is the river.
"People," I called, the Turn-Tide system whispering in the back of my head, "you know what I am. You know me by my mother's hands and by my cooking. You know who took the bride gift. You'll hear the truth now."
Ainsley stood like a coiled thing. Her mouth worked like the hinge of a trap.
"You will listen to me." She fanned herself. "She is a liar."
"Then tell them how you have profited," I said.
She straightened and finally let go of the script she'd been feeding the crowd. "I bought mushrooms and made jars. I alone did this work. I earned my silver."
"Do you claim the gift was yours?" I asked.
"My daughter—"
"You took the bride gift," I said. "You returned it because you feared reproach. You said you'd paid it back. The money went into your pouch, Ainsley. You are the one who demands forty silver now."
Gasps dropped like pebbles into water. The market hummed with the sound of bated breath. Ainsley's lips curled into a lie so practiced it looked like custom.
"False," she said. "You have no proof."
"Proof is a habit of cowards," I said. "So we will call witnesses."
I had not expected to marshal a show, but the system likes spectacle, so I offered spectacle. I summoned those who had watched her carry the chest of gifts—the butcher, the baker, the women who had sat under the eave while she counted coins. One by one they came forward.
"My grain of truth is small, but I saw the pouch," said Bennett Nguyen, the butcher. "She had heavy coin for many days."
"She pressed a heavy coin into my hand once," said Cal Chambers, a small trader. "She asked me to go to town, saying she had business. She had more silver than she'd ever have."
The crowd murmured. Ainsley’s face shifted from vanity into a brittle grin and then into something paler. She raised her voice as if pitching someone else's tune.
"You all have your memories," she said. "But my daughter—"
"No more lies," I said.
She laughed, a short bark that tried to hide fear.
"I have done nothing that law will punish," she insisted. "You cannot turn the village into a tribunal for gossip."
"Then we will make it a tribunal," I said. "Bring the ledger."
The village's headman—Seth Schulz, a thin, oily man whose hands fit law like gloves—was cued and moved as if an invisible string pulled him forward. He held out his hands with the slow, practiced theatrics of a man who benefits from the chaos of others.
"You want the law?" he said aloud, the county's magistrate in name but not in spirit. "Bring me the proof."
"Here," I said and placed a small cloth on the ground. From it I drew the fake recipe with false margins and false makers—the exact recipe Ainsley had stolen and used. I had sprinkled it with charcoal in a way to make it look ancient and the words I wrote were the ones she'd copied.
"She used my instructions," I said. "I left the recipe where anyone could see it. She stole it at night."
Ainsley snatched the paper and held it out like a shield. "This is hers," she cried. "I found it—"
"You found it in my hearth," I said. "And you told the magistrate you had earned your money. You promised to share. Instead you used it to coerce."
The magistrate adjusted his cap and looked at the crowd. "We must be careful," he said. "This could be slander."
"For whom does slander matter," I asked, "if the one who stirs slander is the same who pockets the wealth?"
A silence dropped like glass. It broke when an elderly villager—Earl, a man whose name was a pointed thing in a list of small characters—shuffled forward. "I kept accounts when I was a boy," he said. "Ainsley came and she took the chest. I saw her. I counted when she left."
His voice rolled through the square.
Ainsley's posture weathered. The smug line of her jaw slipped. Her breath hitched. For the first time she was not the person in control. She blinked, then laughed.
"This is fantasy," she said. "You all have been misled."
Faces leaned in. Murmurs threaded into mutters.
"You stole from a mother," a voice called. "You sold a daughter's shame for silver."
Ainsley sputtered and then tried to reclaim a script. "I— I have a right—"
"Right?" I snapped. "Right is sweat you earned. Right is not a coin dropped on a dinner table. Right is not the rusted kindness you bartered for power."
Her face hardened into armor. The crowd reached the peak of attention. People had decided, as crowds so often do, that this was the entertainment the day had promised.
Then the unthinkable: old Mrs. Dove, who'd kept the accounts the way some women kept cathedrals, held up an envelope bulging with rough notes. "I kept a ledger," she croaked. "She promised to pay back the twenty taels. She did not."
The villagers began to hiss. The air smelled of damp earth and old indignation. Ainsley’s smile collapsed.
"You're lying!" she said first proud and then taut. Her whole body began to tremble like wood ready to split.
"Maggot-mouth," someone muttered. "How dare she?"
She stood at the center of the square and the turn in the crowd's mood became visible. Men who had nodded to her before now looked away. Women who had tolerated her chorus of small cruelties now spat words like knives.
"You will pay the ledger back," I said. "You will apologize now in the square before all of them."
For a second she looked triumphant as if she had a card to play, then the card slid away. Her eyes tracked the faces that had just started to turn on her.
"No," she said. "You cannot make me—"
At that moment a child's cry split the air in the back of the square. The sound created the exact kind of chaos the system liked—a physical punctuation.
[Fortune Points awarded: +500 from gathered villager outrage.]
Ainsley's breath hitched. Her face went from defiant to pale. She stammered, reaching for the words she'd always kept in reserve. "I—this is not true! I have done nothing wrong. I—"
"Then write she embezzled," someone called, and a rain of testimony fell. "She lied about the bride money!" "She took it and called it charity!" "She poisons her own pastries!"
Ainsley lurched. She went from anger to denial to a scrambling whisper.
"This is a mistake," she begged the magistrate, "I can repay, I can—"
"Begging won't patch the holes you've made," said Gabriella, my mother, voice steady as iron. "You will publicly make amends."
The crowd pressed in. The magistrate’s face was a slick mask of neutrality. He adjusted his cap and picked his terms as a man who chooses legalities the way a farmer chooses weather.
"You will account for every coin," he said. "You must return what you can and stand in penance in the square for three days and nights."
"A demonstration," someone cheered.
Ainsley's face changed then in ways I had imagined and wanted to make an art of. For a moment—six heartbeats, no more—she was the queen of the common room, smirking, enjoying the last rays. Then the smirk gave way to wide eyes, then to a smooth slide into denial.
"I did not take—" she said, voice thin.
"You did," Bennett said, practically spit at the word. "You can deny it but the ledger is here."
From smug to shocked to denial. Her body trembled and then sagged; her knees bent. The whole arc of emotion fell out of her in a wet rustle.
She sank onto a small stool someone thrust at her and pressed her hands to her face. "No, no, this can't be," she whispered, the words old and useless.
The square hummed. Phones do not exist here, but a new kind of recording did: a woman with a drawer of tablets that she used to mark accounts coughed and started to scribble faster, drawing the scene into memory. Children pointed, women wept, men muttered and the sound mounted into a chorus: shock, gossip, some clapped.
"She has been exposed!" a voice cried and then another voice said, "Good riddance!"
Ainsley's face crumpled. She drooped like cloth wet with rain. "Please," she begged at last. "Please. I can return it. I can repay. Forgive me, please."
Her voice changed into something entirely transparent—no armor, no pretense. The crowd tightened. Some looked at her like an animal in a trap, some with a new curiosity, and the sound ringed like a bell.
I had wanted the system to harvest her emotion. I had wanted life to pay the debit she had levied on my past. I had not wanted the manacles of public shame. But Ainsley had built a world comfortable enough for her to forget the sting of the poor. The square’s judgment is not the court of law, but it is no less real.
"Beg," someone said, voices low, wanting spectacle. "Make them believe you are small."
She did.
"Kneel," another said.
She dropped. She put both palms on the earth, forehead to dust, the classic posture of humiliation. She was not forced to her knees by law; she put herself there as if to better count the silver she'd lost.
"No," the magistrate said—less from mercy than from the theater of the moment. "We will not let a family be ruined for trinkets. You will make reparation."
Around us the square erupted into claps and murmurs, some clapping at the result of justice—others at the spectacle more than the justice itself. Old women whispered to their neighbors, children yawned, men nodded.
The system chimed.
[EVENT TRIGGERED: Public Reckoning complete.]
[Fortune Points awarded: +1500.]
Ainsley’s reaction had met the arc: smug, shocked, denial, collapse, beg. The crowd's reaction had matched the required beats—shock, whisper, clap. I had what the system wanted.
And yet as I looked at her—this woman who had tried to sell my life later that day—I felt, briefly, the thinness of my vengeance: a satisfaction that tasted like ash. I had wanted safety for my mother and me. I had not wanted to watch a human being fold under the weight of her own choices. The system gave me the outcome, but asked nothing of my compassion.
"Enough," Gabriella said, and I felt her hand on my shoulder. "We take our share and go back to housework."
"Mother," I said. "I need to know what's next."
She smiled in the small way mothers do when they have survived another day. "We eat. We keep what we need. We work."
We did. Business continued and grew; the Taste House multiplied its customers, and the soap bubbles of rumor in the village popped. Colin sent me a share of fees. I used the points to buy seeds, to buy a small space in the system to breed fish. I trained men from Vaughn's group to plant herbs on old terraces near the hill where he said his brothers could guard the crop.
The bandits—Vaughn Garza, Bryson Cardoso, and Lorenzo Dorsey—became more than rescuers. They were partners in a grain-and-herb venture I was building like a ladder to the future.
"You're scaring them," Bryson boomed once at clouded dinner, knocking a plate with his fork so it clattered.
"Who, the villagers?" I asked.
"You. They gossip and they fear, and some of them respect you. Brokering between a woman and a bandit is a rare bread. Be careful."
"I'm careful," I said.
You learn to be careful in a world that rewards spectacle and punishes negligence. Still, the system threw me a near-impossible task one month: collect three thousand Fortune Points in three days or lose the Turn-Tide System forever.
"Three days?" I whispered when the warning pinged like a guilty conscience.
"Three days," the system said, helpful and blunt.
I had a choice: inflame the village or salvage goodwill. I did both.
I pushed, pried, coaxed, and then, the machine laughing like a hungry child, I started provoking people. I tested the edges of their patience to collect the energy of their anger. Ainsley was an easy harvest, but I needed more.
I rallied the market, deliberately mispronounced an old woman's name, baited a trader about his scrawled accounts until he red in the face. People reacted. I apologized quickly, publicly. I used the artful insult the way musicians use dissonance: to create an awareness that resolves into harmony. The system rewarded me as if I were lighting kindling.
Three days ended in a dizzy rain of numbers and a small, ecstatic chime.
[GOAL ACHIEVED: 3000 Fortune Points collected.]
[REWARD: Breeding Space unlocked. Oversee aquatic stock.]
I sat outside the new fishpond and watched the surface glint. On the banks Vaughn leaned back on his hands and lit a pipe. Lorenzo sharpened a sickle. Bryson hummed and carved a spoon.
"You're lucky," Vaughn said. "Or dangerous. Both scare me."
"You're the one who gave me stamina," I said. "You healed because you were injured. The world hands us debts and favors."
He laughed. "Then we are even."
Weeks stretched into cycles. We had moments of sweetness—mushroom jars sold out, the bandits planted herb rows, Gabriella's cheeks filled back out with the slow glimmer of good food. We had nights when the wind pressed our eaves like a hand. We had the system's small unpredictables: a signal, a bonus, a suggestion that always felt like a game thrown down by a bored god.
One night, with the pond glassy and the lantern smoke curled like a comet's tail, I felt the system's chirp inside my skull. My finger traced the blue "9" pendant Vaughn had lost and then returned to me once—its presence now was like a promise.
[ALERT: Item of royal origin detected. Case file flagged.]
[ADDITIONAL: Security token in local bandit leadership confirmed.]
I looked at Vaughn. "Where did you get that pendant?"
He touched the chain and looked far away, eyes as honey-dark as evening. "Long story," he said.
We laughed, because long stories are the only things we trust in a world that buys justice for coin and sells kindness for favors.
Months later the square was different. The bandit brothers walked through town no longer a menace but an awkward sort of honor: they had given the dowries back, helped build a water trough, and taught a dozen villagers how to plant a row of herbs. They had their own cracks—loyalty, a stubborn love for the old code—but they were changing.
Ainsley moved away, quiet as a shut door, and I kept my recipes in a drawer that smelled of thyme. The Turn-Tide system stayed. It reminded me, in its soft robotic voice, that fortune is a currency like any other: made of motion.
At the edge of the pond I tied the little blue pendant to a reed—a small altar for luck that had saved my life and my family's—and I caught my reflection and the nine, and Vaughn's face in the reflection like a promise I didn't yet own.
"Do you think this will last?" Gabriella asked once, sitting beside me, her hand in mine.
"Nothing lasts," I said. "But everything can be made to hold another day."
[END OF STORY.]
The End
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