Revenge12 min read
The Tower, The Recipe, and the Twelve Promises
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I remember the subway falling into a kind of hush that felt like a held breath. I remember my phone’s green glow painting strangers’ faces in sickly light. I remember a small green dot slipping from the screen, through my forehead, and into my head.
“System: detected host. Soul binding initiated,” a flat voice said inside my skull.
“Who are you?” I asked out loud, though no one in the dark train answered.
“I am Trial Deity Support System 001. Hello, Master Jaylene Meyer,” it said.
“My name is Jaylene?” I said. “What—this is a joke, right?”
“No joke. You are currently disembodied. Binding complete. You are in a soul-lost state. We must travel to another world to restore your essence.”
“You mean… I’m unconscious? In a hospital? What about my life? My kid? My husband?”
“Host status: previous body deceased. No direct family remain. Current host body: Layered in rural agrarian world. Game core detected: JoyTower, cultivation branch. Would you like to activate JoyTower?”
I cursed softly. My life in the city had been small and messy and entirely mine, with bills and noisy neighbors and one person I called family. “Can I refuse?” I asked.
“Why refuse exploration?” the system said, as if I’d proposed walking into a rainstorm to avoid laundry. “Activation recommended. JoyTower yields storage vault, production modules. It will aid your survival and give you resources.”
“All right,” I said. “Fine. Turn it on.”
A green progress bar crawled across emptiness and then everything snapped hard. I tasted dirt.
I woke up in a body that had worked the fields until it had that particular ache that marked a life measured in grain and small disasters. My hands were raw and my back ached like someone had pressed it into a board. The house smelled of boiled greens and smoke. Children’s breath came from cramped rooms. Someone—my someone—was gone. A dark knot lodged in my chest.
“Ma?” a small voice said from the doorway.
“Dalton?” I said. The name came out different because my mouth belonged to a woman named long ago in this body, but the warmth in the voice was not foreign. “Is that you?”
“Dalton, you’re up,” the child said, half running in. “You’ve been asleep a long time.”
I blinked, and the system pinged, and the JoyTower slid into my vision like a clean window.
“Host Jaylene Meyer,” the system intoned. “JoyTower — Level One. Storage slots: 200. Transportation: disabled until initial world cleared. Production: Flour. Currency: gold — local silver exchange available. System assistance limited in this world. Would you like to bind local operations?”
“This is my life now?” I said softly. “How many children—how many names?”
“You have twelve dependents: five sons, seven daughters. Primary name memory: family surname Meyer (host’s prior adoptive name irrelevant). Legal guardian status: confirmed. Previous husband: Quinn Farmer — deceased — respected in village. Local clan support: partial. You were last in coma, declared unresponsive, and household forced to make hard choices. JoyTower stored one item on entry: one silver bracelet. It has been exchanged.”
My throat went dry. “So I—this is what I got, huh. Twelve people, no husband, a bracelet gone, and a system that makes flour.”
“JoyTower stores. One action at a time, Master.”
I sat up straight. “Then we start.”
“Affirmative.”
“Good. Dalton, fetch the big kettle,” I said. My voice sounded strange to me—older, rougher. The children—my children—jumped into motion like trained sailors. They were efficient and thin and used to doing more than their fair share.
“Mom,” Finn said later, wiping his hands on his pants, “we—how long were you out?”
“A month, maybe more,” I lied, because the truth would only get them tangled. “Enough for me to feel like I want to change everything.”
“So what now?” Ellis asked.
“We survive,” I said. “And we do it with dignity.”
That winter was a collapse and a slow, careful rebuilding. I learned the old woman’s hands—how she stitched, how she held someone on her lap so they would not fall apart. The JoyTower produced flour: bags and bags of slotted, soft white sacks. I pressed its produce into the real world like a magician pulling sunlight from a hat.
“Jaylene?” asked Julia, the eldest girl, one night as we sorted bundles. “That flour—does it… where did it come from?”
“From away,” I answered. “From something that picked me up. We will use it to buy time.”
We brought flour to market. We traded it for cloth and a few coins. The old woman whose body I inhabited—or rather, whose life I had taken over—had been an exceptional seamstress once, and her clothwork fetched good price in a town where fine stitches were rarer than silver. “We can sew,” I told the children. “We can trade. We can make sauces and preserved meats from old packs I’ve unlocked. We can build a small stall.”
“We can do it, Ma,” Finn said, voice steady like a man twice his age.
We did it. We set up in the market square with a tarp and two benches. People crowded around the tiny stall because good food smells like hope. I mixed the spices the system allowed me to draw: Milk—manufactured as “spirit milk”—and a small packet called “ling-laced flour” that made people’s cheeks flush with memory.
“Order!” I barked, in the old woman’s voice. “One portion of preserved beef. Two for the road.”
“Lady—” a man from a neighboring stall called, “what's your secret? It’s like those city kitchens.”
“Luck,” I said, and I smiled.
Luck and a system that could craft an almost-impossible ingredient. JoyTower’s “spice shop” unlocked: a list of shops, each warping my unfamiliar tongue into something useful—dairy, fruit, spice, meat, fabric. I pulled out a packet labeled “Aromatic Eight,” and the town’s market never tasted the same.
“We’ll keep the recipe close,” I said to the kids. “We’ll freeze any chance of exposure.”
“Who would want to steal a recipe?” Julianne asked doubtfully.
“Who do you think has every penny to spare?” I said. “Who thinks other people’s hard work is an invitation?”
That winter, our stall grew into a small operation. We licensed the brine packets, and half the village learned to treat them as precious. The money was slow at first and then sudden, and the household began to breathe again. I taught the girls to embroider and the boys to read when the local master agreed to take them as pupils. Education became our north star.
“You want us to go to school?” Dalton asked one morning, astonishment on his face.
“Yes. The world will eat you if you don’t learn how it names things,” I said.
“You might lose us.” Finn’s voice was smaller than usual.
“You won’t,” I said. “I will not let you.”
A year passed and our names changed. We kept the old world names—the children took the first names that suited them best: Dalton, Finn, Keegan, Xavier, Ellis, Julia, Julianne, Lauryn, Everlee, Iris, Justine, Laila. We kept Quinn Farmer’s memory on the wall because rites mattered, and we fed his portrait daily with incense and with the bread he might have loved.
Business grew in a way I had not expected. The town’s taverns wanted our brine. Innkeepers Drew Ahmed and Fredrik Morin tried to purchase our packets wholesale. “Jaylene, you must sell more to us,” Drew said, rubbing his palms. “We’ll pay you handsomely.”
“We’ll build with the village,” I said. “No one will take it all. That is my condition.”
“You’re giving your secret away to the village?” Fredrik asked later, incredulous.
“We’re sharing profit, not surrendering pride,” I answered. “You get product. We retain recipe control.”
They acquiesced, for a while. The JoyTower demanded small sacrifices—coins I did not always want to withdraw from the vault—and I limited the usage of certain synthetic spices. People whispered that our food had “otherness” inside, but they could not name it. The orders doubled and then tripled.
“You did well,” the village elder, Maddox Morin, said one night, leaning on a cane. “You did better than most,” he admitted. “You took a broken family and made them strong.”
“Not me,” I said. “My kids. They’re the honest ones.”
All of it felt precarious, as if a single jealous hand could knock the tower of pots down. I knew—because I am a woman who has lived in the city where a small lie could be the end of everything—that any success fragile enough to be held in hands would inevitably be trampled by greed. I kept a small core of knowledge locked in my chest and taught the rest of the family enough to keep people fed and ledgered.
Then, the betrayal happened.
I had noticed subtle changes before: a packet misplaced, a ledger with a number that didn’t match, late-night lanterns across the yard, Laila’s fingers twitching around a coin like a moth at flame. Laila had always been restless. She wanted simple comforts and quick lifts. She was also my child—a girl who had been given a stomachful of scarcity and learned to taste the sugar before the bread.
One evening I found a slip of folded paper in the shed: a note with towns and amounts and names—names of people who had paid for a brine sample. It had come from outside, from a man who smelled like foam and travel. My palms went numb. In that moment I felt a cold hand—history—wrap around my spine.
“Who brought this?” I asked, holding up the paper.
“Ma?” Laila froze, her face draining of anything that could be called innocence.
“We leave no trail of our recipe,” I said slowly. “Who signed a name for brine batches?”
She stammered. “I—”
“Who was it?” I said. My voice was quiet and very dangerous.
“It was me,” she admitted. “I… I sold it for five hundred coins. I thought—” Her mouth opened. “I thought we could be done with want overnight. I thought—”
“You thought?” I echoed. For a moment I saw the child she had been, the one hiding flour to make a sweet for her sibling. “You thought of yourself first.”
Laila’s eyes went wide, then small. “We had nothing, Ma. I was afraid. I didn’t mean—”
“You meant to change the course of our life with a single paper,” I said. “You broke trust.”
Later, in the evening, the village gathered at Maddox’s judgment bench because small clans in small places love trial by people. Bryson Dickerson—who owned the next field and had never forgiven us for being given the festival stall the previous year—was there with his wife, Harmoni Harrison, sour at the corner of their mouths. They’d long envied our suddenness. I expected them to gloat.
“Laila sold the recipe,” I said to the crowd. “She took money and handed what made our stall ours.”
“You sell your child to strangers,” Bryson spat. “You taught her how to break the world!”
“She came to me,” I said, stepping forward. “I raised her. She did wrong. The wrong is hers to answer.”
“Punish her,” someone muttered.
“You cannot—” Laila pleaded, voice small. “Please—Ma—please, I did it for us! I thought if I did I could—”
“You thought,” I repeated. “Then listen. I will not let our village be hollowed by greed. That is a crime against everyone who depends on this nest. You sold what feeds us all. You must answer where everyone can see.”
They dragged in the buyers—Drew Ahmed and Fredrik Morin’s junior agent had the sample and had started to copy a low-end brine. He was dumbfounded when we confronted him. He stammered and offered coin, and then he offered apologies when the crowd turned cold.
I had no desire to make a child walk barefoot in winter for entertainment. I wanted pain to mean correction, not to be sport. So I crafted a punishment that would hurt in the only way meaningful in a tightly knit place: the stripping of public trust and the making of consequences clear.
“Laila,” I told her, “you will not be beaten or jailed. You will repair what you have broken in the best currency we have: labor and truth.”
“You want me to work it off?” she asked tearfully. “I’ll do anything.”
“No,” I said. “You will do everything. And you will forgive yourself only after everyone who has a hand in this—villagers, buyers, your family—sees the path taken and the price paid.”
First, we forced the buyers and the imitators to come to the common bench. We sat them in the open square so their faces could be seen from the inn to the field. Drew’s agent had to stand like a thorn—uncomfortable, peering at us for any mercy. Bryson and Harmoni sat with smug faces, expecting spectacle.
“Look,” I said to the assembled crowd. “This is where the right begins: honesty.”
I had Laila stand and tell, in plain voice and without flourish, what she had done. She read the note she had kept as a shame-writ confession and said the names out loud. The buyers flinched. People murmured. Then I asked each of the buyers to enumerate what they had received, and they had to say the number aloud—every coin, every sample, every attempt to replicate our brine.
Then, we made restitution. Not by coin only but by construction. The buyers were ordered to work—publicly—alongside Laila and my older children for a full seven days. They scrubbed the village's communal well. They hauled cornstalks. They rethatched roofs for poor families that winter. Each hour of work was tallied and announced: the town clock chimed the hours and a scribe recorded the labor.
“Why should we do this?” Drew’s agent complained, wincing as he carried a basket twice his size.
“Because you put your hands on what wasn’t yours to replicate,” I said. “You broke trust, and trust is the only currency here that matters more than silver.”
As the week wore on, the village watched the change. The buyers’ faces went from condescending to exhausted. They spoke little. The crowd no longer jeered at Laila but watched her slowly peel off the weight of shame by sweat and by admitting fault.
On the sixth day, we gathered again. “What you did cost us more than money,” I told Laila, voice low. “You set us back in trust. But you have also shown that you are capable of repair. I could exile you. But exile is easy; the hard thing is to make amends while staying.”
“I understand,” Laila whispered.
The crowd had mixed reactions: some clapped, some spat quietly. Bryson and Harmoni’s faces had become slack and red, not with pity but with a dawning anger that their attempt to profit off others had been snatched into a public accounting. They had wanted to watch the family fall; instead they had been forced to help us rebuild.
The punishment had not been a spectacle of cruelty. It was public accountability combined with a demand for the guilty to repair harm. Laila’s transformation was slow: she rose before dawn to help with the brine, she knelt with younger girls to learn packaging, she opened her palms to the buyers and learned to insist on fair exchange.
The sellers—Drew Ahmed and Fredrik Morin—left town with faces older than when they had arrived, having spent their wages on reparative toil and a ledger of shame signed by all of them.
“I never thought public work could cut into my pride like that,” Drew told me quietly as he shouldered a sack of grain.
“That’s the point,” I said. “Pride lets you think you own the world. Work shows—everyone—that you do not.”
After the reckoning the village settled into a new rhythm. The brine packet’s recipe lived in the hands of family and village elders. We taught apprentices from households we trusted. The JoyTower still hummed at my back, producing little miracles like jars of preserved milk and packets of spice that tasted like the first winter’s rosemary. We used the system sparingly, with a dignity that stemmed from the cost of the lesson.
The business recovered, but different things shifted. My sons were sent to school—Dalton and Finn made their way to a provincial academy, while Keegan and Xavier apprenticed to carpenters. Our daughters learned trades: Julia and Julianne sewed, Lauryn learned herbal tinctures, Everlee and Iris tended the new orchard we planted from a JoyTower seed pack. Justine managed the ledgers. Laila took the hardest path and became our village’s liaison to travelers—guarded, steady.
“You taught me to be a thief and a coward,” she said once, sitting by the kitchen hearth. Her eyes were empty of childish pleading and full instead of a grown woman’s resolve. “I am rebuilding.”
“Yes,” I said. “That is enough.”
We used our silver to buy a small city house when my eldest sons had gained enough means to argue convincingly. “Move in, Ma,” Dalton said. “We’ll build smart.”
We moved to the city. I walked the paved streets like someone who had finally learned to breathe and not valiantly survive every moment. The JoyTower traveled with me, humming like a compass. We opened a small eatery in a corner that smelled of spice and of the sea. My food brought people who wanted to remember something soft and true.
Years later, on an evening heavy with the smell of simmering brine, I sat with a cup of tea and the system whispered like a modest clock. I watched my children pass in the doorway—older, finer, and near enough to have become what I had always wanted.
“You did all this,” Finn said, setting down a plate.
“We did,” I corrected. “We did it together. And I taught you not to sell our secret.”
“You taught us more,” Dalton said. “You taught us to make choices that keep us whole.”
I smiled. “And don’t forget: the JoyTower gave us flour.”
“You always say that,” Keegan laughed.
“You always say 'we did it together' when I know it was mostly you,” Everlee teased.
“We did it together,” I said again, because we had. We had built a tower of work and trust that would not tumble at the first wind.
If I had to circle back to where my life had started—on a subway with a green dot slipping into my skull—I would say this: the system had given me tools, but this world taught me what tools do when hearts are involved. The children made the repairs. Laila paid publicly, and in doing so, she learned the only kind of freedom worth having. I kept the JoyTower’s glow as a promise: small, bright, and mechanical. But the true engine of our lives was sweat and honesty and the stubbornness to be better than our past.
Once, in the dark of a city night while the JoyTower hummed, I heard the system chime with a flat voice.
“Master Jaylene Meyer: Trial Deity System status: stable. You may choose to return to your original timeline after one more world is tried.”
I looked at the family around my table—my twelve—now woven into this life as surely as any root into soil. “No,” I told the system. “Not yet.”
“So you choose to stay?” the system asked.
“Yes,” I said, and the room laughed, and the laughter stamped out any last fear.
We closed the shutters, and outside the city went on being itself, but inside, our table held twelve plates and twelve hands. The JoyTower’s tiny green light blinked, like a heartbeat, like a promise. It would be there if I needed it, but I had learned to bake my own bread.
The End
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