Chapter 27 — Waiting Without Begging
The examination compound swallowed men and returned them like ghosts.
For three days, the streets around the walls stayed crowded with families clutching food bundles and prayer slips. People waited for any scrap of news from inside—who fainted, who was expelled, who was caught with hidden notes.
I didn’t wait at the gate.
Not because I didn’t care.
Because waiting at the gate felt too much like the Lin residence: standing in the cold while someone else decided my fate.
Instead, I waited in the inn.
I wrote.
I cooked thin porridge in a borrowed pot.
I walked the alleys, buying cheap charcoal so the room wouldn’t freeze at night.
When anxiety rose, I pressed my palm to the red thread on my wrist and reminded myself:
This time, waiting had shape.
It had boundaries.
It wasn’t begging.
On the second night, the man in the room beside mine began to sob. A scholar. His voice cracked as he whispered that his ink had spilled, that his hands were shaking, that he couldn“t remember a line he”d known since childhood.
I lay awake listening, heart tight.
Then I opened my writing kit and wrote anyway.
If a scholar could be undone by ink, so could a woman.
But I had learned to keep writing even when the world shook.