Chapter 57 · for subscribers
Twenty-nine characters, in lamp soot, in a hand that learned its strokes from a bowl rim on lime plaster — and not one seal on the page, because the Emperor of Great Yan has no chop of his own that the Office of Rites will read. Since the fifteenth I have been begging a man for one word spoken in a room with no witnesses, and he has gone and spent something larger on a sheet of paper whose whole purpose is to move a duty out of my arms and into his.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.