Chapter 9: Teaching the Ancients the Proper Way to Slack Off

The first day of the fifth month, outside the Hanlin Academy of Great Qi.

The new second-place scholar Xie Wei reported for his first day of morning roll call. He had risen at cockcrow, dressed with meticulous care, straightened the documents in his hands again and again, and waited a full hour early at the yamen gate, ready to greet the wage-slave-of-the-bureaucracy career his ten years of bitter study had bought him.

But when the first rays of morning sunlight fell on the tea stall across from the yamen, half of Xie Wei's cool, handsome face turned black at once.

In the tea stall's best seat, the young ducal heir Su Mian of the Duke Who Guards the Realm's household was sprawled across an armchair cushioned in velvet, that fat cat still in his arms. On the table sat soup dumplings, shrimp congee, and delicate pastries of every kind, while two of the ducal household's ruffian servants stood at his side fanning him.

"Well now, Lord Xie. Morning." Su Mian lifted a hand lazily at the sight of him, half a youtiao still clamped in his teeth. "This young master has come to collect. First day on the job—don't be late."

Xie Wei drew a deep breath and told himself to stay calm. Eyes fixed straight ahead, he lifted his feet and walked into the yamen.

The moment he entered the yamen, Xie Wei summoned the grind-hound spirit of a man who owned twenty percent of the firm.

Pouring tea, fetching water, copying documents, cross-checking the archives of Great Qi's years past. While the Academy's senior officials sipped tea and idled, Xie Wei alone did the work of three men—and even lunch was two cold, hard steamed buns, gnawed standing up.

Only by spending myself in the shadows can I stand in this court like a man.

So Xie Wei told himself through gritted teeth, brush flying across one document after another. He had no backing. If he did not give ten times the effort of the men around him, this man-eating capital would swallow him down to the last bone sooner or later.

Evening roll call came at last. Every other official had long since slipped away, but Xie Wei still sat by candlelight, stubbornly cross-checking the last three files.

Just then a hand—slender, elegant, faintly scented with aloeswood—reached over without ceremony and pressed down flat on his files with utter barbarity.

Xie Wei looked up. Of course. Su Mian again.

"Lord Xie, the sun has set. Are you planning to cultivate immortality right here in the yamen?" Su Mian rolled his eyes and plucked the brush straight out of his hand.

Xie Wei massaged his aching temples, swallowed his anger, and marshaled the hardest backbone any scholar of Great Qi could muster:

"Young Master Su, this humble official is not like you. A son of a poor family has no ancestral shade to shelter under. When the storms come, there is nothing to do but run barefoot and fast! I have only just entered office. If I don't drive myself now, work harder than the rest, what will I have to stand on when the court's performance evaluations come due?!"

The first maxim of the grind-hound, delivered ringing and resolute, full of a poor scholar's proud refusal to bend rather than break.

Su Mian looked at his eyes, threaded red with exhaustion, and sighed. He fished the ten-copper IOU straight out of his sleeve and waved it before Xie Wei's face.

"Lord Xie, spare me your ideals about the realm of Great Qi. This young master's ideal is not working." Su Mian shook his head in disapproval and landed the first salted-fish strike:

"You speak to me of storms? Money can always be earned again, but a life only runs out once. Look at your own face. Keep grinding like this, and before you ever pass a single evaluation, this young master will be attending your funeral feast. And when that happens, who do I collect this hundred coppers of yours from?"

"You—! Utter nonsense!" Xie Wei's face went red with fury. "The sages said, to labor for the realm day and night! Since I draw the court's salary, I must bear the sovereign's cares. How could I crave ease?"

Neck stiff with defiance, Xie Wei produced his second quotation of the sages, trying to crush this fop under the full weight of Confucian righteousness.

Su Mian sighed, gave up on argument, seized Xie Wei's arm outright, and hauled the new second-place scholar toward the yamen gate.

"The sages never told you to grind yourself into an early ghost." Su Mian said it walking, with an insufferably smug sneer, and landed the second heavy blow:

"Take your big brother's advice. Because this young master has no ambition whatsoever, none of the court's schemes ever land on his head. Same logic applies to you: grind yourself to the bone here, and your superiors will simply decide you're a useful beast of burden and pile on more work tomorrow. Be good. You've already fallen flat here—why not shut your eyes, go with this young master to Taibai Tower for a proper meal, and enjoy a little of the capital's spring."

"Absurd! Utter nonsense!"

Xie Wei struggled and reviled in the same breath. But what hope did a weak scholar have—one who had ground through a whole day on two cold buns and was one step from a blood-sugar collapse—against Su Mian, who slept his sixteen hours a day and ate in silk and jade?

In the end, Xie Wei was half-shoved into the splendid carriage all the same.

Seated on the carriage's soft bench, Xie Wei panted hard. His mouth still sputtered furious fragments—"an outrage to scholarship," "contempt for law and order"—but for some reason, breathing the faint calming incense in the carriage air, feeling the soft cushions beneath him, the nerve that had been wound taut all day, near snapping, loosened for the first time he could remember.

He glanced, without meaning to, at Su Mian, who sat beside him with no posture whatsoever, eyes closed, resting.

In this round of dueling epigrams, Xie Wei felt that while he had not lost on the merits, in momentum... he had somehow been dragged sideways by this fop with a mouth full of crooked logic.