But in her heart, something shifted—a tiny, frightened resolve. If kindness could live in the Empress even under punishment, then perhaps courage could live quietly in her too.Lian An studied her, the shape of small saving graces in a palace built on cruelties. She felt the hot sting of humiliation flare into a colder flame—memory of injustice receding into something far more deliberate: resolve.
If the Dowager thought she had snuffed out something in her by kneeling through those hours, she was wrong. The hours had not been wasted but tempered something in Lian An's chest like a smith heating steel. It would redouble her focus, not diminish it. She would survive. She would endure. She would remember how to be ruthlessly patient until the moment when patience could be sold not as weakness but as strategy.
