With a screeching protest, the door closed behind me.
This time, I was determined that I would give him no fault to find with me. I would let him know that I was worth the part and his favor. "Your Majesty," I said indifferently as I kneeled in perfectly crisp angles. If I were to play this part, I would play it well.
After a momentary pause, I was granted relief. "You may rise." His voice was dry, an edge of fatigue seeped into every word.
I looked up to find his back faced toward me as he gazed intently at the wall. Suddenly, it hit me, and the otherwise empty room and he both became disproportionately small in comparison to the giant canvas that spanned the entire surface.
For such a vast frame, I was surprised that I hadn't noticed it last time. Its smooth and slightly faded texture blended in with the scholarlike tranquility of the room, and its humbleness only accentuated its elegance and grandeur.
Painted rivers and roads alike coursed through the screen in strokes of ink, and fine print marked off major cities and capitals. With each careful flourish of the brush, the curves of the land nestled into the map.
For the first time, I saw the world before my very eyes. And for the remainder of my life, I couldn't unsee it.
"Youshi, do you know where Liang is?" The mention of my name momentarily broke my trance. He had said it so naturally and without hesitation, not even a single tremor to his words as if he assumed that I had spoken to him my entire lifetime.
But standing in front of this giant map that seemed to carry the burden of the entire world, there was a sense of guilt as I considered personal emotions instead of the larger picture at stake. Hastily, I changed the direction of my thoughts.
Before, the apothecary and my uncle and aunt's house had been my entire world. Even when I dared to venture out of it and looked into the far distance, all I saw were the pasture lands that stretched on for seemingly forever. It wasn't like officials had drawn lines into the ground to denote where Liang ended and the Sui or Chen began. And in this world, transfers of power were as frequent as starving beggars anyway.
I shook my head no, forgetting that I wasn't in his field of vision. Nonetheless, he must have taken my silence for a response.
"Come closer," he gestured, never breaking his gaze from the map. I took a few steps, now but a desk's distance away from the emperor and the screen.
Up close, what appeared to be an unbroken stretch of land linked together by channels and pathways was actually marked off by faint lines between regions. They were so thin in comparison to the rivers and routes that if I ever-so-squinted my eyes, they would disappear altogether.
I tracked and followed all of these borders, yet, I couldn't find Liang.
"Come stand next to me," the emperor turned and nodded in encouragement, the wrinkles near his eyes deepening as he smiled benevolently.
Gingerly, I took a few more steps, not sure whether I could move past this invisible barrier that the emperor kept around him.
He beckoned again, motioning to the empty space next to him.
I hesitantly obliged, and the distance between us shrunk by a foot and then yet another. Before I knew it, I stood at an arm's length from him, and he looked me in the eye for the first time.
"Your uncle said that he taught you how to read. Up close, it should be easier to see the names of the cities." Once he looked at me, his eyes never left. He was expecting an answer.
Over and over, I looked.
There it was.
Though it wasn't apparent, towards the middle, sandwiched between the North and the South, there the capital of Jiangling was. If the entire canvas was in the shape of a sparrow, then the kingdom of Liang was the size and position of its heart.
Caught between the two sides, not being fully a part of either, it was swallowed from the top and enclosed on the bottom. If I looked at it a mere moment later, it might have very well disappeared from the entire scene.
"I see you've found it." He chuckled. "It was pretty hard, wasn't it?" His joking tone made it clear that the question was not meant to be answered.
"That's not the Liang kingdom today," he added, pointing to the map.
I looked towards him in confusion, not sure if the conversation would fall one way or the other.
"If you shave off a few more Southern border cities, then it becomes the Liang of today."