Ming Cheng, frozen still, almost succumbed to the instinct to bow down and just accept Qi Tao's words, without any real intention to keep his word and fully aware of just how uncomfortable he was currently feeling at this very moment.
Promises meant less than nothing; they were just simply ways to sweeten the pot of anyone who you were trying to persuade, manipulate, or trick.
If one party in a deal decided to rub their hands together and promise you the goods, swearing on the lives of their mother's or, sister's lives, then the deal should be ended then and there.
They were lying.
No good business man makes promises.
No magistrates made promises.
It's why they were so good at their jobs when it came to cleaning up the city.
But now, right in front of Ming Cheng, was a bowing little boy, tears pooling from his eyes and streaming down his face in rivulets that dropped down and fell onto the wooden floor.
Yet the little, naïve, and so very small boy, in front of Ming Cheng, pressed his back deeper and deeper downwards, forcing his promises and voices out into a world that didn't care about him.
He stood there, so, so alone, away from his friends who stood behind Ming Cheng as he spelled out his declarations, screamed out his promises in the whispers of his tones and the hard edge that he gave his voice.
Behind him, seemingly his only ally, as the servants milling around them parted as if they were waves of a receding ocean, there was a ghost who nodded along with each and every single one of the boy's requests, voice silent, and eyes speaking all that she needed to say.
To bow in return and to accept the promises would be instinct and would be right.
To bow in return and to accept the promises would be the done thing if Ming Cheng didn't know Qi Tao's name, if Ming Cheng didn't know Qi Tao's personality, philosophy, and laughter.
Hardly anybody back then laughed, all eyes hung and melancholy, tinged by the perpetual emptiness of hunger and a glaze of jealousy, want, and hate.
The little boy in front of Ming Cheng did not know any of those things, his life free from the hardship and without those goals and principles to act upon to survive.
He was an honest child.
Qi Tao was too honest of a child.
To refuse him, in this case, would be cruel.
Ming Cheng, on another instinct, different from the one that he had needed and honed over the years, resorting to a newer and fresher thing, looked at Qi Tao, taking in the puffy and swollen rims of his eyes.
Seeing the wobble of his mouth.
Absorbing in the flush in his face.
He looked at Qi Tao, and saw, as far as he was able to make it, that the little boy in front of him was just a desperate, crying, lonely child.
"I promise," Ming Cheng replied.