On the night of the Lantern Festival, thirty thousand lanterns were lit in Chang'an. Nine thousand seven hundred of them belonged to his family.
That same night, in the ancestral hall, he used his mother's silver hairpin to scrape his name from the family register. His father came through the door with a sword in hand.
He fled Chang'an and headed north, seeking refuge in the city guarded by his biological father. After twenty-two days under siege, the city fell.
His father took his own life, and his younger sister was cursed by the entire city as the one who had betrayed them and opened the gates.
At the Crossing of Guixu, he found her spear. He had no knife, so he used a shard of stone to carve four characters into its shaft. Then he headed south, back to Chang'an,
and accepted the death sentence for treason: let the histories record one more traitor named Lin, and one fewer gate-selling traitor named Weng.
A thousand years later, the spear was recovered from the black waters and catalogued as HD-112. The restorer recognized the last three characters,
but the first stumped him for eight months.
