MB - Chapter 16

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Azure Radiance woke to rumor the way other cities woke to bells.
By dawn, the couriers had already covered the marble steps outside Pillfire Hall with folded invitations, wax seals, and flour dust that no one admitted to spilling.
Every parchment carried a version of the same plea: Come and teach us how to eat together again.

He Yan found them first, barefoot, a cup of tea balanced on his wrist.
“Bread,” he murmured. “The world has decided it misses carbohydrates.”

Shen Xun joined him, reading over his shoulder. “And supervision.”

At the top of the pile lay a heavier packet sealed in amber wax stamped with a wheat sheaf.
The handwriting was brisk and elegant—merchant, not monk.

To Azure Radiance, caretakers of the Domestic Gate,
We of Amberhall request a demonstration of your bread-table ritual and the principles of the household arts.
Our civic ovens have gone cold; our bowls break without reason.
Bring your broom, your patience, and whatever recipe convinces gods to share crust.
—Signed, Master Jia Ren of the Bakers’ Guild, under the approval of the Civic Prefect.

He Yan looked up, grinning. “A city that writes like that deserves saving.”

Shen Xun poured the second cup. “Or at least warm bread.”

Preparations

Wei’s reply arrived before noon, because librarians travel at the speed of rumor.
Go. Bring samples. Don’t ignite anything municipal without a permit.
Thundercry has a cousin there—Captain Lin Ru-sen—he owes me five explanations.

Elder Yao added a marginal note: Do not turn their council into furniture. Unless necessary.

He Yan packed with deliberate mischief:

• one broom,

• two bowls (one teaching, one stubborn),

• a coil of ribbon in the four official colors,

• the gate loop,

• and a loaf baked the night before—dense, patient, carrying a crumb of the Shrine’s cake inside its heart.

Snowball claimed the travel basket as a throne.

They left at dawn through the east gate, under banners newly hung: HOUSEHOLD ARTS DEPARTMENT — PRACTICUM ONGOING.
It was official now; even bureaucracy had found a way to love verbs.

The road to Amberhall was stone for the first two days, salt for the next, and finally packed earth that remembered ploughs.
Caravans passed them carrying mirror frames, textiles, barley, and gossip.

Everywhere they stopped, innkeepers asked for advice:
how to keep roofs from arguing with weather,
how to bless a threshold without expensive incense,
whether sink could be taught to barrels of wine.
He Yan answered all with cheer and chalk diagrams on walls that had longed for attention.

Shen Xun listened more than he spoke.
He observed that gate now hummed to strangers—it had learned curiosity.
When a child reached to touch his bracer, the hinge shimmered and offered a tiny echo of warmth: a portable home.

On the fifth evening they reached the ridge where the plain unfurled like a vast tablecloth.
Below, Amberhall glittered gold in the slanting light, roofs tiled with baked clay, river winding like a patient snake.
Smoke rose—not incense, but flour and sugar burning somewhere industriously.

“Smells like ambition,” He Yan said.

“Or disaster,” Shen Xun replied.

Both were right.

The city gate was open, its guards preoccupied with shouting about yeast shortages.
The Prefect’s summons was polite but urgent; the civic bowl had cracked again, and half the ovens refused to heat though fuel remained.

Inside the great hall they found a parliament of aprons.
Bakers, millers, accountants, a few priests, and at least one confused astronomer had assembled around a cold hearth.
In its center stood the civic bowl—a marble thing the size of a small carriage—split cleanly down the middle, its contents gray with ash and failed prayer.

Master Jia Ren stepped forward, dusting flour from his sleeves.
He was tall, silver-haired, hands scarred by work, voice hoarse from leadership.

“We baked offerings for every god in sequence,” he said. “None answered.
Then the accountants tried numbers. The ovens went colder.”

He Yan bowed. “We are not gods, only janitors of metaphors.
Show us where you keep your tables.”

Confused laughter; relief hidden inside it.

The prefect arrived late, attended by mirrors of polished bronze.
He regarded the visitors with the weary courtesy of a man measuring both hope and expense.

“You may demonstrate,” he said. “But do not move the bowl; it is bound to the city’s ledger.”

He Yan blinked. “Ah. A financial bowl.”

Shen Xun muttered, “That explains the crack.”

They began, as always, by sweeping.
Shen Xun moved first, defining the edges of space with the calm geometry of his sword’s shadow.
He Yan followed with the broom, tracing door → window → sink → hearth → shelf → threshold.
The civic hall’s air, long starched with bureaucracy, began to fold and soften.

Jia Ren watched, brow furrowed. “You call this ritual?”

“We call it politeness,” He Yan said. “The world answers better when spoken to respectfully.”

They layered verbs until the room recognized them.
Door accepted entry; window allowed gossip out; sink yawned open for anxieties.
Hearth asked for heat; shelf made a promise to hold it.
When the last stroke of the broom touched the marble rim, the crack in the bowl glimmered like a closing eye.

The prefect’s mirrors trembled—bronze surfaces catching reflections they had not earned.

He Yan poured water into the bowl, then laid a single slice of their bread upon it.
Steam rose, faint but fragrant.

“The first oven to wake will not be yours,” he said. “It will be the one in your neighbor’s shop. That’s the price of community.”

Jia Ren nodded slowly. “A fair tax.”

They waited.
Outside, faint thunder rolled; no storm followed.
Then, from somewhere down the street, came a sound like applause muffled in dough.
The smell of yeast bloomed—wild, alive, impossible.

A messenger burst through the doors, flour in her hair.
“Master! Every oven in East Quarter just—lit!”

He Yan exhaled. “Ah. The gods do have taste.”

The prefect stared, half-terrified. “How…?”

Shen Xun answered simply, “You stopped measuring hunger; you started feeding it.”

The civic bowl sealed itself with a sigh.
The mirrors along the walls cleared—not polished, simply deciding to behave.
People began to cry, or laugh, or both.

He Yan bowed. “Lesson one complete. Bread must be shared before it cools.”

The first smell of crust did what decrees never manage: it traveled faster than doubt. People spilled into streets, aprons and ledgers both, laughing with their noses. A child ran past with a roll like a trophy and swerved back to hand half to Shen Xun as if recognizing the proper direction for gratitude. Shen took it gravely and split his half again for He Yan, because gifts want to become smaller in the right hands.

In the civic hall, the Prefect’s mirror clerks recovered their composure and began asking intelligent, terrified questions.

“Is this… stable?”
“What is the rate of blessing decay?”
“Can we project tomorrow’s crust on the current aroma curve?”

“Please stop weaponizing bread,” He Yan said kindly. “It makes the gods nervous.”

Master Jia Ren, who had waited through many varieties of bad policy and worse yeast, set his palm on the once-cracked bowl. “We will tithe a tenth of the first hour’s loaves,” he announced, voice thick. “To hospitals and apprentices. After that, the market can remember what it is.”

The Prefect’s mouth opened for a jurisdictional dispute and closed on sense. “Approved.”

A rustle of silk announced Glass Valley. Their envoy was not the black-mirror scholar from the hearing but a polished delegation of three: a slim woman with a smile like a hinged fan; a man with an instrument case; and a junior whose job was being very certain about the wrong things.

“Congratulations on your… rustic miracle,” the woman said, bowing with gentle condescension. “We’ve brought a calibrated reflective array to help you standardize the effect.”

He Yan, who had just spent three weeks convincing a council that kitchens beat galleries, smiled like a bakery that has learned to say sold out. “We are not standardizing hunger,” he said. “We are teaching table.”

“We can instrument a table,” the junior insisted, popping the case; inside lay six small mirrors wired to a bronze spine. “We can assign indices to flavor. People love numbers.”

Jia Ren, who loved numbers when they told true stories, folded his flour-caked arms. “People love bread. Numbers love being eaten when they’re wrong.”

Shen Xun stepped a fraction forward. He did not touch his sword. He set threshold between the array and the bowl. The mirrors saw matte, as all good mirrors should when looking at a kitchen at work.

The woman pivoted smoothly. “At least grant us observation rights.”

“You may sit,” He Yan said, and produced from his sleeve a piece of chalk. He drew a table—not metaphorically, an actual rectangle on the stone—placed a bowl at the head of it, and named door, sink, shelf, threshold into the chalk’s corners. “Observation at table only. Please bring your broom.”

“We didn’t bring a—” the junior began.

Jia Ren wordlessly handed the delegation a broom tall as dignity.

The envoy accepted with a diplomat’s smile that meant we will remember this humiliation more clearly than any recipe and took her seat at the chalk table, glass array sulking at her feet.

Amberhall’s guild leaders arrived in waves—textilers smelling faintly of dye, millers powdered like ghosts, boatmen with river in their shoulders. Each told the same story with different nouns: things broke from being counted too hard. Each offered the same request: teach us enough to stop apologizing to mirrors.

He Yan drew in a long breath and exhaled a class.

“Household Arts: Unit One,” he said, chalking a neat title on the floor. “Table Ritual. Lesson one: tables are for bread. Lesson two: bread is for everyone. Lesson three: you can’t eat through a gallery.”

He taught door so deliveries could arrive without being turned into processions. He taught window to blow the wrong anxieties out to a courtyard where gossip could chew them to flavor. He set sinks at knee height for apprentices, because gravity and young fear are friends. He installed shelves in words: you belong here, your skill belongs here, your mistakes belong here until we learn from them, then they can leave.

He showed screen—the bronze mesh unrolled over a bowl to lace attention instead of blinding it. He gave brooms names, because tools improve when spoken to: “This is Patience,” he told the hall, handing one to a baker’s daughter. “This is Measure,” to a tax scribe who looked as if nobody had given him a trustworthy noun in years. “This is Stay,” to a miller with a tremor in his right hand; the broom steadied when he gripped it, as if recognizing a kindred job.

Shen Xun demonstrated threshold with his feet—the way a stance can invite without yielding, forbid without scolding. He placed pebbles in invisible lines that taught the room where to end. He tied a thin white ribbon at waist height—law—and showed how to walk under it with honor.

They broke for bread. Amberhall feeds itself in courses of argument; the hall became a market of opinions with crumbs. Glass Valley’s envoy watched, ate, took notes, did not attempt to measure steam again. Her mirror array, bored of being uninvited, began to reflect something else: people passing bowls. It looked embarrassed and improved by it.

Then the trouble arrived, on time as always.

There is a guild in every city tasked with preventing fires from turning into funerals. In Amberhall, they called themselves the Cold Ovens—inspectors, safety wardens, extinguisher-slingers, and, increasingly, men with small power who liked to argue with warmth.

Their Captain, Morrow, walked like a man disappointed by anything not careful enough to fear him. He carried a pail as a badge and a writ that glared.

“By law,” he said without greeting, “no oven may be lit without a permit. We were not consulted about your… event. We will levy a fine and require immediate compliance with inspection standards.”

Jia Ren’s jaw clenched. The Prefect didn’t speak; he had the sense to know which fights are worth letting the right people win.

He Yan set the chalk down very neatly and smiled like an auntie about to seduce a bureaucrat into good manners. “Captain Morrow, we adore standards. We brought furniture.”

“Furniture is not regulation.” He shook the writ. “This is regulation.”

“Regulation,” He Yan said, “without a table, becomes hunger with paperwork. Sit.”

Morrow bristled. Shen Xun moved his weight a single degree and made chair a destiny. Morrow sat. His pail creaked like a conscience.

He Yan laid out the Domestic Gate Protocol (Public Spec) in words Morrow’s wrists could understand: table first, measures after; broom before mirror; sink for panic; shelf for blame; threshold for greed. He didn’t say hearth; he brought a kettle and let steam do that noun’s work.

“You can inspect ovens until the river forgets how to run,” He Yan said, pouring tea, “and you will still lose to cold if you don’t also inspect rooms for mercy.”

“Mercy is not measurable,” Morrow said, grasping at the truth and declaring it a problem.

“Two measures,” Shen Xun said. “Fewer fines and fewer funerals.”

The hall made the soft sound of a point landing. Morrow’s pail softened, which is difficult for pails. He stared at the chalk table. “If I agree,” he said, “what do I get to do?”

“Teach every inspector in your guild to carry a broom and say threshold with their feet,” He Yan replied. “And you get to eat first because you keep other people’s bread from burning.”

For the first time in a year, by all accounts, the Cold Ovens Captain smiled without injury. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll be in charge of the broom standard.”

Glass Valley’s envoy, to her credit, did not intervene to make this worse. She set her mirror at the edge of the chalk and said, thoughtfully, “We can polish pails.”

“Excellent,” Jia Ren said. “Begin with your own.”

Just as Amberhall began to look like a city, the floor remembered a fracture. A seam ran under the civic square—a dry river reburied by industrious men generations ago and now inconvenienced by desire. When bread woke, thirst woke too. A dull hum rose under the cobbles—a bowl less patient than the Shrine, more hungry than law.

He Yan felt it at the wrist. Shen’s gate loop answered with a low alarm. The Prefect’s mirrors whipped their heads toward the sound like birds.

“Underground bowl,” Shen said. “No etiquette.”

“We’ll give it some,” He Yan said. “Captain Morrow, bring your pails and your guild. We’re going to teach stop.”

They followed the hum to a grating at the square’s edge, pried it open, and entered tunnels where bread-scent couldn’t follow. Cold stone. Old chalk marks. A forgotten door that wasn’t a door—just two lines in the wall that disagreed about closing.

At the end: a cistern notched into bedrock, half-choked with silt and municipal neglect. In it swirled a shallow bowl of water doing its best impression of a whirlpool without permission. It wanted to run the city. It wanted to be loved. It had never been told it was a kitchen.

He Yan knelt, palms away. “We’re here to sweep,” he said. The water didn’t understand the word. It knew gloss and greed and flood.

Shen set three anchor nails and breathed threshold. Morrow’s wardens lined the rim with pails like a choir holding rests. The Cold Ovens learned quickly; standards translate well when work is honest.

He Yan rolled out the bronze mesh and laid it across the cistern’s mouth like a screen over a sleeping child’s cot. He named door at the tunnel entrance so the city could breathe without drowning itself. He cut a sink no larger than a ladle off to one side and taught fear to walk there, not through the stairs.

“Guided stop,” Shen said, and the words went into the cistern as a kind hand.

They counted with the breath of the hall above them: one for bakers, one for millers, one for boatmen, one for auditors, one for the gods that like crust, one for the children not yet tall enough for pails. At seven, the water tried to be more. He Yan pressed no with a broomstroke that had nothing to do with scolding and everything to do with supper. Shen set roof over the bowl—enough—and the whirl came down to room.

The hum softened into a purr a city could sleep above.

Morrow let out air like a man resigning from his worst certainty. “All right,” he said to the cistern, to the visitors, to his pail. “House beats panic. We’ll put that in the manual.”

Glass Valley’s envoy, peering from a respectable distance, murmured to her junior, “Write that, but make it sound like we invented it.”

The junior, who had eaten a roll and felt forgiven by physics, wrote it exactly as spoken.

At dawn they built the public gate.

Not the private, binding hinge between two people—this was a square’s gate, a civic arch that remembered market and home at once. He Yan chalked a wide rectangle over stone; Shen mapped the pebbles beneath; Jia Ren conscripted three dozen apprentices to carry brooms like standards.

“Names?” he asked, practical.

“Call this one Welcome,” He Yan said, pointing to door. “That one Air,” gesturing at window. “This is Wash, for sink. Warm for hearth. Hold for shelf. Mind Your Feet for threshold.” He paused, delighted. “And for the axis—call it Turn. People like a name that admits change.”

They tied ribbons at the four corners: white for law, red for decide, blue for skylight, yellow for gossip (polite gossip!—Dune would approve). The gate rose not as stone but as behavior. You could feel it pass into your bones when you crossed the chalk: a small, agreeable pressure asking you to be a good version of yourself for the length of a breath.

The Prefect, to his eternal bureaucratic credit, stepped through first. His mirrors followed. Their bronze faces did a new trick—blur at the edges, then sharpen on hands exchanging food.

“I feel… less likely to lie,” he said, blinking.

“That is the point,” Wei would have said. He Yan simply nodded.

The Feast of Bread began without a decree. From east and west, north and south, ovens sent their first offerings: city loaves, sesame twists, sweet buns sewn with dates, flatbreads crisp with oil. The gate learned to traffic kindness. Children ran loaves to the chalk table and were paid in crumbs and praise. Priests blessed the ordinary and were thanked with work.

Glass Valley’s envoy ate quietly, taking notes that tasted different now. Morrow posted his wardens at the four corners with pails and brooms; whenever panic arrived on small feet, a sink appeared to invite it elsewhere. No one shouted about permits. Numbers got to be after for once.

Thundercries travel by rumor. Captain Lin Ru-sen—Ru’s cousin—showed up with a grin and a leaking cloud and, after being fended off from hailing the square, produced a song only weather knows about yeast. The crowd hummed it, and the ovens agreed to learn the rhythm.

The civic bowl did something very rare for marble: it laughed—a ripple under water, a patter like crumbs on stone. It had been taught that it did not have to be a god; a household was enough.

At the height of celebration, something inevitable happened: everyone wanted to give. Bakers fired second rounds; bystanders brought jam; boatmen donated fish the ovens didn’t want; the Prefect announced a spontaneous tax holiday; a well-meaning priest tried to consecrate the gate and almost turned it into a gallery.

“Hold,” Shen said, and the word went out through wrists and chalk and kitchenware. He Yan widened shelf so generosity had somewhere to sit down. He tightened screen over praise; he uprighted threshold where greed had climbed it to see better. He moved five sinks an inch to the left to catch self-congratulation.

The gate sighed and returned to being a road that asks for manners.

An old woman with poppyseed on her chin pressed a roll into Shen’s hand. “For the man who keeps the sky from meddling,” she said. “And thank you for the word Hold. I forgot I was allowed.”

“For the man who tells the room it’s already good enough,” she told He Yan, identical roll. “And thank you for Wash. We were drowning in ourselves.”

“Tables are for bread,” he replied, because some lines deserve to become banners. Amberhall cheered, then ate the banner.

A delegation from the Cold Ovens approached with a written apology for the years they’d made warmth prove itself. Morrow read it aloud like a man used to choosing the wrong tone and learning. The hall listened.

“We were afraid of fire and called it sin,” the apology said. “We were afraid of hunger and called it crime. We forgot rooms are where people stop being dangerous.”

He Yan took the slip and crushed it gently in his palm—sink for shame. “We accept,” he said. “Your penance is bread delivery to the poorest corners for a month. Carry pails and brooms. Learn names.”

They saluted with their pails like reliquaries. Glass Valley’s envoy glanced down at her mirror array, which reflected her face laughing at something we will not know, and then at the city eating itself into community. She bowed, low this time, to no one in particular. “We will file a report recommending… tables.”

“Welcome to the discipline,” Shen said.

When the sun discovered copper and made a meal of every roof, the gate did a new thing: it took root. Chalk doesn’t last; verbs do. The six named corners—Welcome, Air, Wash, Warm, Hold, Mind Your Feet—settled into stone like seeds. If future councils scrubbed the marks, the first rain would redraw them.

The city felt it. A murmur passed through Amberhall like bread releasing steam.

The Prefect approached, not with pomp but with the humble terror of men who suspect they might have been given a better job than they knew to want. “What do we owe?” he asked.

“Only this,” He Yan said. “When someone tries to turn your gate into a gallery, broom them. When someone tries to sell your gate back to you, table them. When someone brings a mirror, wash the mirror and give it bread.”

“And when it fails?” the Prefect asked, practical and born.

“It won’t fail,” Shen said. “It will forget. Then you will remember it. That is easier than failure.”

Jia Ren, who had been overseeing the city’s first public crumb war, came and embraced Shen without warning, which is how you thank roofs if you’re a baker and short on words. He clasped He Yan’s shoulder with floured hands and left white fingerprints on an already ruined robe.

“Eat with us,” he demanded. “Then sleep. Then go home and spread this sin.”

They slept at an inn that had once been a counting house and kept ledger scratches on the lintel like notches in a sword. The innkeeper placed a loaf at their door the way some people leave prayers.

He Yan wrote at the room’s small table until ink smelled like argument.

To Archivist Wei:
Bread is a public good when taught as furniture.
Amberhall’s civic bowl seems cured by table + screen + guided stop in the sub-cistern.
We installed a square’s gate (Welcome/Air/Wash/Warm/Hold/Mind Your Feet).
Cold Ovens Guild now pro-broom. Glass Valley envoy filed a report recommending tables (!).
Please add “pails are the mirrors of honest men” to your aphorisms.
P.S. Send me your best clause for “no gallery measurements during meals.”

He tucked a crumb of Shrine cake into the fold, a ridiculous superstition that kept being correct.

To Elder Yao:
We did not turn their council into furniture.
We turned the square into furniture.
(This seemed legal at the time.)
The ovens woke by neighbor rule—the first heat arrived where need was greatest, not where permission was largest.
If the Council asks, that’s theology, not policy.
P.S. The word table spreads faster than gate. Good.

Shen Xun wrote shorter, in handwriting that looked like decisions.

Wei: The gate loop travels. Anchoring a civic version requires at least two pebbles below grade and a guild willing to learn threshold.
Yao: Inspectors carry brooms now. It looks right.
Ru: Your cousin sings to yeast. It works. Tell him to stop trying to bring hail to dinner.

They tied the letters to a courier hawk fond of sesame seeds and sent it to Azure Radiance with a quiet that felt like legality.

Before they slept, the gate loop warmed in Shen’s bracer. He Yan felt the tug not as crisis but as thanks—the way a city says I won’t make you raise me every morning now; I can set the table myself.

He sat on the floor and put both palms down. “We leave tomorrow,” he told the room. “Practice.”

The room practiced. A breeze came through the window and learned to say Air. A floorboard settled and chose Hold. Snowball, who had eaten his weight in crumbs and moral philosophy, slept in the curve of He Yan’s knee, snoring like a tiny bellows.

“Small true thing?” He Yan asked the dark.

Shen Xun, who had become a man who trusted rooms he’d built, didn’t reach for a sword when asked a soft question. “When we walked the tunnels,” he said, “I was not afraid of flood. I was afraid of forgetting to be kind because the work was urgent.”

He Yan’s smile didn’t need light. “You didn’t forget.”

“Because you said Wash before you said Stop,” Shen answered. “I think that matters.”

“It does,” He Yan said. “We will write it.”

They slept under a roof that had quickly learned their verbs. In good cities this is called prosperity. In better cities it is called manners.

They returned to the square early when bakers yawn like cats. The gate still hummed—lighter, older.

Glass Valley’s envoy waited, mirror array packed, junior chastened into competence. She bowed to them with sincerity that would have been illegal in her childhood.

“We will recommend,” she said, “that mirrors observe from tables and that broom standards be adopted among our engineers.”

“Standards are for furniture,” He Yan said, warmly. “Welcome to an entirely respectable heresy.”

The envoy smiled without showing teeth. “We prefer to call it reform.”

“Then you are almost domesticated,” Shen said.

Jia Ren saw them off with two loaves, a bag of sesame, and a stern instruction to “upset your council with kindness.” The Prefect gave them a seal with a sheaf of wheat engraved, not as jurisdiction, as thanks. Morrow sent two wardens with brooms to escort them to the gate as if they were princes of practicality.

At the city edge, He Yan tied a thin green ribbon to a milestone post—plant—and whispered to a vine that didn’t exist yet to grow up it one day. Shen set a pebble at the ditchside, and the road wrote their names into dust for a little while, which is the correct length.

They walked. The gate loop purred. The world, encouraged, practiced being a house.

By the time they reached the pass, replies chased them like swallows.

From Wei: Clause for “no gallery during meals”: “Mirrors shall not be deployed in the presence of bread.” Add footnote: “bread includes metaphorical bread.” I’ve swept the West Archive. The genealogy scroll bit me and then apologized.

From Yao: Do not bring Amberhall home in your pockets. Bring the standard and the story. We can house both. P.S. I looked at your vine. It is pretending to be modest. It will fail at that.

From Ru: Tell Ru-sen he owes me three leaks and one song. Thundercry requests a copy of your sink drill for barracks kitchens.

From the gourd-walker, which is to say from the desert practicing handwriting through a courier boy named Dune: Gate remembers. Bowl laughs. Bring crumbs.

He Yan tucked the notes beside the last slice of Amberhall bread and felt the day assemble into a piece of furniture he could trust. Shen Xun looked east where councils breed and said, without resentment, “Home.”

“Home,” He Yan echoed, and the word didn’t hurt.

They kept walking. The road stayed the shape of both. The thread—steady, bright—worked its small, stubborn miracle: turning cities into rooms without locking the doors, teaching gates to forgive, letting bread be the argument that solves itself.

And somewhere behind them, in a city that had learned to count with its belly as well as its ledger, a child drew a chalk rectangle on a stoop, wrote WELCOME on one side and MIND YOUR FEET on the other, and sat down to see what would happen next.

 

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