The examination was in spring.
He had known this since the announcement came, posted on the notice board at the north dock in the characteristic dense script of official communications, and he had read it and noted the date and walked away and had not thought about it again, consciously, for approximately one hour.
After that hour, he had thought about it constantly.
This was a problem he solved by refusing to acknowledge it, which is a solution that works for a shorter period than most people believe and for a longer period than they deserve.
The examination was not important to him. He told himself this clearly: the examination was a sect ritual that sorted people by a metric that was not the only relevant metric, and his life did not depend on the outcome, and he had things he cared about that the sect could not give him and would not take away. He believed this. He also practiced not thinking about the examination every day, which is not a thing you need to practice if it is genuinely true.
Hao Jin was training. Not secretly — Hao Jin did not do things secretly, which was one of the things Wei Liang admired about him — but deliberately, running the riverside path in the mornings before the boats went out, doing the breathing exercises that were supposed to help with spiritual sensitivity, even though cultivating before you had a confirmed root was like trying to fill a cup you didn't know you had. The effort was real even if the effect was unknown.
Wei Liang watched this from the south dock, one morning in early spring.
"You're watching me," Hao Jin said, not stopping.
"I'm sitting on the dock," Wei Liang said.
"You're watching me from the dock."
"It's a small dock. There's not much else in the field of view."
Hao Jin finished the path and came to sit beside him, breathing harder than the run justified, which meant the breathing exercises were adding to it.
"Are you nervous?" Wei Liang asked.
"Yes," Hao Jin said, without hesitation.
Wei Liang appreciated this. Hao Jin was the least likely person to claim he wasn't feeling what he was feeling.
"I'm not nervous," Wei Liang said.
Hao Jin looked at him. He had the look of someone deciding how much to say.
"Really?" he said.
The really had a quality to it. Not skeptical exactly. More like: I know you, and I am giving you the opportunity to be honest, and whether you take it is up to you.
"Really," Wei Liang said.
He meant it and he didn't. Both were true, which was the particular texture of the lie he was telling himself: not false in the easy way, but in the way of a truth that had been selected from among other available truths and placed in front of the ones that were harder to look at.
Hao Jin nodded. He let it go, which was a kindness. He picked up a pebble and threw it at the water.
"I practiced not caring about it," Wei Liang said, unprompted, a minute later.
"How did that go?"
"For two months," Wei Liang said. "I got very good at not caring about it."
Hao Jin looked at him.
"Constantly," Wei Liang said. "I didn't care about it all day every day."
Hao Jin laughed — the real kind, chest-first, surprised out of him. "That sounds exhausting."
"It was," Wei Liang said. He looked at the water. "I think I probably care about it."
"Probably," Hao Jin agreed.
They sat on the dock and the river went south and the examination was in spring and they both cared about it in different ways and for different reasons and neither of them said this because it didn't need saying.
What Wei Liang understood, sitting on the dock in the early spring light, was that the thing he'd been telling himself — it doesn't matter, the examination is not the measure of what I am — was true and also incomplete. It was true that the examination was not the measure. It was also true that he wanted to pass it. That wanting a thing and arguing it shouldn't matter were not the same as not wanting it, and that performing indifference was its own kind of care.
He sat with this. He looked at the water.
Then he decided that he was not going to resolve this before spring and went to help his father with the nets.