Pang was nervous. He has never thought he was a great poet, just a middling one. But to be summoned before the Emperor's Grand Imperial Eunuch for a poetry review, that was an honor few received. "Pang, Welcome! You are well regarded as the most promising poet of your province! We have heard you have been writing poems about the Emperor, is this true?" The Grand Eunuch was disgustingly fat. His smile seemed unclean, and his lips seemed to drip with the grease of duck-fat from meal happened recently. "Yes, Grand Eunuch, I write many poems, all of which are to honor the great Emperor, and I write them on all on auspicious occasions! I find the Emperor to be the inspiration behind all of my writing!" The Grand Eunuch sneered at him, as if he was a simpleton who knew nothing. "Did you write poems to honor his last two marriages?" The poet began to shake. He had. Everyone had been ordered to honor the marriages. The Emperor had been married 10 times. His poems had been well regarded, and repeated often by the commoners who lived in his prefecture. "Yes, Grand Eunuch. Why do you ask?" Again, the Grand Eunuch gave him the stare that one would give a dog who didn't know he was in trouble for shitting on a bed. "You mentioned that his most recent wife would be his true love for 'all of eternity'. You are aware of the assassination attempt, aren't you?" Pang, the poet, started to shake in his robes. "But I did not know!" The Eunuch spat. "Did you also not 'know' about the fertility of his previous wife? When your poem honoring their union said they may bear a thousand sons?" "How could I have known?" The Eunuch looked bored, as he proceeded to dole out the Emperor's justice. His sentence would be lenient, because the Poet was an imbecile, who seemed to not know the political implications of what he wrote. "You are lucky the Emperor enjoyed your poems about his first eight wives. Writing two bad poems out of ten, not a terrible ratio?" The Imperial Eunuch thought for a moment. Not about the punishment, that had been decided long before the hearing. But this was justice, so he had to appear to be thinking during the trial. He thought about roast pork over long noodles. That would be a good lunch. "Ten poems, eight enjoyable, two wicked. If you wrote 20% less, you would be the greatest Poet in the Empire. And you wrote these poems with your fingers... This is simple math. Guards, remove his thumbs, so he might choose he words more carefully"