I. Seven Steps

Let us begin with a story almost everyone who knows Cao Zhi has heard: the poem composed in seven steps.

It appears in A New Account of Tales of the World, compiled roughly two centuries after his death, not in a contemporary palace transcript. The hall, footsteps, and silence below belong to a retelling of the anecdote, not to a reconstructed day in the court record.

Imagine the great hall. Cao Pi is emperor; Cao Zhi kneels before him. One occupies the place from which commands are issued. The other must answer.

They were sons of the same mother, Lady Bian; Cao Zhi was five years younger. The same father, the same mother, years of growing up. Now the distance between emperor and subject cuts through that closeness.

Cao Pi looked at the brother kneeling in front of him.

He knew this face.

This is the brother he has known since childhood. Their father, Cao Cao, had particularly admired Cao Zhi’s gifts and considered making him his successor. The story’s sharpness lies in this familiarity: not ignorance of who you are, but knowledge.

In the end he had not. In the end the heir had been him, Cao Pi.

But this face was still here.

In this story, the brother’s gift has also become a threat in the emperor’s eyes.

He gave an order.

"Compose a poem within seven steps. If you cannot, you will be punished."

Cao Zhi rose to his feet.

He began to walk.

One step. Two steps.

The anecdote makes the poem arrive within seven steps. The four-line version best known today runs—

"Beans being cooked, with bean-stalks for fuel — The beans inside the pot weep. We grew from the same root. Why are you so urgent to burn me?"

Four lines, twenty Chinese characters. The version in A New Account has six lines and some different wording. Even this brief poem has a history of transmission.

The fuel beneath the pot of cooking beans is the stalks of the bean. The beans inside the pot are weeping. We grew from the same root. Why are you so urgent to burn me?

The hall was quiet for a moment.

The anecdote says that Cao Pi was deeply ashamed.

The story can end there. Cao Zhi’s actual life cannot.

After Cao Cao’s death in 220, Cao Zhi lived under Cao Pi and then Cao Rui. Titles rose and fell; fiefs changed; surveillance and suspicion came from the court. Not every change was a demotion, nor was he continuously locked in one cell. Yet princely rank did not give him the political scope he wanted.

He died in 232, forty-one in traditional reckoning, about forty by modern counting. From the favored youth to the repeatedly petitioning prince, the life was not long. Waiting had occupied a large part of it.

The seven-step poem compresses fraternal persecution into an instant. What follows concerns the long days beyond that instant: living inside a place assigned by someone else, and continuing to find a voice of one’s own.

II. The Succession

To understand why Cao Pi could not let his brother go, one has to go back to their boyhood.

Cao Cao had many sons. Cao Pi and Cao Zhi became two major contenders in the succession.

The eldest son, Cao Ang, had died in battle. Cao Pi had the advantage of seniority; Cao Zhi enjoyed favor for his gifts. Succession was not a question rendered uncontroversial merely by birth order.

Why?

Cao Zhi was brilliant. Brilliant in a way that astonished even his father.

The Records of the Three Kingdoms describes extensive reading and a gift for composition from early adolescence. His father even wondered whether someone else had written his work; Cao Zhi offered to be tested in person. When the sons composed rhapsodies on the newly completed Bronze Bird Terrace, he wrote rapidly and impressed Cao Cao. His talent was not merely a reputation granted by posterity. It was already visible at home.

His temperament was tangled with that talent.

The biography describes Cao Zhi as informal and excessive in drinking, Cao Pi as skilled in managing appearances. One exposed his inclinations more readily; the other better understood what people should be allowed to see. Labels such as authentic and calculating cannot, however, substitute for political judgment.

Admiring a son’s writing is not quite the same as trusting him with power.

Cao Zhi had supporters; Cao Cao hesitated more than once. A father’s preference became a matter of advisers, inheritance, and rule.

Cao Zhi did take actions that damaged his father’s confidence.

He drove on the reserved roadway and opened the Sima Gate without authorization. This was more than an unruly young man’s excursion. A prohibition had been violated; the responsible transport official was executed, and Cao Cao tightened restrictions on the princes. One person’s conduct had reached another person’s life.

In 219, when Guan Yu besieged Cao Ren, Cao Cao intended to send Cao Zhi with a relief force. The biography reports that he was too drunk to receive his instructions, and the appointment was abandoned.

That episode cannot explain Cao Pi’s appointment as heir two years earlier. The order of events matters.

In 217, Cao Pi was named Heir of the King of Wei.

In 220, Cao Cao died. Cao Pi succeeded him as King of Wei. A few months later, he forced the abdication of the last Han emperor and founded the Wei dynasty.

Cao Pi became emperor. Cao Zhi went from being a man who had nearly become emperor to being the brother of an emperor — and a brother who had once nearly displaced him.

We can criticize Cao Zhi’s failures and acknowledge his subsequent repression. The first does not automatically justify the second.

Nor does making mistakes prove that he never wanted a political role.

Brilliant people lose control and misjudge situations too. Talent does not guarantee that every action will be sound.

His letters and memorials contain a serious wish to serve and accomplish something. There is no warrant for rewriting all of it as a desire for paternal affection alone. Someone can want a father’s approval and want to act in the world. Only one desire need not be allowed to remain.

The position left by the succession struggle was harder to shed than a wish. However he later explained himself, the brother who might have displaced him had entered the emperor’s political memory.

From then on, even explaining himself became dangerous.

III. Huangchu

220 CE. Cao Pi changed the era name to Huangchu.

In Huangchu’s second year, 221, Cao Zhi was demoted to Marquis of Anxiang and then reassigned as Marquis of Juancheng. In 222 he became Prince of Juancheng. Titles changed; a title alone could not measure his power to direct his own life.

Promotion from marquis to prince could be real, and changes of fief need not all have had the same motive. Neither honors nor transfers, however, removed the court’s suspicion of the imperial clan.

A supervising envoy could turn conduct into political evidence. In 221 Guan Jun accused Cao Zhi of drunken insolence and threatening an emissary; proceedings and demotion followed. We need not imagine a complete record of every letter and footstep. The danger is already clear: the account of his own life was not solely in his hands.

He addressed memorials to his brother and later his nephew: he wanted command, service, a use for his abilities beyond poetry. His treatment was not devoid of honors. Yet the scope he sought remained far from the place permitted him.

A maintained prince had income, a residence, people serving him. Those advantages must not be erased. Material privilege and a part in deciding one’s direction are nevertheless different things.

The management of the imperial clan reveals a logic here: grant rank while restricting action.

It does not require killing.

It can leave a person waking, eating, and reading each day, while making what I want to do almost impossible to negotiate. Life is not equivalent to death. But an important part of living remains in someone else’s keeping.

Twelve years separated Cao Cao’s death from Cao Zhi’s.

They were not years of silence alone.

He did one thing — he wrote.

He kept writing, in each constrained fief. He wrote poems. He wrote rhapsodies. He wrote memorials (formal addresses to the emperor). He used writing to keep himself from disappearing.

Many texts had to reach the emperor: thanks, petitions, requests for service. Their words had to survive a dangerous reading. A gifted man writing to someone who might regard him as a threat had little room for error.

Poetry and rhapsody could hold another voice. Memorials were not necessarily false, or poems free of artifice. The same person could find different forms for grief, desire, and anger. Later, readers he could never see would approach him through them.

The court assigned him a place. His writing did not contain only that place.

IV. The Luo River

The preface to the Rhapsody on the Luo Goddess places its story in Huangchu’s third year, 222, on a return from the capital to his fief.

The carriage stops. A traveler passing the Luo River rests.

The Luo River is not large, flowing south past Luoyang. In Chinese tradition, the Luo has a goddess named Mi Fei, said to be the daughter of the legendary Fuxi.

Here we enter the rhapsody’s world. A traveler’s encounter with a goddess does not establish that the historical Cao Zhi experienced such a meeting.

Writing lets an impossible meeting unfold slowly before the reader.

The narrator first sees a beautiful figure beside the water and asks his driver in astonishment. The driver identifies the possible presence of Mi Fei, goddess of the Luo. A sudden sight interrupts an ordinary journey.

He looks again.

The rhapsody spends a long stretch of language on that act of seeing.

Of her form —

"Light as a startled wild goose taking flight, sinuous as a coiling dragon. Bright as autumn chrysanthemums, flourishing as spring pines. At moments, like a soft cloud veiling the moon; at moments, drifting, like wind-driven snow."

The images move between a startled bird, a dragon, flowers, trees, cloud, and snow. No single comparison holds her still.

Each of these comparisons is not an everyday comparison. Each pushes the image of the goddess to a place beyond the human.

Of her movement —

"She walks with light steps on the waves, her silken stockings stirring dust."

The light steps seem scarcely to touch the surface; the silk belongs to a body and yet does not obey the weight of a human body.

It is a stroke almost impossible to hold still: waves, light steps, silk, dust. A bodily image and a motion beyond the human inhabit one sentence. She is not a portrait that dimensions and proportions can exhaust.

The traveler in the rhapsody watches.

He writes what passes between them —

He is drawn to her, wishes to send his feelings across the water and offer a jade pendant. She responds too, in pauses, hesitation, movement, and speech. Yet suspicion, propriety, and the difference between mortal and divine remain between them. Mutual attraction does not simply erase the distance.

But.

She is a goddess. He is a man.

The end of the rhapsody is parting.

A departing procession unfolds over the water: spirits, a chariot, clouds. The farewell is splendid and remote at once.

The traveler can only watch.

In her speech of farewell, the goddess herself says—

“I grieve that human and divine must follow different ways, that our prime cannot be joined. I lift a silken sleeve to hide my tears; they stream over my collar. I mourn the end of our fine meeting, the parting that sends us to different places. With little to express my love, I offer a bright jewel from the south. Though I dwell in the dark depths, my heart will remain with you, my prince.”

She raises the sleeve, offers the jewel, and promises remembrance to the prince. She is not only beauty described under a male gaze. Here the poem gives her grief and farewell a voice of their own.

After she leaves, the traveler does not calmly resume his journey. He searches upstream, passes a sleepless night, and finally takes the reins but still lingers, unable readily to depart.

The rhapsody is finished.

Across eighteen centuries, readers have kept asking:

Is the goddess all he is writing about?

She can suggest an existence desired but not possessable. That reading should grow from the movements, voices, and distances of the poem, not begin by announcing that he is not really writing about her.

Generations of commentators have read it differently.

Some say the goddess is Empress Zhen — the wife of Cao Pi, whom Cao Zhi was rumored, in his youth, to have loved. This reading has had a vigorous life in literary criticism but lacks strong evidence.

Some say the goddess is Cao Zhi's political ideal — the place from which he could have used his gifts. He lost that.

Some say the goddess is something more abstract — beauty itself, freedom itself, an existence the world cannot contain.

This essay does not take a side among these readings.

It says only one thing —

The rhapsody lets us see someone write desire with extraordinary depth without acquiring ownership by describing another’s beauty.

He can describe her to the limit. He can write each gesture of her beauty. He can write the depth of his own longing. But he cannot hold her.

She is other.

This does not mean that love or a shared life makes people cease to be other. Intimacy and commitment can be real. What does not follow is that, because I desire you, you must exist only as I wish.

What we read beside the Luo is not a saint who has completed the management of his feelings.

He is still longing.

The poem neither deletes the longing nor resolves it through possession. She has gone; he remains sleepless and reluctant to leave. Acknowledging that the other is not one’s property does not immediately end the pain.

That is what makes it thicker than a maxim. The thought can become clear while the feeling is still finding its way.

She is herself; he is himself. Distance can hurt. I cannot cancel it unilaterally merely to stop my hurt.

V. To Cao Biao, Prince of Baima

223 CE.

Cao Pi summoned several brothers to the capital — Cao Zhi; the Prince of Rencheng, Cao Zhang; and the Prince of Baima, Cao Biao.

That visit to court became the setting of the long poem.

Cao Zhang died suddenly while in Luoyang.

The official histories say he died of illness.

A later anecdote in A New Account of Tales of the World has Cao Pi poisoning Cao Zhang with dates. The main text of the Records says that he died of illness at his residence. The anecdote can illuminate how later readers imagined fear between the brothers without acquiring the same evidential weight as the earlier account.

Distinguishing anecdote from record does not diminish Cao Zhi’s loss.

Cao Zhang was dead. Cao Zhi and Cao Biao were about to return to their separate fiefs.

After a parting in death, they wished for a little more time together on the road.

The preface says officials required separate lodging on the return to their fiefs. Cao Zhi places that separation before the poem. Having just lost one brother, he cannot now spend time with a living brother as he wishes.

A meeting of brothers had once again become subject to the arrangements governing imperial princes.

Cao Zhi and Cao Biao could only obey.

On the day of parting, Cao Zhi wrote a long poem to Cao Biao — To Cao Biao, Prince of Baima.

The poem has seven linked sections, and grief keeps changing its position: difficulty on the road, enforced separation, the dead brother, the living brother, words the speaker must somehow make strong enough to bear.

In the middle, there is a section that is what Cao Zhi says to Cao Biao in farewell —

“A man’s resolve reaches the four seas; ten thousand miles can be next door. If affection does not fail, distance can deepen closeness. Must we share one coverlet to show our care? To grieve until grief becomes illness—is that not a tenderness too small for our resolve?”

Let the aspiration range across the world; ten thousand miles can seem next door. Affection need not diminish with separation; sharing a coverlet is not its only proof. Do not let sorrow become illness, he urges, drawing on his time’s ideal of masculine resolve against tender attachment.

This passage is his comfort to Cao Biao — and his comfort to himself.

But in the final section, consolation begins to tremble again—

"What is the use of dwelling on suffering and toil? Even the mandate of heaven seems doubtful now. The pursuit of empty immortality — Master Red Pine and his kind have deceived me too long. A change of fortune comes in an instant; who can hold a hundred years? This parting will never be undone. When will I take your hand again? My prince, take care of your jade body. May we both reach white-haired age. Wipe away the tears, set out on the long road, take up the brush and end the poem here."

Suffering and anxious thought entangle each other; even heaven’s mandate becomes doubtful. Promises of immortality cannot guarantee another meeting. Everything can change in an instant. He returns to the smallest wish: take care of yourself; may we both grow old. Wipe the tears, set out, lift the brush to say goodbye.

This parting will never be undone. When will I take your hand again?

Ten Chinese characters, holding an uncertainty no consoling argument can settle.

Two brothers wish to continue together and cannot even decide where to stay. A road lies ahead; their next meeting has no timetable they can arrange.

Never meeting again is the poem’s profound fear. The less certain the future meeting, the less replaceable the injunction to take care becomes.

What has power done here?

It need not order a killing every time in order to keep narrowing someone’s relations. Fiefs, visits to court, lodging, association: each can become a matter of permission. To an administrator it may be a regulation. To those affected it may decide whether another handshake is possible.

Cao Pi knew who his brother was. Familiarity did not automatically cancel suspicion; kinship did not automatically protect freedom.

But he chose.

This also warns against reading Levinas’s face as a psychological guarantee: having seen someone does not prevent harm. People suppress those they know and put a relative’s life behind their own sense of security.

We can judge actions and their consequences.

That does not mean we have seen every inward motive behind every command.

Reading this beside the Heidegger essay raises a limited, sharp question: why can knowledge of a particular person coexist with placing them among the expendable?

This does not make Wei dynastic politics and support for Nazism the same event. Context, scale, and institutions differ. Comparison can illuminate a question; it cannot replace either history.

Closeness is no guarantee against domination. Neither is learning.

The question is whether, when fear and interest press in, the other still has a place from which to refuse.

The Sima family later replaced Wei, and the imperial house fell under another power. Power does not necessarily protect its own descendants. But that outcome cannot be presented as inevitable retribution for Cao Pi’s treatment of his brother. History is not a machine assigned to punish a poet’s enemies.

We can picture that life as a storm without letting weather substitute for judgment.

VI. A Prince in Captivity

In his last twelve years, writing left Cao Zhi a way of making himself heard.

Anxiang, Juancheng, Yongqiu, Dong’e, Chen: titles and fiefs changed repeatedly. Some changes were demotions, others promotions. The places cannot all be painted as equally impoverished prisons. What runs through them is his difficult distance from the power of the court.

Surveillance and the possibility of denunciation made self-expression precarious.

Meetings among brothers were restricted; travel and political activity were regulated. He was not without resources. But important decisions were not his to make.

After his brother’s death, he continued seeking service under his nephew, hoping to accomplish something. Poet is how posterity best knows him. It was not the whole of what he wanted.

Those wishes did not obtain the scope he sought.

Admiring his continued writing cannot become a demand that everyone under oppression be equally strong. Some become ill, lose words, cannot pick up a pen again. That is injury, not the loss of their standing as human beings.

That needs to be clear first.

Cao Zhi left poems, rhapsodies, memorials, letters, and lyrics for music. He acted within what was permitted and let writing travel beyond those permissions into other people’s hearing.

His writing did not contain only the position of a victim.

His poems contain resentment — he does not deny it. Lines like "A tall tree has many sorrowful winds; the sea raises its waves. With no sharp sword in my hand, what good is a great roster of friends?" make clear that he saw the truth of his condition. But his poems contain more than this. Observations of nature. Thoughts of friends. Reflections on figures of the past. Reflections on the human life.

Reading him, we meet a person still seeing, judging, and missing others.

Confinement can take freedom and damage the capacity to express oneself. Even someone no longer able to express themselves has not become a faceless thing.

Cao Zhi cannot become a ruler for measuring whether people who left no works were sufficiently whole. Someone with no book to speak for them still deserves hearing and protection.

The works did not erase his injuries. Someone can write a beautiful line while carrying great pain. We need not force him to choose a place between the intact genius and the broken failure.

The writing lets us see something else—

Power did not say everything he could say.

The court could assign title, land, and restrictions, and record him as an imperial kinsman requiring vigilance. Those arrangements did not exhaust the longing of the Luo rhapsody or the reluctance to part from Cao Biao.

He left us more than the file others kept on him.

Not because he possessed an invulnerable strength. The specific work of writing gave certain feelings a form.

Writing a character, revising a line, choosing which voice will remain in a poem: small acts, but judgments the watcher could not wholly make on his behalf.

Writing did not issue him dignity. It allowed someone who already had dignity to leave a voice that later people could hear.

Cao Pi died in 226; Cao Zhi lived another six years. Restrictions continued under Cao Rui. Institutions sometimes outlive those who establish them. A person’s departure does not automatically loosen their grip.

The emperor changed without the circumstances opening up accordingly. Reading the poems, we also know those circumstances were not all of Cao Zhi.

VII. What Cannot Be Held

What cannot be possessed is a recurring thread in these works.

The goddess cannot be possessed; a brother’s trust cannot be compelled; political wishes are obstructed; meetings among brothers are regulated. All can hurt. They are not the same kind of cannot.

Another person’s freedom deserves respect; one’s own denied freedom deserves to be sought. The second must not be romanticized as a distance one ought peacefully to accept.

How did he meet this?

He did not deny longing.

This is the key.

Sometimes someone says I never wanted it to soften a loss. Sometimes letting go is a genuine change, the beginning of self-protection and a new life. We cannot tell everyone who lets go that they are evading otherness.

What marks these writings is their refusal to hurry pain into indifference.

The rhapsody deepens desire and lets the goddess say goodbye herself. The promise that her heart will remain with the prince is her voice, not the narrator’s declaration that he has obtained her. She speaks; departure still happens.

The poem to Cao Biao likewise refuses to call parting trivial. When will I take your hand again? The writing keeps the question open instead of guaranteeing the future.

In political memorials he repeatedly expresses his wish to serve. The language is constrained by courtly forms; the desire does not thereby cease to exist.

Acknowledging desire without turning it into a right to possess another person is difficult.

Two temptations lie nearby: to devalue the other in order not to hurt, or turn the other into something that must belong to me in order to satisfy myself.

Refusing those roads does not require remaining forever in hopeless longing. Loving, negotiating, refusing, and leaving can all be acts that respect each person.

But this road has one feature:

The other’s weight is not bestowed by my success or failure.

I can lose a relationship without declaring the other worthless. I can work seriously for my own life without requiring someone else to surrender theirs.

You are not my property is not the only answer to pain. It is a line not to be casually crossed.

Eighteen centuries later, Cao Zhi still makes the tension felt: wishing to approach without deciding for the other; wishing to act while another person’s arrangements stand in the way. The first asks that I not possess; the second that power not possess me. They differ, yet meet within one life.

In the preceding essays, ethics, relation, and philosophy helped us approach the other.

Cao Zhi gives us another language —

The language of longing.

The other also appears in missing someone, in parting, in a night from which one cannot calmly depart. That does not justify every desire. Desire can, however, make us hear ourselves more clearly and hear the voice across from us.

Making room is not canceling oneself. It is refusing to let one’s own longing write everyone’s ending.

Kant refuses the person reduced merely to a means; Levinas lets the face question my freedom; Buber lets the Thou interrupt the relation I thought I knew. What we read in Cao Zhi is the narrow path between longing and possession.

These are not four identical philosophies. They are echoes we hear between four different languages.

In that direction there is a wind. A mild wind.

VIII. The Bridge

Night again on the imagined bridge. Cao Zhi approached.

We gave him an old robe, a loose belt, a light tread. No ceremonial retinue was needed here. Nobody stood beside him recording how he ought to stand.

He carried something in his hand.

Not an astrolabe like Hypatia’s, nor a cane like Bergson’s.

What he carried in his hand was a roll of bamboo slips, or of silk — written with his own hand.

He walked unhurriedly. He had died young, around forty. We let the fatigue of constrained years remain in his bearing and allowed him, finally, not to hurry an explanation of himself.

He reached the middle of the bridge.

Hypatia was there. The astrolabe in her hand. Aquinas, on the other side, his hands empty. Bergson, leaning on his cane. Levinas, standing. Buber, standing not far off.

The middle of the bridge was not just these five. The bridge held people accumulated from generation to generation — those drawing equations, those watching corn, those writing poems, those reading star charts, those writing novels, those sketching diagrams, those crouching aside taking notes, those sitting and looking into the distance, those speaking quietly with their neighbors.

Cao Zhi looked around.

Hypatia, Aquinas, Bergson, Levinas, and Buber had all been born after him. He had not read their books or known how they would speak of the face, encounter, ends. Kant would not be born for over a millennium.

But he saw one thing —

What they were doing, he understood.

Not that he understood their philosophies in full. Their way of standing there let him feel no need to prove his usefulness first. The scroll in his hand could be opened, or left unopened.

He nodded to them.

They nodded back.

He did not approach for further talk. He found a place in the middle of the bridge and stood. He set the scroll beside him — those were his poems and rhapsodies. He did not need to hold them. The words had been written. They had been in the world for eighteen hundred years. Doing the work they were meant to do.

At the far end of the bridge, Kant stood. Tonight Kant was a little clearer than before — you could see his rough outline, the color of his hair.

Across from the bridge, on that road, the sky had darkened. Lightning.

There were people on that road, walking.

The ones farthest along were no longer visible. That man in the professor's robe — Heidegger — had walked further than last time.

Cao Zhi glanced once toward that road.

He recognized the road.

In his own age, power had also pushed brothers apart. Cao Pi died in 226, six years before him; Cao Rui succeeded without the restrictions disappearing. Later the Sima family replaced Wei. A position one person believed firmly held could not be held forever for descendants.

Cao Zhi looked for a while.

He did not have to say the injury no longer hurt, or settle himself by imagining his brother punished. The rain outside was not an instrument for completing his revenge. When he turned, the losses caused by those orders remained. They no longer dictated the only direction in which he could look.

Cao Zhi turned back.

The astrolabe in Hypatia's hand caught the moonlight.

He smiled at her, slightly. Hypatia smiled back. The two could not understand one another's languages — Cao Zhi did not know Greek, Hypatia did not know Chinese. But they each saw the instrument the other carried. An astrolabe and a scroll of bamboo slips. Two tools from different times, doing similar work — making people see the stars, making people see the words, making people see something they cannot otherwise see but should.

Aquinas walked over from the other side. He said something in Latin. Cao Zhi did not understand. But there was something in the tone of Aquinas's voice that he recognized — the tone of a man who has written many words and then stopped. Cao Zhi was such a man too. He nodded back.

Buber drew a little closer: dark robe, white beard, empty hands. One had experienced his mother’s absence in childhood; the other had lived under the constraining power of brother and nephew. Their wounds were not identical. They did not need to decide whose pain was greater to recognize that those nearest can also leave one alone.

The middle of the bridge — many people, and the moonlight was mild.

The figure who had always been looking into the distance, the one at the far end of the bridge, looked at Hypatia, at Aquinas, at Bergson, at Levinas, at Buber.

This time he looked at Cao Zhi.

Cao Zhi's eyes met the eyes of that figure for an instant.

Cao Zhi did not lower his head. No emperor awaited his submission. He looked up toward another person who was also standing.

But there was an acknowledgment in his eyes.

As though to say: I do not know your whole language, but I see that you have not left my place solely inside an imperial decree.

The figure who had always been looking into the distance nodded, lightly.

Cao Zhi stood in the middle. His life had not been without possessions or relationships; he had lost many things he deeply wanted. His surviving writing crossed eighteen centuries. Later readers heard the goddess’s farewell, the wish for Cao Biao’s safety, a person not exhausted by his title.

Immortality does not compensate for his life. A person’s voice can still reach another person.^[1][2][3]

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · Great Lives