This chapter opens with a flashback to a time when the narrator was seven years old. He and his brother were forced to spend the night in the cold utility room of an eunuch's office because their mother was dying. They were locked in there for a day and a half, and the doctor told them that they would have been dead if they had spent another night there. The narrator explains that he was so young at the time that he did not understand the rivalry among the courts or the competition for succession, and that he has kept his distance from them ever since