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It was a dog well-versed in waiting. It waited and waited, until it had waited its way from a little dog into an old one.\nIn those days, Li Si was still but an Inkbound Order disciple. She went to the market, and came back with a small mutt, legs stubby and short, hidden away in her book chest and smuggled into Scholar's Repose. The moment she stepped through the gate, her dormitory-mates went "Pspsps" at her book chest, and when she turned around, the dog had already been poking its head out for quite some time.\nWhy this one of all of them? Someone asked.\nShe said it looked very much like the one she had kept at home, long ago. Later, by the riverside... they were separated. It had not waited for her.\nFrom that day forth, Deng Deng waited for her every single day. When Li Si went to her lessons, it lay at the gate of the lecture hall and waited. Every teacher and student who passed by would give it a pat. When she went to the Tianyi Tower to read, it lay at the gate of the Tianyi Tower and waited, and those who passed by patted it all the same.\nIn time, Li Si became a teacher herself and moved out of Scholar's Repose. She grew ever busier, not only teaching, but attending to a great many matters on behalf of Laureate Lin, sometimes setting out and not returning for ten days or more.\nDeng Deng padded back to Scholar's Repose and began a new round of waiting.\nBack in familiar ground, it quickly came to know the ways of the place. Who liked to eat late into the night, who felt the cold, who was still racing through coursework in the small hours... Deng Deng knew it all.\nJust as it had once lain at the gate of the Tianyi Tower, the disciples passing through Scholar's Repose liked to pat its head. Those not in a hurry would crouch down and share a little something to eat.\nDeng Deng would ease itself down by their feet and listen to whatever they had to say: the teacher ran over time today; the Tianyi Tower has new books on the shelves; the queue for the new dish at the Dining Hall stretches forever; the one next door won at chess again; someone tripped over their own feet playing the Flower Poem Challenge... It listened with a head tilt, tail sweeping slowly back and forth across the ground.\nWhen the sky grew dark, it would go and sit at Liu Yizhi's door, and tap the door frame three times with its tail: thump, thump, thump. The person inside would laugh: "Alright, alright, I'm coming." Three steamed buns, a bowl of water, and something extra on a feast day.\nWhen it had finished eating, it did not leave. It settled by his feet and kept him company through his endless reading, his endless coursework... its belly rising and falling, like a round and fluffy yellow warming-stone. The long night somehow did not feel so hard to get through.\nEvery time Li Si returned, she brought little things from the places she had been: Pine Nut candy from Suzhou, pepper-salt cakes from Shu... and anecdotes from the road, offered to Liu Yizhi who had looked after Deng Deng for her, and to Deng Deng who had looked after Liu Yizhi for her. When the gifts were given, and the stories told, she would wave her hand, and Deng Deng would come bounding after her back to the small courtyard. That night, its purring rumbled especially loudly.\nA few days later, it would pad back to Scholar's Repose, lie down on the covered walkway, and wait. For today's chat, for tonight's steamed buns, for tomorrow's hand that would reach down and pat its head... and for Li Si's next return.\nLi Si called it "Deng Deng" because when it was small, its legs were too short to keep up. She could not take more than two steps before she had to turn around and call out "wait, wait." Liu Yizhi had taken up the name as well. Its whole life, it seemed, had been spent waiting.\nBut it was in no hurry. The end of waiting was always something good: Li Si would come back. The steamed buns would come. And in Scholar's Repose, there would always be someone who would crouch down and give it a pat on the head.