Function waiting 

fn waiting(
    ball: &Ball,
    entity: Entity,
    expired: &[Entity],
    stale: bool,
) -> Waiting

What a tick does with a ball.

A ball is reclaimed when one of the requests it is waiting on was given up on — it waited out PENDING_TIMEOUT, or a world that owed it an answer ended — and when the world it wears an instance in ended, because the instance went with that world.

The wait is measured by the requests themselves, not by the tick the ball was dropped on: a ball the render world confirmed owes nothing, and no number of ticks takes it away.