I Was Marked By The System's Arbiter

Chapter 104: Chapter 104: Hallway Mystery

The knocking stopped the moment Lin Yue’s hand touched the door.

He opened it to find Bai Wuyin standing in the corridor, sketchbook tucked under one arm, expression as flat and unreadable as it ever was when no one else was watching. The performance he’d worn through the atrium and in the instance, the trembling hands, the ducked head, had been folded away somewhere and put back on its shelf, the way a coat gets hung the moment a person steps indoors.

"Rooms have been reassigned," Bai Wuyin said, without preamble. "Following the rank update. We should look before either of us unpacks anything."

Lin Yue considered the boy for a moment. "You already checked."

"I checked mine." A pause, brief, deliberate. "I didn’t check yours."

It wasn’t quite a lie. Lin Yue let it pass without comment and stepped out into the hall, pulling the door shut behind him.

The residential wing stretched in both directions, longer than it had any right to be, white walls under a soft, shadowless light that came from nowhere Lin Yue had ever been able to locate. Doors lined both sides at even intervals, identical but for the small brass plates beside each frame, numbers etched into them in a neat, unhurried hand that looked less like print and more like something carved by a very patient tool. Here and there, players moved between rooms with bags slung over their shoulders, murmuring to each other in the low, unbothered tone of people settling into a routine they’d long since stopped questioning. Compared to the atrium, the air here felt almost gentle.

Bai Wuyin fell in half a step behind him, the way he always did, close enough to reach if something happened and far enough to look, to anyone watching, like a nervous child keeping a careful distance from an adult he wasn’t entirely sure of.

He read the numbers as they passed.

"Seven-twelve," he murmured, and then, a few steps later, "Seven-thirteen." Another few steps. "Seven-fourteen."

Lin Yue said nothing at first, only listened, the way he listened to most things without urgency, noting the rhythm of it before deciding whether the rhythm meant anything. Bai Wuyin’s voice didn’t rise or fall. It simply kept pace with his footsteps, one number for every three or four strides, steady as a metronome nobody else could hear.

"Looking for something?" Lin Yue asked eventually.

Bai Wuyin didn’t answer right away. When he did, his eyes stayed forward, fixed on the next brass plate before it had even fully come into view.

"Just remembering."

Lin Yue glanced sideways at him. "Remembering what?"

"That’s the part I haven’t worked out yet."

It wasn’t an answer, but it wasn’t nothing either, and Lin Yue had learned by now that Bai Wuyin rarely spoke without a reason sitting underneath the words, even when the reason wasn’t ready to surface. He let it be. Whatever the boy was tracking in his head, he would say it when he had something worth saying. Pressing him now would only get silence dressed up as an answer.

They turned a corner, and the hallway opened into a longer stretch, doors marching off into a haze of distance that made the far end look smaller than it should have. Lin Yue’s own door was somewhere along this stretch, according to the small notification that had bloomed in the corner of his vision the moment the Rank Board finished settling. He hadn’t paid it much attention at the time. He was starting to think that had been a mistake.

He was three doors past seven-nineteen, scanning the plates ahead for his own number, when a voice cut down the corridor from somewhere around the next bend—bright, unhurried, already pitched for an audience that hadn’t arrived yet.

"You two are impossible to lose track of."

Bai Wuyin’s head came up. For just a fraction of a second, before either performance settled into place, something in his face did something Lin Yue rarely saw—an actual reaction, unguarded, quick and warm and entirely unrehearsed.

Then Shen Rui rounded the corner, and the moment closed over as smoothly as it had opened.

He came toward them with a small travel bag slung over one shoulder and that easy, loose-limbed walk that had never once looked hurried in four instances of knowing him, grinning like the atrium hadn’t happened at all, like the Rank Board hadn’t just spent the better part of an hour rearranging half the Hall’s opinion of them.

"I go missing for what, twenty minutes, and you two have already become the most talked-about names in the building." He fell into step beside them without waiting to be asked, the way he always did, as though there’d never been a question of whether he’d be welcome there. "Do you have any idea how many people asked me if I knew you? Strangers. Complete strangers. One guy cornered me by the vendor stalls like I owed him information."

"What did you tell him?" Lin Yue asked.

"That I’d known you both since before you were interesting, and that made me infinitely more interesting than either of you, and he should really be asking me for my autograph instead." Shen Rui’s grin widened. "He did not agree with that assessment."

Bai Wuyin’s shoulders had already curved slightly inward, his grip finding the strap of his sketchbook and holding it a little too tightly, his eyes dropping half a degree toward the floor. To anyone glancing over, it would have read exactly as it was meant to—a shy kid, uneasy around a loud, familiar presence, comforted by it and cowed by it in equal measure. Lin Yue had seen the transition happen enough times now that he no longer needed to watch for the exact moment it occurred. It simply happened, seamless, the way a held breath turns into an exhale.

Shen Rui didn’t seem to notice anything different about it at all. Which, Lin Yue supposed, was rather the point.

"Xiao Bai," Shen Rui said, turning to look the boy over with exaggerated scrutiny, hands on his hips as if appraising a piece of furniture. "You got taller."

Bai Wuyin blinked up at him, confusion settling over his face with perfect, unhurried timing. "...I didn’t."

"You did. I can tell. It’s a feeling." Shen Rui nodded seriously, as if he’d just confirmed something scientific. "You got taller in spirit."

Bai Wuyin stared at him for a long moment, utterly silent, the particular silence of a child trying to determine whether an adult is joking and not quite willing to commit to an answer either way.

Lin Yue, walking a half-step ahead, felt the corner of his own mouth twitch, not quite a smile, but close enough to one that he let it happen rather than smoothing it away. Four instances ago he might have suppressed even that much. He didn’t bother tonight.

"That doesn’t mean anything," Bai Wuyin said finally, very quietly, sounding exactly as bewildered as a twelve-year-old ought to sound when an adult said something like that to him.

"Everything means something if you say it with enough confidence," Shen Rui said. "That’s basically the only life skill I have. Ask anyone."

"I would rather not," Lin Yue said.

Shen Rui laughed, a short, genuine bark of a sound, entirely without performance, and for a moment the corridor felt less like a place the System had built to house its most-watched survivors and more like an ordinary hallway in an ordinary building, three friends walking back from somewhere unremarkable, the kind of scene that could have belonged to any life that wasn’t this one.

It didn’t last long. Nothing here ever did. But Lin Yue noted, distantly, that he’d wanted it to.

They kept walking, the numbers on the doors climbing steadily upward, until Shen Rui suddenly slowed, glancing between a brass plate on his left and something he was counting on his fingers.

"Wait," he said.

Lin Yue looked back at him. "What?"

"Wait, wait, hold on." Shen Rui held up a hand, palm out, the universal gesture for give me a second, and began counting again, lips moving slightly, eyes flicking between the door beside him and some invisible tally only he could see. "Seven-twenty-two. That’s mine. And you two are—" he squinted down the hall toward where Bai Wuyin had stopped in front of a door, "—seven-nineteen and seven-twenty-five?"

"Seven-nineteen," Bai Wuyin confirmed, pointing at the door nearest him. "His is seven-twenty-five." He tipped his head toward Lin Yue.

Shen Rui’s face went through an entire performance of mental arithmetic, brow furrowed, mouth moving, one finger tracing an invisible number line in the air, before breaking into a grin so sudden and so pleased with itself that it looked almost dangerous.

"Three doors."

He pointed dramatically down the corridor, first at his own door, then sweeping the finger across the space between until it landed on Lin Yue’s.

"We’re three rooms apart."

"That’s a fact," Lin Yue said. "I’m not sure it’s a discovery."

"It is absolutely a discovery," Shen Rui said, entirely unbothered by the correction. "Out of every room in this entire wing, and there are a lot of rooms in this wing, I walked past what felt like four hundred of them just getting here; we all landed within three doors of each other. That’s not nothing. That’s basically fate holding a clipboard."

"Or it’s a coincidence," Lin Yue said.

"Sure. Or it’s fate. Holding a clipboard." Shen Rui folded his arms, entirely satisfied with his own logic. "This calls for celebration."

Bai Wuyin blinked up at him again, this time with an expression that landed somewhere between confusion and mild alarm—a child unsure whether celebration meant something was about to be asked of him. "Celebration of what?"

"Of the fact that the universe apparently likes us enough to keep us close together." Shen Rui spread his arms as if presenting the hallway itself as evidence. "Do you know how rare that is? Last time I ended up two wings over from anyone I recognized. I spent three days making polite conversation with a guy who only wanted to talk about the acoustics of the vendor stalls."

"I don’t think that qualifies as evidence of anything," Lin Yue said.

"It’s evidence that I have suffered, and that this—" Shen Rui gestured at the three of them, "—is an improvement. That’s all the evidence I need."

Lin Yue simply looked at him. Beside him, Bai Wuyin’s lips pressed together in something that, on a less carefully managed face, might have been the beginning of a smile.

Shen Rui laughed at his own joke before either of them could respond to it, unbothered, already moving on, and for a few more steps the corridor held that same loose, easy warmth—the specific, unremarkable comfort of people who had decided, without quite discussing it, that they belonged to each other now.

Then Shen Rui’s voice dropped, and the warmth thinned out around the edges.

"People are talking about your rank, by the way." He said it lightly, almost carelessly, but Lin Yue had spent enough time listening to know the difference between careless and practiced carelessness. "Both your ranks."

Bai Wuyin’s head dipped, shoulders curling in a fraction further, though Lin Yue thought, without any way to be certain of it, that this particular reaction might have needed less performing than the others.

"What are they saying?" Lin Yue asked.

"Depends who you ask." Shen Rui rubbed the back of his neck, the gesture of someone choosing words with more care than he usually bothered to. "Some people think it’s incredible. I heard a couple of first-timers say your names like you’re already legends, which, honestly, is a little premature, but I get it. Some people think the board glitched. There’s a rumor going around that it double-counted something, recalculated wrong, that kind of thing." He hesitated. "And some people just don’t buy it. Especially about Xiao Bai."

"Don’t buy what," Bai Wuyin asked, small and quiet, exactly as a frightened child would ask it.

"That a twelve-year-old ranks the same as someone who’s survived four instances doing God knows what in each one." Shen Rui’s tone stayed gentle, but he didn’t dress the words up either. "I’m not saying I think that. I’m just telling you what’s floating around the Hall, because you’re my friends, and I’d rather you hear it from me before you hear it secondhand from someone less polite about it."

"Who’s saying it?" Lin Yue asked.

"Mostly veterans." Shen Rui’s mouth twisted, half a grimace. "Newcomers mostly just think it’s cool. It’s the people who’ve actually survived a lot of these that are side-eyeing it. Somebody near the terminals called it ’convenient.’ Somebody else said the board’s been acting strange for a few cycles now and this might just be the first time anyone noticed." He shrugged, though the gesture didn’t fully land as casual. "For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s convenient. I think you two did something out there. I just figured you should know people are looking harder than usual right now."

Lin Yue nodded once. "Thank you for telling us."

"Don’t thank me, it’s not exactly a gift." Shen Rui exhaled, some of the weight sliding back off his shoulders now that he’d said it. "Just be careful who you talk to for a while, is all. Some of these veterans hold onto suspicion the way I hold onto grudges against people who reorganize furniture without asking me."

Bai Wuyin lowered his head further, quiet, small, folding into the shape of a child who’d just learned the world was watching him for reasons he didn’t understand and couldn’t control. It was, Lin Yue thought, a completely convincing reaction. He was fairly certain, by now, that convincing didn’t mean false. Only that it was harder to tell where the boy’s own unease ended and the performance of it began—a distinction Bai Wuyin himself might not always know either.

"I’m sorry," Shen Rui added quickly, apparently reading something in the silence that made him wince. "I didn’t mean to make it heavier. I just... I’d rather you know than not know, you get it?"

"I get it," Lin Yue said.

Shen Rui nodded, visibly relieved to have the moment behind him, and then, with the sudden, weightless recovery of someone who genuinely didn’t like sitting in heavy air for long, brightened again.

"Anyway. Speaking of things I forgot." He patted down his own pockets with theatrical dismay, then groaned. "I left my other bag back in my old room. If I don’t grab it before someone reassigns the room to a stranger, I’m never seeing my good jacket again, and I will hold both of you personally responsible for the resulting emotional damage."

"How is that our responsibility?" Bai Wuyin asked, quiet, genuinely puzzled in the way only a child could manage.

"Everything is your responsibility if I decide it is. That’s how friendship works." Shen Rui was already backing away down the corridor, walking backward with the easy confidence of someone who’d never once run into anything doing this. "Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back, and then we are absolutely getting food, because I have been awake for what feels like a geological era and I refuse to process any more of this hallway on an empty stomach."

He turned the corner and was gone, his footsteps fading fast, the particular energy he carried everywhere with him fading with them until the corridor settled back into its earlier hush.

The change in Bai Wuyin happened at once, the moment the last echo of Shen Rui’s footsteps thinned past hearing.

His shoulders straightened. The tremor left his hands. He didn’t so much drop the performance as set it down gently, the way a person sets down something they intend to pick back up in a moment, and when he looked up at Lin Yue again his face held none of the uncertainty it had a second ago—only the same flat, careful attention it always carried when there was no one left to fool.

"Three rooms," he said.

Lin Yue waited.

"Maybe coincidence." Bai Wuyin’s gaze drifted along the corridor, tracking the doors, the numbers, the small distances between one plate and the next. "Maybe not."

"You’ve been counting since the atrium," Lin Yue said. It wasn’t a question.

"Since before that." Bai Wuyin’s voice stayed even, unhurried, the tone he used when he was working something out rather than simply reporting it. "I noticed the last placement too. Instance three, before we came back here—He Jian and Zhou Ke ended up two doors from each other without ever requesting it. I didn’t think much of it then. It’s easy to write off one coincidence." He tilted his head slightly, dark hair sliding further over his mismatched eyes. "Harder to write off two."

Lin Yue looked down the length of the corridor, at the long procession of identical doors stretching toward a vanishing point that never quite resolved. Here and there, other players moved between rooms, a woman hauling a duffel bag past a doorway three units down; further off, a pair of men Lin Yue recognized distantly, survivors of the same early instance, standing outside adjacent doors in quiet, unremarkable conversation. He hadn’t paid the pattern any attention before Bai Wuyin pointed at it. Now that it had been pointed at, he found it difficult to unsee.

"You think proximity is deliberate," Lin Yue said.

"I think proximity is something." Bai Wuyin’s mouth flattened, thoughtful rather than certain. "I don’t have enough to say what. Maybe it groups people by rank. Maybe by survival record, or instance history, or something we haven’t guessed yet. Maybe it’s nothing at all, and I’m seeing a shape in noise because I want there to be one." He glanced sideways at Lin Yue. "But if I had to guess, I’d say the System doesn’t put anyone anywhere by accident. Not here. Not in an instance. Not on the board."

"The System rarely wastes details," Lin Yue said.

Bai Wuyin nodded slowly, the small, precise nod of someone filing the sentence away rather than merely agreeing with it. "That’s the part that worries me more than the crowd in the atrium ever did. Attention is loud. It’s easy to notice, easy to plan around." His gaze drifted back to the numbers on the doors, distant and considering. "Whatever decided we should end up three doors from Shen Rui, and however many doors from whoever else it’s watching—that isn’t loud at all. It’s just quiet, and correct, and sitting right where nobody thinks to look for it."

Neither of them said anything further for a moment. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence. It was the kind that settles between two people who both understand a question is larger than either of them currently has the pieces to answer, and who have both, separately, decided that pretending otherwise wouldn’t help.

Lin Yue thought of the notification still glowing faintly somewhere behind his closed door—New Privileges Unlocking, Details Pending Arbiter Review—and wondered, not for the first time, how many small, deliberate things had already been arranged around him before he’d thought to ask whether anything was being arranged at all.

He didn’t say that out loud. There would be time for it later, once there was more than a guess to hang the thought on.

Down the corridor, footsteps returned, unhurried at first, then quickening into something more recognizable, the particular rhythm that belonged to exactly one person in the whole Hall.

Bai Wuyin’s posture folded inward before Shen Rui had even rounded the corner, shoulders curving, hands finding the strap of his sketchbook again, the transition so complete and so immediate that Lin Yue, who had watched it happen dozens of times now, still found himself unable to mark the precise instant it occurred. One version of the boy simply stopped being visible, and the other took his place, seamless as breath.

Shen Rui reappeared with a slightly rumpled jacket slung over one arm, looking pleased with himself in the specific way of someone who’d successfully rescued a minor personal treasure from bureaucratic oblivion.

"Crisis averted," he announced, holding the jacket up like a trophy. "This thing has survived three instances with me. I wasn’t about to let a room reassignment take it out."

"Congratulations," Lin Yue said.

"Thank you. I accept your congratulations graciously." Shen Rui slung the jacket over his shoulder and glanced between the two of them, apparently noticing nothing unusual in the quiet he’d walked back into, no reason to notice, Lin Yue supposed—when the surface of it had already smoothed itself over before he’d come close enough to see beneath it. "Okay. Food. I meant that. I will actually collapse if I don’t eat something in the next half hour, and I refuse to do that in this hallway, it has terrible lighting for collapsing dramatically in."

"The lighting seems adequate," Lin Yue said.

"It’s fine, which is worse. Dramatic collapses need mood lighting. This is just—" Shen Rui gestured vaguely at the soft, even glow overhead, "—competent. There’s no romance in competent lighting."

Bai Wuyin, quiet and small beside them, glanced up at Shen Rui with an expression that might have been confusion or might have simply been a twelve-year-old deciding, once again, that adults said strange things and it usually wasn’t worth arguing about.

The three of them stood there a moment longer, in the wide white hush of the corridor, doors marching off identically in both directions, the golden numbers beside each one glinting faintly under the same shadowless light. For the first time since they’d stepped out of the last instance, nobody said anything at all—not because there was nothing left to say, but because, for just a breath, none of it needed saying.

It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence. It was, if anything, closer to peace than anything Lin Yue had felt since the Rank Board had first begun to move.

But underneath it, each of them was thinking of something different.

Shen Rui thought of a jacket rescued and a meal not yet eaten and the simple, uncomplicated relief of having his friends within three doors of him again.

Lin Yue thought of a notification still glowing behind a closed door, and of an Arbiter’s review still pending, and of how carefully something might have arranged all three of them into this particular hallway without ever once explaining why.

And Bai Wuyin, small and quiet and entirely unreadable to anyone but the one person walking beside him, thought about the numbers on the doors, and about how rarely, in his experience, the System ever gave anything away for free.

The hallway stretched on behind them, identical doors under identical light, swallowing the silence the way it swallowed everything else here.

None of them moved to break it.

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