I Was Marked By The System's Arbiter

Chapter 105: Chapter 105: An Unexpected Arbiter

The residential wing had already gone quiet by the time Lin Yue left his room, the corridor holding nothing but the low hush of white walls and the distant murmur of someone’s laughter three doors down. He didn’t linger over closing the door. There was no reason to.

He’d made it four steps before Bai Wuyin’s voice caught him from behind.

"You’re going somewhere?"

He turned, found the boy standing half in the doorway of his own room, sketchbook already tucked under one arm as though he’d anticipated needing both hands free for something. His posture hadn’t folded yet. No one else was in sight.

"I want to verify something," Lin Yue said.

Bai Wuyin studied him for a moment, the particular stillness he wore only when it was just the two of them, the flat black of his right eye tracking Lin Yue’s face with an attention that had nothing childlike in it at all. Something moved behind that stillness—the beginning of a question, maybe, or an objection, or something closer to both.

Then footsteps rounded the corner behind him. A pair of players, mid-conversation, heading toward the atrium.

The change happened the way it always did, not gradually, but completely, in the space of a single breath. Bai Wuyin’s shoulders curved inward. His grip on the sketchbook tightened until his knuckles paled. When he looked at Lin Yue again, the sharpness had gone out of his gaze entirely, replaced by something wide and uncertain, a child watching an adult walk toward something he didn’t have the language to ask about.

"Be careful," he said, and his voice had thinned to match the rest of him, small and a little unsteady.

Lin Yue held his gaze for exactly as long as courtesy required, then nodded once and turned away. Behind him, he heard the two players’ footsteps slow as they passed Bai Wuyin’s door, heard one of them murmur something too soft to catch, heard Bai Wuyin’s voice answer in the tremulous register that had, by now, become as familiar to the Hall as his name.

Lin Yue didn’t look back to watch. He’d already seen enough versions of that particular performance to know exactly how convincing it would be.

—————————————————

The atrium was still busy when he crossed it, the Rank Board’s glow washing pale gold over knots of players who’d gathered in its light like moths that hadn’t yet decided the flame was dangerous. A few heads turned as he passed. He’d grown used to that too, in the last several hours—the particular weight of being looked at by people who weren’t sure whether to be impressed or suspicious, and had settled, for now, on doing both at once.

He didn’t stop to acknowledge any of it. He had somewhere to be, and the atrium wasn’t it.

Past the residential wing’s far entrance, the Game Hall began to change shape.

The transition wasn’t sudden. It was the kind of thing a person only noticed once it had already happened—the ceiling lowering by a hand’s width every so many meters, the warm gold light of the public sections cooling by careful degrees into something flatter, whiter, less inclined to forgive. The floor tile shifted from the polished stone of the atrium to something seamless and matte, the kind of surface that swallowed footsteps instead of returning them. Fewer players passed him the further he walked. Then, past a junction marked only by a small brass sign reading ADMINISTRATIVE ACCESS—RESTRICTED, none did at all.

He kept walking.

The corridor here had no character to speak of. No doors with names attached, no notice boards, no benches where players might sit and wait for something. Just wall after identical wall, broken at long intervals by terminals set flush into the surface, dark and unlit, waiting for a purpose nobody currently had for them. The air held a stillness that felt deliberate rather than accidental, not the comfortable hush of an empty room, but the specific quiet of a place built to discourage anyone from staying.

Lin Yue noted the details as he passed them, the way he noted most things: without urgency, without commentary, simply setting each one down somewhere in the back of his mind to be picked up again if it turned out to matter. The lighting here burned a shade colder than anywhere else in the Hall. The silence carried a texture he hadn’t encountered before, as if something on the other side of all this white was listening for a reason to stop being patient.

He’d been walking for what felt like ten minutes when the corridor finally opened into a small alcove, and the terminal he’d been looking for came into view.

It was different from the others he’d passed. Where those had sat dark and dormant, this one pulsed faintly, a slow, even glow behind matte black glass, as though it were breathing. Above it, elegant golden script assembled itself out of nothing, the same unhurried, deliberate calligraphy the System used whenever it wanted to be taken seriously.

[Restricted Access]

[Authorized Player–Arbiter Correspondence Terminal]

[Requests Will Be Logged]

Lin Yue stood in front of it for a moment, reading the words twice before he moved.

Requests will be logged.

Not reviewed. Not answered. Logged—a word that promised nothing beyond its own record-keeping, that made no claim about what, if anything, would happen on the other end of it. He set the distinction aside without deciding yet what to make of it, and pressed his palm flat against the terminal’s surface.

The glass was cold. Colder than he’d expected, colder than anything else he’d touched in the Hall. For a moment nothing happened at all, and he wondered, distantly, whether the terminal recognized him as something it was meant to respond to in the first place.

Then the light beneath his palm brightened, and the interface unfolded.

Unlike the ordinary System windows he’d grown used to—cluttered with details, borders, small decorative flourishes that served no real function—this one was almost aggressively plain. White text on black. No embellishment. No sound.

Select Arbiter:

A short list resolved beneath the prompt. Seven names, evenly spaced, none of them elaborated on. He recognized every one of them; he’d stood in the same room as all seven, once, on the night the Hall had gone silent all at once and every player still moving had simply stopped moving. He hadn’t spoken to most of them since. But he remembered the names, and more usefully, he remembered which of them had bothered to look directly at him that night, and which hadn’t.

He didn’t hesitate over his own choice.

[Gu Yanchen]

[Submit Request?]

[Yes] [No]

He pressed Yes.

[Request Submitted.]

[Recipient: Arbiter Gu Yanchen]

[Status: Pending]

That was all. No estimate of a wait. No confirmation beyond the bare fact of the request having gone somewhere. Lin Yue stood in front of the terminal a moment longer, half-expecting something more—a chime, a shift in the light, some small acknowledgment that the System understood the weight of what he’d just asked for.

Nothing came.

He stepped back from the terminal, found a stretch of blank wall a few feet away that offered nothing to look at, and settled against it anyway, and waited.

—————————————————

Five minutes passed. Then ten.

A player wandered into the alcove around the fifteen-minute mark—a thin man with a bandaged arm, glancing at the terminal with the wary curiosity of someone who’d heard about it secondhand and wanted to see it for himself. He approached, studied the golden text above the black glass, and after a moment, without touching it, turned around and left the way he’d come.

Lin Yue watched him go and thought nothing of it. People came and went. That was simply what corridors were for.

Twenty minutes in, two more players appeared—a pair, mid-conversation, the kind of low, unbothered chatter that belonged to people who hadn’t yet noticed where they’d wandered. They slowed as they neared the alcove. One of them glanced at the terminal, said something to the other Lin Yue didn’t catch, and the pair’s pace picked up again almost at once, carrying them past without either of them looking back.

By the half-hour mark, Lin Yue had begun to notice the pattern for what it was.

Nobody stayed.

It wasn’t that the corridor emptied all at once, in a single obvious retreat. It emptied the way water drains from a basin with a hole too small to notice—gradually, unremarkably, until the fact of it was only visible in hindsight. Players who passed through the junction glanced toward the alcove and adjusted their route without seeming to decide to. Conversations that drifted close to the terminal thinned and redirected elsewhere. Nobody said anything about it. Nobody appeared to consciously avoid it at all.

And yet, forty minutes in, the corridor around him was entirely empty.

Lin Yue considered that, turning it over slowly. He’d have expected a restricted section to draw curiosity rather than repel it; new players especially tended toward exactly the kind of reckless interest that walked straight into places marked stay out. Instead, something about this particular stretch of hallway seemed to discourage lingering at an instinctive level, beneath conscious thought, the way a person’s skin prickled near a ledge before their mind had finished calculating the danger of falling.

He wondered whether that was the terminal’s doing. Or the System’s. Or something else the System hadn’t built so much as allowed to exist here, quietly, for reasons of its own.

The lighting shifted, very faintly, sometime past the forty-five-minute mark—not darker, exactly, but flatter, as if some small warmth had been withdrawn from it without changing its brightness. Lin Yue noted that too.

He didn’t move from where he stood.

An hour passed.

He had, by now, run through every reasonable explanation for the delay he could construct from the little he knew. Gu Yanchen might simply be occupied—Arbiters presumably had responsibilities beyond a single marked player, whatever those responsibilities entailed. The terminal itself might be slower than its stark efficiency suggested, its plainness a poor guide to how quickly anything behind it actually moved. Or the request might have gone nowhere useful at all, logged and then left, exactly as the golden text above the glass had warned him it might be.

None of the explanations sat comfortably. In every prior instance, every single one, without exception, Gu Yanchen had found him first. Sometimes deliberately, stepping into a scene with the calm inevitability of someone who’d simply decided to be there. Sometimes almost by accident, appearing at the edge of some crisis as though drawn by it. But always, always, without Lin Yue needing to ask.

This was the first time Lin Yue had reached out instead. And for the first time, nothing had reached back.

He didn’t like how much that observation unsettled him. He noted the feeling anyway, set it down beside the rest, and kept waiting.

—————————————————

It was somewhere past the hour mark, the corridor by then so silent that Lin Yue could hear the faint, almost inaudible hum of the terminal’s internal light, when the glass finally brightened again.

He straightened from the wall.

The light didn’t simply flare on this time. It gathered, pulling inward from the corners of the alcove in slow, deliberate threads, coalescing into a column that thickened and darkened by degrees until it held, unmistakably, the shape of a person.

Lin Yue watched the shape resolve, already composing the words he intended to say. He’d expected black robes, a face carved into stillness, the particular gravity Gu Yanchen carried into every room he entered, whether or not he meant to.

What stepped out of the light instead was someone else entirely, and Lin Yue recognized him before the light had even finished settling around his shoulders.

He’d seen that formal scholar-like uniform a couple of times before, on the night the entire Hall had frozen mid-motion around him and seven figures had stood in a row on a raised platform that hadn’t existed a moment earlier. He hadn’t spoken to this one that night. But he remembered the scholarly look, the thin book in his hand that he always carried, the general air of a man with an oppressive logic who had never once in his existence stood the way an Arbiter was presumably meant to stand.

"He Luowen," Lin Yue said, before the other man had said anything at all.

That stopped him for exactly a beat, not long, but long enough that Lin Yue caught it. He Luowen blinked, then broke into a wide, delighted grin, as if Lin Yue had just done something genuinely impressive rather than simply remembered a name from a single night weeks ago.

"Well," he said. "I’m flattered. Most players who see all seven of us in one room manage to forget every name except the one they actually care about." He tucked both hands into his pockets, rocking back slightly on his heels. "You rang for the wrong Arbiter, by the way. In case that wasn’t obvious yet."

"I noticed," Lin Yue said.

"Lucky for you," He Luowen went on, entirely unbothered, "I answer his mail."

"His mail."

"Figuratively." He shrugged, the gesture loose and easy, nothing about it carrying the weight Lin Yue had come to associate with anything an Arbiter said or did. "Requests, correspondence, the occasional very formal, very serious summons submitted by a very serious player through a very serious terminal." He tipped his head slightly toward the black glass behind him, as if introducing it properly for the first time. "You’d be surprised how much of that ends up on my desk instead of his."

"You’ve never mentioned that arrangement," Lin Yue said. "The night we all stood in that hall. You said very little."

"I said nothing at all, if I remember it right," He Luowen corrected, mild amusement flickering across his face. "That night wasn’t mine to talk during. There’s a pecking order to these things, believe it or not, even among us." He spread one hand, vaguely gesturing at himself. "He Luowen. Arbiter of Rules. Since you already knew that much, I’ll just remind you formally."

He tapped the small insignia stitched into his collar, then let his hand drop, the grin widening.

"And no. Before you draw any conclusions from the title, that doesn’t mean I follow them particularly well."

Something in the corridor’s flat silence loosened, just slightly, at that. It was, Lin Yue thought, probably meant to. He didn’t let it show that it had worked.

"Where is Gu Yanchen?" Lin Yue asked.

He Luowen’s smile didn’t vanish. But for exactly one instant, brief enough that Lin Yue might have missed it if he hadn’t already spent the entire hour training his attention on this man’s every shift, something behind the grin faltered. A flicker of hesitation, quickly smoothed. Not fear, exactly. Closer to the reflexive tension of someone choosing carefully which of several true things he was allowed to say out loud.

"Gu Yanchen isn’t available right now," He Luowen said.

The pause that followed carried more weight than the sentence itself. Lin Yue let it sit, watching He Luowen’s face rather than filling the silence, the way he’d have watched any subject that had just given away more than it meant to.

Then the smile came back, quick and easy, as if it had never wavered at all.

"But," He Luowen said, "since you asked so nicely, and personally requested to meet him, I’ll tell you what I can."

Lin Yue set the deflection aside for now, choosing not to press it yet. There would be time. He’d already learned, over four instances, that pushing too early only ever taught the other side to guard itself more carefully, and something about the way He Luowen had answered told him this was a man who guarded things well when he wanted to.

"That’s generous of you," Lin Yue said instead, tone flat.

"I contain multitudes." He Luowen spread his hands, palms up, as if presenting himself as evidence. "Ask away. I’ll answer what I’m allowed to and lie badly about the rest, so you’ll always know which is which."

"Why does a formal request get logged rather than answered?"

"Because that’s what formal requests are for." He Luowen, leaned back against the wall beside the terminal, entirely at ease, the posture of a man settling in for a conversation he’d had before. "Every audience request a player submits gets recorded. Timestamped. Filed somewhere very official-sounding that neither of us will ever see. Most of the time, that’s the end of it; the Arbiter it’s addressed to reads it whenever they get around to it, and decides whether it’s worth a personal appearance."

"And when it isn’t answered personally?"

"Then someone like me shows up instead, and you get stuck listening to me talk for twenty minutes about things I’m only half allowed to tell you." He grinned again, wider this time. "Believe it or not, that’s the better outcome. There’s a version of this where nobody shows up at all, and you just stand in this hallway getting steadily more unsettled until you give up and go home."

"You make it sound routine," Lin Yue said. "Is it?"

"Depends on the player." He Luowen’s gaze sharpened, just slightly, the first genuine edge Lin Yue had seen beneath all the loose charm. "Most players never come down this corridor even once. Fewer still ever submit a real request instead of just poking at the terminal to see what it does. And out of the handful who do, almost none of them are asking after a Core Arbiter by name, the way you just did, like you already know exactly who you’re looking for and expect him to already know you back."

"I do," Lin Yue said simply.

"Yeah," He Luowen said, quieter than before, the loose charm briefly setting itself down the way Bai Wuyin’s own performance did, whenever there was no one left worth performing for. "I figured you might. That’s actually most of why I came instead of letting this sit in a queue somewhere."

He pushed off the wall, straightened, and for a moment the careless posture fell away almost entirely, replaced by something more deliberate.

"Look," he said. "I’m not going to sit here and pretend this is a normal audience request. It isn’t. In every instance before this one, near as I understand it, Gu Yanchen came to you. On his own terms, whenever he felt like it, without anyone submitting so much as a slip of paper through a terminal like this one." He tapped the black glass beside him, almost idly. "This is the first time you’ve had to come looking. That’s not nothing. I don’t think you need me to tell you that."

Lin Yue said nothing. He’d already reached the same conclusion an hour ago, standing alone in an empty corridor that had emptied itself around him without a single visible reason why.

"So," He Luowen went on, the easy grin creeping back over his face, though something behind it stayed a shade more careful than before, "since I can’t hand you the person you actually came for, how about I buy you a few minutes instead? Somewhere that isn’t a hallway with terrible acoustics and even worse lighting."

He glanced sideways, toward a stretch of blank wall a short distance down the alcove, the same seamless white as everything else here, unmarked by any door, any seam, any indication that it was anything other than more wall.

He lifted one hand, made a small, unhurried gesture, almost lazy in its casualness.

The wall parted without a sound. No grinding of hidden mechanisms, no seam of light widening into a doorway, simply a section of white folding smoothly out of existence, revealing a small chamber beyond it. A table. Two chairs. Nothing else. The same shadowless light as everywhere in the Hall, and the same total, absolute quiet, if anything deepened by the confines of the smaller space.

"Come on," He Luowen said, tipping his head toward the opening, the grin settling into something a little more genuine, a little less performed. "Some conversations aren’t meant for hallways."

Lin Yue looked at the chamber for a moment, at its bareness, its silence, the careful absence of anything that might explain why it existed here at all, tucked behind a wall that wasn’t supposed to be a door. He thought of Bai Wuyin’s face in the doorway an hour ago, the question that had risen and then folded itself away unspoken. He thought of the hour just passed, of a corridor that had emptied itself around him for reasons no one had bothered to name.

Then he stepped forward, into the room.

He Luowen followed a half-step behind, unhurried, and the wall closed itself behind them both, not loudly, not dramatically, but completely, without so much as a whisper of sound to mark the moment the corridor outside disappeared.

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