I Was Marked By The System's Arbiter

Chapter 112: Chapter 112: School That Never Sleeps

The last thing Lin Yue remembered was white light, and two words shaped without sound.

Be safe.

Then nothing. No falling sensation, no wrenching pull through space, none of the disorientation that usually marked the space between one Instance and the next. There was simply a gap, clean and total, as though someone had reached into his memory and folded it shut.

And on the other side of that gap—

Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.

Chalk against a blackboard.

Lin Yue’s eyes opened slowly, the ceiling above him swimming into focus—pale, water-stained, ordinary. A classroom ceiling. Fluorescent lights humming faintly overhead, one of them flickering in a lazy, arrhythmic pulse that suggested nothing more sinister than a loose fixture.

He became aware, in order, of the following things.

The smell first. Chalk dust, thick and dry in his throat. Old wood polish beneath it, and beneath that, the faint mineral scent of rain-dampened concrete, though he couldn’t place where the rain smell was coming from. Too cheap ballpoint ink, the kind that stained fingers.

A voice, calm and unhurried, moving through the final steps of an equation like it was the most natural thing in the world.

"—and when you isolate the variable here, you’ll find that x equals negative three. Copy this down, please."

Lin Yue did not move.

He was sitting upright. His hands rested on a desk, wooden, slightly scratched along one edge where some student, at some point, had carved something too shallow to read. A textbook lay open in front of him. Mathematics. Chapter four.

He did not remember opening it.

Around him, the room hummed with the low, unremarkable noise of an ordinary class in session. Pens scratching. A chair creaking as someone shifted their weight. Someone coughing quietly into their sleeve. Thirty desks, arranged in five neat rows of six, every seat occupied but one.

Lin Yue did not move his head. He moved only his eyes, slow and deliberate, the way he always did when the world had not yet earned his trust.

School uniform.

He was wearing one. Dark trousers, a white-collared shirt, a thin gray sweater vest with a crest stitched over the left breast—a stylized pine tree, needles rendered in careful green thread, encircled by characters he didn’t immediately recognize. A student ID card sat clipped to the sweater’s pocket. He didn’t dare look down at it yet. Not with the teacher’s back still turned.

To his left, two rows over, a familiar head of dark hair sat with unnatural stillness, and Lin Yue felt something in his chest ease by a fraction before he caught himself and set the feeling aside. Bai Wuyin. Small, uniformed, sketchbook nowhere in sight, replaced instead by a plain school backpack slung over the back of his chair.

Further ahead, near the window, Shen Rui sat with his jaw slightly slack, staring at the equation on the board like it had personally wronged him.

And two seats down from Lin Yue, close enough that their eyes met the instant Lin Yue looked, was Ye Xian.

He didn’t look confused. If anything, he looked amused, one eyebrow lifted in silent commentary on the absurdity of it all, the corner of his mouth already curling upward like he was waiting for Lin Yue to say something first.

Lin Yue said nothing.

He counted instead.

Thirty desks. Thirty seats. Twenty-nine filled.

One empty.

It sat near the back of the room, close to the window, an ordinary wooden desk, chair pushed neatly beneath it, a worn schoolbag hanging from the side hook and a textbook resting squarely on its surface, corners aligned, as though its owner had just stepped out and would be back any moment.

Except no one in the room seemed to be waiting for them.

A boy near the front, not a player, Lin Yue was almost certain, something in the too-smooth rhythm of his breathing marking him as something other, leaned toward his neighbor and whispered, barely audible.

"Where are we?"

The neighbor whispered back, just as lost. "I don’t know."

Somewhere behind Lin Yue, a chair scraped as someone tried to stand.

"Please remain seated."

The teacher hadn’t turned around. He hadn’t raised his voice. The chalk in his hand didn’t even pause mid-stroke. It was, Lin Yue thought, the most ordinary sentence a teacher could say to a restless student, and somehow, in the silence that followed, it landed heavier than a shout would have.

The student who’d tried to stand sat back down without a word.

Lin Yue’s gaze slid toward the window. Gray sky. A courtyard below, empty, hedges trimmed into severe rectangular shapes. Streaks of moisture ran down the outside of the glass in thin, static lines.

It had rained recently. Or it looked like it had.

But the puddles gathered along the courtyard path didn’t ripple. The single tree standing at the courtyard’s center, bare-branched, gray-barked, didn’t sway. Not a single leaf, not a single blade of grass so much as trembled.

No wind. No rain falling. Just evidence of rain, without the rain itself.

He made a note of it mentally. No alarm, no speculation—just another fact that didn’t yet belong anywhere in the puzzle.

The chalk stopped.

The teacher set it down in the tray at the base of the blackboard, brushed the dust from his fingers with two efficient strokes, and turned.

He was an unremarkable man in every visible respect, middle-aged, thin-framed glasses perched low on his nose, hair combed with the kind of precision that suggested decades of the same habit repeated every morning without variation. A plain white dress shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow. Dark trousers. A red pen tucked neatly into his breast pocket, cap facing outward.

He smiled at the room. It was a pleasant smile. Practiced, but not unkind.

"Good morning, students."

The response came instantly from most of the room, a ragged but immediate chorus.

"Good morning, Xu Laoshi." (Teacher Xu)

The players hesitated. Lin Yue watched the beat of silence where their voices should have joined in, watched them glance sideways at each other, watched them catch the rhythm a half-second late and mimic it clumsily.

Mr. Xu’s smile widened, warm and approving, as though nothing about the delay had struck him as strange at all.

"Excellent."

His gaze swept the room once, unhurried, and stopped on Lin Yue.

For exactly half a second, something shifted behind the man’s glasses. Not fear. Not confusion.

Recognition.

The kind of look a teacher gave a student they’d taught for years, catching sight of them after a long absence. Then it smoothed away, seamless, gone so quickly that if Lin Yue had blinked he might have missed it entirely.

"You’re the new transfer students, aren’t you?"

No one answered.

Mr. Xu didn’t seem bothered by the silence. He simply nodded, as though the silence itself was an answer he’d expected.

"Don’t worry. You’ll get used to Yinshan."

Lin Yue lingered on the phrase. New transfer students. The words were broad enough to include all of them, almost deliberately so. As though their arrival hadn’t been unexpected at all, but something already accounted for on a schedule none of them had seen.

There had been no transfer forms. No orientation. No explanation at all beyond a mathematics lesson already in progress and a man who spoke about them the way one might speak about children returning from summer holiday.

He isn’t surprised that we’re here, Lin Yue thought. He’s surprised we don’t already know where "here" is.

The System noticed his silence took nearly four full minutes to arrive.

It came all at once, a translucent pane of text sliding into the corner of his vision, gold characters cool and impersonal against the classroom’s warm, ordinary light.

[INSTANCE LOADING COMPLETE.]

[INSTANCE NAME: YINSHAN ACADEMY]

[CURRENT ROLE: STUDENT]

[INSTANCE OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE.]

The screen lingered on that line longer than Lin Yue expected. Long enough for him to think the message was finished. Then it flickered once, a subtle stutter in the gold characters, like an old projector catching on a damaged frame, before a second line slowly appeared beneath the first.

[PRIMARY RULE: NEVER SIT AT THE EMPTY DESK.]

[WARNING: SCHOOL RULES WILL BE PROVIDED AFTER ATTENDANCE.]

Then the pane dissolved.

Lin Yue sat with the words a moment longer than he needed to.

It wasn’t the rule that unsettled him. Rules were simply rules; the Flow offered them freely, arbitrarily, sometimes cruelly, and he had long since stopped wasting emotion on their existence. What bothered him was what the System had chosen not to say.

Why delay the remaining rules until attendance? Why place attendance ahead of survival-critical information? And why choose the desk as the opening rule when there were countless other things it could have warned them about?

He didn’t need to look at the desk again. He had already memorized its position the moment he woke—the back row beside the window, a schoolbag hanging neatly from its hook, the textbook aligned at perfect right angles on the desk.

Never sit there, he thought. Understood.

He stored the instruction in the back of his mind and made no move toward the desk. But the thought of it remained, quietly occupying a corner of his mind.

The bell did not ring.

Instead, Mr. Xu simply closed his textbook with a soft, decisive snap, set down his chalk, and said a single word.

"Assembly."

The effect was immediate. Every non-player student stood at nearly the same moment, chairs scraping backward in an unnervingly synchronized rhythm. It wasn’t precise enough to seem rehearsed, nor strange enough to draw attention on its own, but Lin Yue noticed it anyway.

The players hesitated a half-second behind them. Then, seeing no other option, rose too.

The hallway outside the classroom came alive within moments. Students in matching uniforms moved between lockers and stairwells, backpacks hanging from their shoulders as fragments of morning conversation drifted through the corridor. Seen from far enough away, it could have belonged to any ordinary school.

It was the closer Lin Yue listened, the more the illusion thinned.

"—did you finish the homework—"

"—I heard the cafeteria’s serving—"

"—it rained again last night, did you—"

Every fragment sounded correct. The phrases were exactly the sort students should say to one another, but they felt practiced rather than spontaneous. As though someone had written the script of an ordinary school morning and taught everyone their lines without bothering to explain what they meant.

No one mentioned names. No one referred to anyone beyond the person standing beside them. Every conversation avoided specifics—a teacher without a name, a test without a subject, a weekend without plans. They talked around specifics, leaving only the empty framework of conversation behind.

Bai Wuyin’s hand found the hem of Lin Yue’s sleeve.

"Lin Yue," he said, voice small, eyes wide and darting between the crowd of unfamiliar faces. "Are we really in a school?"

It was, Lin Yue thought distantly, a remarkably convincing performance. Even now, even knowing what he knew of the boy beside him, some old and unkillable instinct in his chest still wanted to answer the fear as though it were real.

"It looks that way," Lin Yue said.

Shen Rui appeared at his other shoulder, jaw set, some of the sarcasm drained out of his usual bearing. "It’s okay," he told Bai Wuyin, reaching over to pat his shoulder with rough, genuine reassurance. "We’re together. Nothing’s going to happen to you while we’re all here."

Bai Wuyin nodded, small and uncertain. "Okay..."

His gaze shifted briefly toward the classroom door behind them, stopping on the exact place where the desk stood inside, though there was no possible way for him to see it. A moment later he looked away and disappeared into the crowd, small and inconspicuous in the manner of a child hoping not to be noticed.

Lin Yue’s attention caught on the boy’s free hand, hanging almost carelessly at his side. Four light taps traveled along the seam of his trousers—one, two, three, four—quiet enough to pass for nervous fidgeting if not for the precision of the sequence.

He’s counting.

He said nothing about it.

The assembly hall stretched wide beneath a high ceiling, far larger than Lin Yue had anticipated. Folding chairs filled the floor in orderly rows before a raised platform. Tall windows ran along one wall. Four doors opened around the perimeter, and students continued pouring through all of them.

Waiting near the platform’s edge stood a boy who could not have been older than seventeen, uniform pressed to a crispness that made every other student in the room look faintly rumpled by comparison. His posture was perfect. His expression was pleasant, patient, the kind of calm that came only from genuine ease or from a great deal of practice at appearing that way.

He turned as the players approached, and his face brightened with polite, unhurried welcome.

"You’re the new students, right?"

Shen Rui, still recovering some of his usual dry composure, answered first. "Apparently."

The boy smiled, unbothered by the flatness of the reply. "You’ll get used to it."

Lin Yue’s attention sharpened.

The same words. Nearly identical. Mr. Xu had said the same thing not long ago.

Two different voices. Two different speakers. Yet the sentence was identical, word for word, delivered with the same unhurried certainty—as though both were following a script neither realized they had memorized.

"I’m Zhou Mu," the boy continued, offering a polite little bow. "Class President. If you need directions to a classroom, the dormitories, or the cafeteria, just ask me." His smile remained pleasant. "I’ll always be around."

"How long have you been here?" Lin Yue asked.

It was a simple question. Lin Yue watched Zhou Mu’s face closely as he asked it, waiting for the pause, the flicker of uncertainty—the same half-second hesitation Mr. Xu had shown when he’d first looked at Lin Yue in the classroom.

It came briefly. Almost imperceptible.

Then Zhou Mu smiled again, easy and untroubled.

"Long enough."

Lin Yue didn’t press. The answer could wait. He had learned across four Instances that the first question was rarely the important one. Ask too early, and people might hand you a lie before you’ve learned what the truth looks like.

He let it go for now, adding the detail to the growing list of things that refused to fit the pattern.

The recitation began without any formal announcement. Zhou Mu stepped onto the low platform, folded his hands behind his back, and began speaking in the calm, measured cadence of something rehearsed so many times that the words seemed to know their own way out.

At first, the words were utterly unremarkable: a welcome, a reminder of diligence and order, a statement about the pride Yinshan Academy placed in its students. The kind of assembly speech Lin Yue imagined had been delivered in schools for generations, ordinary enough to disappear the moment it was heard.

Then something in the rhythm shifted.

Somewhere near the front, one of the unfamiliar players shifted in her chair. Lin Yue noticed the smallest tightening around her eyes, the unmistakable expression of someone thinking, I want to leave. I need to get out of this room

Zhou Mu continued speaking without pause, his cadence unchanged.

"—and there’s no need to worry about leaving," he said, the sentence continuing with effortless smoothness from wherever it had been interrupted. "Yinshan takes care of its own."

The girl went rigid.

A few seats down, Lin Yue watched Shen Rui’s brow furrow, the thought almost visible in his expression—This place is fake. None of this is real. A heartbeat later, without missing a syllable of his recitation, Zhou Mu said:

"Yinshan is real," Zhou Mu said calmly. "As real as anything you’ve ever known."

Lin Yue’s spine went very still.

Coincidence, he told himself first. A common thought. A common answer. It happens. He repeated it once more, though he wasn’t sure who he was trying to convince.

Then it happened a third time. By the fourth, coincidence had begun to feel like an excuse.

Each time, the answer came a fraction of a second too soon—too early to be a reaction, too precise to be coincidence, perfectly aligned with a thought that had never been spoken aloud. Zhou Mu never acknowledged it. He continued his recitation, sentence flowing into sentence, answer folding into answer, like a man reading from a book whose pages only he could see.

Shen Rui leaned toward Lin Yue, voice dropped to the barest whisper. "Is he—"

"Don’t," Lin Yue said, just as quietly. "Not here."

Too late.

Zhou Mu’s gaze shifted toward them, slow and unhurried. There was no suspicion in it, only the mild attention one might give to a sound disturbing an otherwise silent room.

He smiled.

Then he continued speaking. Whatever had happened was swallowed by the next sentence, and the assembly carried on as though there had never been anything worth noticing.

By the time the students were dismissed to their first classes, Lin Yue had already decided he wasn’t going to walk with the crowd.

He let the flow of uniforms move around him, lingering at the edge of the assembly hall while his eyes traced the walls. Four doors. He remembered counting them on the way in.

He counted again now.

Two of them opened. The hinges moved. The handles turned. Students passed through one after another toward the corridor beyond, making the doors seem perfectly ordinary.

The other two did not move. Not because they were locked, but because they were not doors at all.

They were painted onto the wall.

From ten feet away, it looked like a perfectly ordinary door: dark wood grain, a glossy brass handle, even a narrow shadow painted along the frame. Up close, the lie became painfully obvious. The wall was perfectly flat. The paint was perfectly flat. There was no seam, no hinge, no gap beneath it. Not even enough space for air to slip through.

"There’s something wrong with this hall."

Lin Yue did not startle. He had sensed the presence beside him a moment before it spoke. The voice was quiet and flat, entirely different from the trembling whisper he had heard in the hallway minutes earlier.

Bai Wuyin straightened his shoulders, his expression clear and precise, his black eye fixed on the painted door with the same unblinking attentiveness he gave to anything worth understanding. The frightened child’s act had disappeared the instant the last non-player student was out of hearing range.

"I noticed," Lin Yue said.

"Two real. Two fake." Bai Wuyin tilted his head slightly. "There aren’t any other visible exits. The windows don’t open either. I checked while everyone was distracted by Zhou Mu."

"You checked during the recitation?"

"I check things during everything." A faint, humorless quirk of the mouth. "Nobody watches a twelve-year-old closely enough to notice what he’s doing with his hands."

Lin Yue studied him for a moment. "You noticed him answering thoughts."

"Of course I noticed." Bai Wuyin’s gaze didn’t leave the door. "Four times, at minimum. Maybe more that I missed. He never looked like he was doing anything unusual. That’s what makes it worse."

"You think the school is listening."

"I don’t know yet." A pause, deliberate, honest. "But until I do, I’d rather not say anything it might overhear."

He glanced up at Lin Yue then — just briefly, just long enough to make sure the words had landed — before his shoulders folded back inward, his eyes widened with rehearsed uncertainty, and the frightened child returned as easily as slipping on a coat. A pair of players rounded the corner behind them, and by the time they passed, Bai Wuyin was tugging lightly at Lin Yue’s sleeve again, murmuring something soft and worried about being lost.

Lin Yue said nothing. He simply let the boy hold onto his sleeve, and filed away one more thing that did not yet fit anywhere.

The classrooms, Lin Yue decided, deserved a closer look than he’d given them on the way in.

He fell deliberately behind the others as the corridor thinned, slowing his pace enough to study the numbers stenciled beside each door. 1-01. 1-02. 1-03. The classroom he’d woken in had been marked 1-08 — he remembered that now, a small brass plate beside the doorframe, easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it.

He walked the length of the corridor once, then doubled back and walked it again, counting doors on both sides.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.

Eight.

Exactly eight classrooms on this floor. No ninth. The corridor simply ended in a stairwell after the eighth door, as though the building itself had stopped there on purpose.

He drifted to the nearest window and looked out. Gray sky. The same still courtyard he’d seen from his own classroom, the same bare tree, the same static streaks of moisture clinging to the glass.

He moved to the next classroom’s window.

Gray sky. The same courtyard. The same tree, in the same position, at the same angle.

A small, cold thread of unease threaded through his chest — quiet, controlled, the kind of feeling he’d trained himself not to let show on his face. He moved to the third window. The fourth. By the sixth, he no longer needed to check; he already knew what he’d find, and finding it anyway didn’t make it any easier to accept.

Every window on this floor faces the same direction.

It shouldn’t have been possible. Not architecturally. A building with eight classrooms in a single row should, by simple geometry, have windows facing at least two directions — unless the classrooms weren’t actually arranged in a row at all. Unless the corridor itself was folding around something that didn’t obey the same rules as the rest of the world.

He thought, unbidden, of the words the System had refused to explain.

Eight classrooms face the rain.

He didn’t know where the thought had come from — whether it was memory, intuition, or something the Instance had planted directly into his awareness the moment he’d woken. But it settled into place now with an unpleasant, deliberate weight, as though it had been waiting all along for him to count high enough to understand it.

Eight classrooms. One direction. No rain falling — only the memory of it, painted onto every pane of glass in the building.

He didn’t have the rest of the riddle. He didn’t know what came after the first line, or whether there was a first line at all beyond the one sentence that had surfaced, unprompted, in the back of his mind since the moment he’d opened his eyes in that desk.

But he understood, with the same quiet certainty he applied to everything worth trusting, that it mattered.

"Eight classrooms," Bai Wuyin said, when Lin Yue found him again near the stairwell, the others having drifted ahead toward the next lesson.

"You noticed too."

"Of course." The boy’s dark eye moved toward the nearest window, considering. "I counted them from the assembly hall roof line before we even went inside. Eight windows, all facing the courtyard, all showing the same view no matter where you stand." A pause. "The riddle wasn’t describing the classrooms."

Lin Yue looked at him. "What was it describing, then?"

Bai Wuyin was quiet for a long moment, his gaze distant, turning something over that hadn’t finished forming yet.

"I don’t know yet," he admitted finally, and there was no shame in the admission, only the plain honesty of a mind that refused to guess past what it actually understood. "But I don’t think it’s asking us to count rooms, Lin Yue. I think it’s asking us to count something else, and the rooms are just the easiest place to start."

Ye Xian was waiting for them at the base of the stairwell, hands tucked loosely into his pockets, an expression of mild, easy amusement on his face that hadn’t shifted once since assembly.

"This way," he said, already turning down a corridor branch none of them had walked yet.

Shen Rui, jogging to catch up, frowned at his back. "Where are you going?"

"Classrooms are this way." Ye Xian didn’t slow his stride.

"How do you know that?"

A brief pause. Ye Xian glanced over his shoulder, something flickering behind his usual warmth — gone before Lin Yue could name it.

"I don’t know," he said, and laughed lightly, the sound easy and unbothered, as though the admission cost him nothing at all. "It just felt right."

Lin Yue studied him for a long moment as they walked. Ye Xian led them down the corridor with the unhesitating confidence of someone retracing a path they’d walked a hundred times — a left turn here, a shortcut through a side stairwell there, arriving precisely where the next lesson’s schedule indicated they should be, though none of them had been told the schedule at all.

"You’ve been here before," Lin Yue said quietly, once they’d fallen slightly behind the others.

"No." The answer came immediately. Too immediately, the way a reflex arrives before thought has time to shape it. Ye Xian’s smile, when it followed, looked genuine — but the speed of the denial sat oddly against it, like a seam not quite matched to the fabric around it.

"But it feels familiar," he added, softer now, and didn’t explain further.

Behind them, half a step back, Bai Wuyin’s small hand tightened briefly around the strap of his backpack, his frightened-child expression carefully unbroken. Later, when the corridor had emptied, and Ye Xian had drifted ahead to walk beside Shen Rui, he murmured to Lin Yue, so quiet it barely disturbed the air between them.

"He’s lying."

"About being here before?"

"Maybe." Bai Wuyin’s gaze followed Ye Xian’s retreating back, thoughtful and unreadable. "Or maybe he isn’t lying at all. Maybe he believes it."

Lin Yue said nothing. But he understood, without needing it explained further, why the second possibility was worse than the first.

Their next classroom was smaller than the first — twenty-five desks instead of thirty — but the pattern held with the same quiet, deliberate precision.

One desk near the back, untouched. A schoolbag hanging from its hook. A textbook squared neatly at its center. A chair pushed in with the kind of care that suggested someone had left it that way on purpose, expecting to return.

Lin Yue took his assigned seat — third row, second from the window — and let his eyes drift toward the desk without turning his head fully toward it. From this angle he could just make out a small brass nameplate mounted at its corner, the kind every desk in the room seemed to have.

Every plate but that one was filled with careful, printed characters.

That one was blank.

No name. No number. No identifying mark of any kind — just smooth, empty brass, waiting.

He noted it, filed it beside everything else, and did not approach.

The lesson had barely begun — Mr. Xu once again at the board, chalk already moving through a warm-up problem — when the classroom door opened, and a woman Lin Yue didn’t recognize stepped inside, said something too quiet to catch, and placed a single sheet of paper on the teacher’s desk before withdrawing again without a word.

Mr. Xu glanced at it. Nodded once, as though confirming something he already expected. Then he set down his chalk, picked up the sheet, and turned to face the room.

"Attendance," he said pleasantly. "Before we continue."

A ripple of quiet unease moved through the players scattered across the room — small, almost imperceptible, but Lin Yue felt it all the same, the way one felt a change in air pressure before a storm.

Mr. Xu began reading names. Ordinary names, most of them — some clearly belonging to the non-player students seated around the room, some, Lin Yue noted with a small jolt of recognition, matching the identities stamped onto the players’ own school ID cards.

"Chen Wei."

"Here."

"Li Mei."

"Present."

"Shen Rui."

A beat of hesitation, then: "...Here."

The names continued, steady and unremarkable, until the sheet neared its end and Mr. Xu’s pace slowed — not dramatically, just enough for Lin Yue to notice the shift, the same way he noticed everything that deviated even slightly from an established rhythm.

Mr. Xu looked down at the paper for a moment longer than the previous names had required.

Then he looked up. Toward the back of the room. Toward the desk beside the window, with its blank brass plate and its neatly hung schoolbag and its perfectly squared textbook.

"Qin Yue?"

The name meant nothing to Lin Yue. He turned it over once in his mind and found no shape to match it against — not a player’s assigned identity, not a name any of the non-player students around him seemed to recognize either, judging by the blank, uncertain glances passing between them.

Silence answered.

Mr. Xu waited, patient, unbothered, the way a teacher waits through the ordinary pause of a student gathering their thoughts before answering.

"Qin Yue?" he asked again, gently.

Nothing.

Shen Rui leaned toward Lin Yue, mouthing rather than whispering, Who?

Lin Yue didn’t answer. His attention had already moved past the question and toward Bai Wuyin, two seats over — toward the small, trembling posture of a frightened child, hands folded tightly in his lap, eyes wide and darting exactly the way they should have been.

Except his eyes weren’t darting toward the teacher. They weren’t darting toward the door, or the window, or any of the ordinary places a frightened child’s attention might have gone.

They were fixed, unmoving, on the empty desk.

Mr. Xu sighed — a small, unhurried sound, faintly disappointed, the kind of sigh a teacher gives a habitually absent student rather than a cause for alarm. He uncapped the red pen from his breast pocket, made a single neat mark on the attendance sheet, and said, without a trace of unease in his voice:

"Absent."

The word settled into the room like a stone dropped into still water.

If the student is absent, Lin Yue thought, watching the desk without appearing to watch it at all, why is there a bag hanging from the hook? Why is the textbook still open? Why did the teacher sound disappointed, rather than simply neutral, the way one sounds when reading a name that has never once answered?

He didn’t have an answer. Not yet.

Mr. Xu capped his pen, set the attendance sheet aside, and turned back toward the board as though nothing at all had happened.

"Now then," he said, picking his chalk back up. "Where were we?"

The room did not relax.

Lin Yue felt it in the stillness around him — a held breath spreading quietly from desk to desk, players and non-players alike, none of them quite able to name what had unsettled them, all of them somehow certain that something had.

And then, from the back of the room, soft and small and entirely wrong—

Creak.

Every head in the classroom turned, all at once, toward the sound.

The empty chair had moved. Only slightly — one leg dragging a bare inch across the floor, the sound thin and deliberate in the sudden silence, as though something invisible had shifted its weight against the seat.

No one had touched it.

A girl near the front let out a small, sharp breath. The non-player students sat motionless, faces blank, unbothered, as though the sound hadn’t registered at all. Mr. Xu, chalk still raised against the board, didn’t turn around.

The chair stopped.

Then, slower this time, the desk’s surface seemed to settle — an almost imperceptible give, the faint creak of old wood bearing weight it hadn’t borne in a long while, as though a pair of unseen hands had just been placed flat against it.

Lin Yue’s eyes narrowed a fraction. He did not move. He did not speak. He simply watched, every part of him gone very still, the way he had learned to go still in the seconds before something in the Flow decided whether or not to notice him back.

A translucent pane bloomed silently across his vision.

[RULE UPDATE]

[Rule 01: Never sit at the empty desk.]

The gold characters flickered, stuttering, as though the System itself had hesitated over what came next.

[Correction: The desk is not empty.]

[Do not respond to the student who sits there.]

The notification dissolved.

No one in the room spoke. Lin Yue kept his gaze forward, fixed on the board, and let only the very edge of his attention remain on the back corner of the room, where a pencil — untouched, unmoved by any visible hand — rolled once across the desk’s wooden surface, then a second time, and came to rest precisely at the edge, as though set down deliberately by someone who had simply finished writing.

Bai Wuyin’s fingers found the strap of his backpack again, gripping it tightly, his performance of fear no longer entirely a performance.

The desk had not looked occupied a minute ago.

It did now.

Mr. Xu set down his chalk, glanced once at the equation on the board, and folded his hands together with the same pleasant, unbothered composure he’d carried since the lesson began.

"Next lesson," he said.

The class opened their books. Pens began to move. Outside the windows, the sky remained exactly as gray and exactly as still as it had been the moment Lin Yue first looked at it, no rain falling, no wind stirring the single bare tree in the courtyard below.

And from somewhere behind him — quiet, precise, spoken in a voice that belonged to no one in the room —

came a single word.

"Present."

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